The Study of Administration
"The Study of Administration" is an 1887 article by Woodrow Wilson in Political Science Quarterly. It is widely considered a foundational article in the field of public administration, making Wilson one of the field's founding fathers, along with Max Weber and Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Although colleges were already teaching public administration in the 1880s, it was considered a sub-field of political science. Wilson argued that it should be treated as its own field of study, with public administrators being directly responsible to political leaders. He believed that politicians should be accountable to the people and that political administration should be treated as a science, and its practitioners given authority to address issues in their respective fields.
In his introduction to the second edition of The Administrative State, Dwight Waldo indicated that Public Administration
in the postwar period had found new foci and disciplines, in
addition to political science, that were relevant to its subject of
study. These included social psychology, economics, sociology,
and business administration. He had argued
previously that the nature and boundaries of the study were problematical, and he suggested that public administration ought to be pursued from a "professional perspective"
. Using Kuhn's terminology, Vincent Ostrom argued that Public Administration faced a paradigmatic crisis
because of the proliferation of prevailing theories, the methodological experimentation, the explicit discontent among scholars,
the large amount of philosophical speculation, and the debate
surrounding fundamental epistemological issues. Ostrom's solution was to develop Public Administration as a science of association. Golembiewski has suggested that the discipline of Public Administration ought to be developed by means of
a "family of miniparadigms" such as organizational development.
In a review of Public Administration research Perry and Kraemer
considered Fritz Mosher's remark of thirty years
earlier still relevant.
Before 1970, Rhodes argued, British public administration was
atheoretical, historical, and focused on administrative engineering
. Since then the British have
turned their attention more and more toward organization theory,
policy analysis, state theory, rational choice, and public management. Chevallier wrote that in the 1960s the legal, the
managerial, and the sociological models in which Public Administration was grounded in France were tearing the study apart.
While he reported that this period of doubt had come to an end
by the late 1980s, thanks to the emerging "paradigm" of
public policy, he concluded that Public Administration would
remain wedged between legal dogma, public management theory,
and political science, and thus it would continue to have difficulty
staking an exclusive claim to its subject of interest. With
respect to Germany, methodological and theoretical weakness
have been mentioned, although the identity of Public Administration was rooted in its legitimacy as a study of and for reform
. In this respect German Public Administration
is reminiscent of the roots of American Public Administration
around the turn of the century. In the Scandinavian countries
and the Netherlands, an
identity crisis existed as well, which was, as elsewhere, related to
the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of the study. The Dutch
emeritus Van Braam recently observed that the scientific
authority of Public Administration will continue to be seriously
challenged as long as we cannot agree on the core that constitutes
the study. While for practical reasons many accept the coexistence of various core concepts, Van Braam argues—more
strongly than Perry—that such will not lead to a coherent and
theoretically unified study.