Adminisistration

What is Public Administration in American definition?

  • field in which leaders serve communities to advance the common good and effect positive change

  • Public administration professionals are equipped with skills to manage at all levels of government (local, state, and federal) as well as nonprofit organizations.

  • Skills employed such as project management and program management are often transferrable to the private sector

  • WOODROW WILSON: THE FATHER OF AMERICAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION “Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government, and is of course as old as government itself. It is government in action..”

What is Public Administration in British definition?

  • the performance or management of affairs, (…) it is also used generally for government, and specifically for government or the executive ministry”.

What is Public Administration in French definition?

  • the whole of public services, assigned to participate in the execution of the thought of the government, and to apply laws of general interest (…) The government directs (rules), gives an impulse, and administration acts, executes”

What is Public Administration?

  • The word „administration” is so equivocal, there is a core of its diverse meanings.

  • „Administration” - origin Latin verb ministrare, strengthed by the proposition ad-, meaning „to serve”. Words minister and ministrations also confirm that „servant” aspect of the derivatives of ministrare.

  • always means a certain service or executive activity; administration is an instrument serving to achieve a goal/ or to execute a will of a superior.

  • is an operational instrument in the hands of a political power. It is in a sense, an executive of the executive power. It can also be qualified as a tension between the necessery exercise of power and the research for responsiveness to achieve maximum accountability from public servants.

  • is also „public” in the sense that, in liberal democracy, the only argument for intervention – as the intervention of the state power in the affairs of the state’s subjects (individual as well as their organisations: business and non profit ones alike) is the public good, also called the public interest.

  • From the functional point of view, public administration can be defined as an operational function, in any state, independently of the epoch and of the form of government. It is not the case of public administration approached in institutional terms.

    As a specific set of authorities and institutions, with mission set up in conformity with the principles of the horizontal and verical division of labour (constituting the division of administrative tasks and competences) and staffed by professional employees – public administration is a relatively new phenomenon.

    Although public administration has been developing since Middle Ages, it was as late as in the Enlightenment period, i.e. in the 18th century, that it appeared in the form comparable to the contemporary ones.

    In many Europeans states, there has been a continuity of administrative history, even the states whose political history witnessed revolutions and breaks (i.e. absolute monarchy – French revolution).

    The contemporary link between public administration and the law consists in the submission of all the executive power, and public administration operating therewithin to the law. The submission is the most important aspect of the „rule of law”, the principle which has been developed in Englan in the Middle Ages, or the „state of law” (Rechtsstaat, then accepted in French under the name of „Etat de droit” or in Polish as „państwo prawne”), the concept intoduced in the Continental Europe, especially in Germany in 19th century as an overt opposition to Polizeistaat. From that point of view, public administration is an instrument of implementation of provisions of the statutes and other sources of law

Phase 1: Politics – Administration Dichotomy (1887-1926)

Phase 2: Principles of Administration (1927-1937

Phase 3: Era of Challenges (1938-1947)

Phase 4: Crisis of identity (1948-1970

Phase 5: Public Policy Perspective (1971 onwards)