Professional Public Administration Research Articles

Citizenship and Professionalism in Public Administration

Citizenship and Professionalism in Public Administration

Professionalism in Public Administration: Towards Conceptual Clarity — a Symposium

Professionalism in Public Administration: Towards Conceptual Clarity — a Symposium

Professionalism in Public Administration: Definition, Character and Values

Professionalism in Public Administration: Definition, Character and Values

Action Theory in Practice: Toward Theory without Conspiracy

Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. By conspiracy, Shaw meant the power of professions, by virtue of their exclusive roles in the creation and legitimation of specialized knowledge, to control or manipulate the presumed beneficiaries of that knowledge in the service of their (the professions') own ends. Public administration, since having attained professional status, is not exempt from this charge.' Witness the widespread reports of clients and others affected by public agencies feeling victimized and alienated by those whose official charge is to serve them. Far from mitigating such feelings, the increasing professionalization of public administration appears to have resulted in administrators being viewed by the public as having joined the ranks of more established conspirators such as lawyers, physicians, psychiatrists, and educators. A plausible explanation for the accusations of conspiracy by public administrators may be inferred from a recent paper by Robert Biller. Biller argues that professional administrators, by virtue of their education and organizational experience, typically bring to bear a particular mind set in the solution to client problems that is directly at odds with problems as defined by the clients.

Symposium on Professionalism in Public Administration

Symposium on Professionalism in Public Administration

Symposium On Professionalism in Public Administration

Symposium On Professionalism in Public Administration

Public Administration and American History: A Century of Professionalism

assurances that there really is something to celebrate. At the bare minimum, of course, there is always survival; but it isn't easy to make much of a party out of that. For over a decade now historians have been picking at the American past in search of evidences of sin-omission, commission, it makes little difference as long as it is sin. Since we are dealing with human history, it's of course not hard to find. Still, people in search of its past can afford moments of generosity now and again. Public administration, along with many of the social sciences, has recently taken a renewed interest in its own history, not simply in the history of administration, but in the history of the development of the discipline itself. The distinction between the history of practices long associated with the process of government and the history of the modern professionalization of those practices is a difficult and complex one, but an important, perhaps even essential distinction to make. Human beings were governed by one another long before government became a field to be studied. The emergence of schools to train governors is part of that process by which all professions open access to the disciplines upon which they rest by making the knowledge and skill available outside a strictly limited group. While the process is slow and need not be called democratic, its openness depends ultimately on the fact that it is the knowledge which defines the identity of the group, not heredity or membership in a class however much those factors may influence selection. This is only to say that while professionalism is not a democratic process-indeed the hierarchies of knowledge and judgment it is intended to reflect are the essence of elitism-the development of modern democracy would be impossible without professionalism. From the perspective of American history, the professionalization of public administration was a key step in the acknowledgment of the dilemma industrial modernization posed for Americans committed to precepts of their revolution, their formative constitutional years, and, ultimately, the nationalism they saw confirmed in their Civil War. Administration became the way of coping with political problems without actually solving them, a process its defenders labeled pragmatic, or pluralist, but which its critics saw as muddling-and worse. The definition of the field, however, depended upon mediating the relation between an administrative elitism devoted to protecting a science of government and a faith in popular democracy which protected an extraordinary range of political practices. That the social sciences were always in the process of striving to be more scientific and the politics always under pressure to be more democratic often exacerbated differences and threats. The social science disci-

The Impact of General Revenue Sharing on the Urban Planning Process - An Initial Assessment

This article was originally delivered as a paper at the 1974 Annual Conference of the American Society for Public Administration in Syracuse, New York. Important further contributions have been incorporated on the basis of comments and reviews submitted by key professional planners and public administrators.1 Data upon which the analyses and conclusions of this article are based derive from published sources that document local government expenditures of general revenue sharing money through June 30, 1973. More current information will be available by the publication date of this article upon which to assess changes, general trends, or new patterns of influence concerning urban planning and general revenue sharing.

Sundquist's Response to Professor Balutis

tant. The governmental process is not like a see-saw where as one end goes up other must automatically go down. It is, rather, like a gasoline engine which operates most efficiently when all of its cylinders are functioning. It is not necessary to strip President of power to increase power of Congress, but time has come for Congress to exercise some of powers which it has always formally possessed but which have been permitted to atrophy. In this process, public administration can offer new insights into legislative structures and their environment. The Executive Branch is by no means only location of formal organizations which may have common features. In addition, if we consider administration to be a process as well as an academic discipline-that is, as a body of knowledge and techniques for effective management of any enterprise-then it is needed in legislatures just as in other organizations. Sundquist is correct in his view that the important thing is that country begin talking seriously about what should be done about presidency. An obvious conclusion, in this author's mind, is that public administrators ought to end their long love affair with Executive Branch and seek to apply principles and precepts of public administration to study of legislative institutions. But how to maintain strength and direction provided by President while guarding against excesses which led to great political crisis of age remains a major challenge confronting professional public administrators and every citizen of United States.

Editorial Comment: Platform for Professional Public Administration

Editorial Comment: Platform for Professional Public Administration

The High Cost of Low-Cost Education

T HE thesis of this paper is that what may appear to be and may so appear even after fairly close inspection by the casual observer-a plan of higher education which is easy of access, which operates without the usual standard controls at a very low cost so far as the individual is concerned, and at a respectable standard of accreditation, may, in fact, be a relatively high-cost institution which is under such limitations as far as expansion is concerned as to be relatively restricted in its access, is actually overcontrolled by rules and regulations, and is severely limited in its academic horizons and standards. The institution so described is the University of Puerto Rico, a complex and diverse institution enrolling some I5,000 students on three campuses and including among its programs undergraduate liberal arts, business, education, engineering, pharmacy, and agriculture, and among its professional programs law, medicine, public administration, social work, and dentistry. Let it be noted that no graduate program is included in the above listing, and that no junior college or extension program is included. The University, in existence since I903, is the absolutely indispensable educational pivot of the island. It provides most of the teacher education that is available; it provides most of the professional education that can be acquired; it supplies the education for government officials, for the entire core of management of Puerto Rican industry and agriculture; it gives basic training and generous assistance to the vast majority of all teachers in colleges and universities in Puerto Rico. In keeping with these many and diverse activities, the University is firmly based upon a concept of freedom of access at all academic levels, of low tuition, and of further amelioration of the existing low cost by subsidy in the form of scholarships at need, and by general lack of restriction and supervision insofar as programs and activities are concerned. Interestingly enough, within this very permissive pattern so far as behavior is concerned, the programs of study offered by the University are notable for their lack of elective courses. Virtually all programs and courses are required. Within this general pattern, then, which controls the University, five points may be picked out as products of this particular concept of administration. i. The undergraduate curriculum is sharply split into two different segments. One segment represents a reasonably contemporary generaleducation approach which holds true for the entire freshman year and part of the sophomore year, for a majority of the undergraduate students. This is followed by an abrupt return to a conventional or departmentalized curriculum operated by the several schools of the University in which, to all intents and purposes, a student, having completed his freshman and part of his sophomore year in the General Studies Program, begins over again in the general subject matter offered in a special area. As a consequence of this, almost no student ever has a chance to get to any of the advanced courses in any field and, in fact, is really debarred from so doing by the program requirements which must be surmounted before he can get to an advanced course. There are, in fact, very few advanced courses listed in the catalog. 2. As a result of the lack of instructional supervision, or as a result of the fact that over three-fourths of the faculty has never progressed beyond the master's degree, all or virtually all of the courses are given by the textbook-and-lecture method. This has several interesting results. (a) Student programs are heavy. They run to eighteen hours or more, and this means that a student who is following a textbook and collating it with instructors' lectures has less studying and in a sense less thinking to do about his courses than a student who is being taught by the reading-list classdiscussion method. (b) Students are notably studious and may be found deeply engrossed in their textbooks all over the campus, as well