What are the tenets of this bureaucratic old public administration, and is it reasonable to characterize any contemporary thinking which falls outside New Public Management as evidence of the old public administration? Certainly there is not a single set of ideas agreed to by all those who contributed over the decades to the old public administration (just as there is not a single set of ideas that all associated with the New Public Management would agree to). But there are elements of public administration theory and practice that seem to constitute a guiding set of ideas or a normative model that we now generally associate with the old public administration. We suggest this model includes the following tenets:
- Public administration is politically neutral, valuing the
idea of neutral competence.
- The focus of government is the direct delivery of services. The best organizational structure is at centralized bureaucracy.
- Programs are implemented through top-down controlmechanisms, limiting discretion as much as possible.
- Bureaucracies seek to be closed systems to the extent possible, thus limiting citizen involvement.
- Efficiency and rationality are the most important values in public organizations.
- Public administrators do not play a central role in policy making and governance; rather, they are charged with the efficient implementation of public objectives.
- The job of public administrators is described by Gulick‘s POSDCORB (1937, 13).