The EmergingParadigm5: PublicAdministration As PublicAdministration,1970-?
Despitecontinuingintellectualturmoil,Simon's 1947 proposal for a duality of scholarship in public administrationhas been gaininga renewed validity. There is not yet a focus for the field in
the form of a "pure science of administration," but at least organization theory primarily has concerned itself in the last two and a half decades
with how and why organizationswork, how and why people in them behave, and how and why decisions are made. Additionally, considerable progress has been made in refining the applied techniques of management science, as well as developingnew techniques,that often reflect what has been learnedin the more theoreticalrealmsof organizationalanalysis.
There has been less progressin delineatinga locus for the field, or what public affairs and
"prescribingfor public policy" should encompass
in terms relevant to public administrationists.
Nevertheless,the field does appearto be zeroingin
on certain fundamentalsocial factors unique to
fully developed countriesas its properlocus. The
choice of these phenomena may be somewhat
arbitraryon the part of public administrationists, but they do sharecommonalitiesin that they have
engendered cross-disciplinaryinterest in univer- sities, requiresynthesizingintellectualcapacities, and lean toward themes that reflect urban life, administrativerelations among organizations,and the interface between technology and human
values-in short,publicaffairs.Thetraditionaland
rigid distinction of the field between the "public
sphere" and the "private sphere" appearsto be waningaspublicadministration'snewandflexibly defined locus waxes. Furthermore,public admin- istrationistshave been increasinglyconcernedwith the inextricably related areas of policy science, political economy, the public policy-makingpro- cess and its analysis, and the measurement of policy outputs.Theselatteraspectscanbeviewed, in some ways, as a linkagebetween public adminis- tration'sevolvingfocus and locus.