A FIRST TEXTBOOK FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
While Woodrow Wilson provided the rationale for public administration to be an academic discipline and professional specialty, it remained for Leonard D. White (1891–1958) to most clearly articulate its preliminary objectives. A U.S. Civil Service commissioner from 1934 to 1937, White spent most of his career at the University of Chicago.42 In the preface to his pioneering 1926 book Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, the first text in the field, he noted four critical assumptions that formed the basis for the study of public administration: (1) administration is a unitary process that can be studied uniformly, at the federal, state, and local levels; (2) the basis for study is management, not law; (3) administration is still an art, but the ideal of transformance to a science is both feasible and worthwhile; and (4) the recognition that administration “has become, and will continue to be the heart of the problem of modern government.”43 Reprinted here is the preface and first chapter from White’s 1926 book, which, through four decades and four editions, became one of the most influential of public administration texts.44
White’s text was remarkable for its restraint in not taking a prescriptive cookbook approach to public administration. He recognized that public administration was above all a field of study that had to stay close to reality—the reality of its largely untrained practitioner base that still professed great belief in the art of administration. Even more interesting, his work avoided the potential pitfall of the politics- administration dichotomy. Defining public administration as emphasizing the managerial phase, he left unanswered “the question [of] to what extent the administration itself participates in formulating the purposes of the state”45 and avoided any controversy as to the precise nature of administrative action.
A FIRST TEXTBOOK FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONWhile Woodrow Wilson provided the rationale for public administration to be an academic discipline and professional specialty, it remained for Leonard D. White (1891–1958) to most clearly articulate its preliminary objectives. A U.S. Civil Service commissioner from 1934 to 1937, White spent most of his career at the University of Chicago.42 In the preface to his pioneering 1926 book Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, the first text in the field, he noted four critical assumptions that formed the basis for the study of public administration: (1) administration is a unitary process that can be studied uniformly, at the federal, state, and local levels; (2) the basis for study is management, not law; (3) administration is still an art, but the ideal of transformance to a science is both feasible and worthwhile; and (4) the recognition that administration “has become, and will continue to be the heart of the problem of modern government.”43 Reprinted here is the preface and first chapter from White’s 1926 book, which, through four decades and four editions, became one of the most influential of public administration texts.44White’s text was remarkable for its restraint in not taking a prescriptive cookbook approach to public administration. He recognized that public administration was above all a field of study that had to stay close to reality—the reality of its largely untrained practitioner base that still professed great belief in the art of administration. Even more interesting, his work avoided the potential pitfall of the politics- administration dichotomy. Defining public administration as emphasizing the managerial phase, he left unanswered “the question [of] to what extent the administration itself participates in formulating the purposes of the state”45 and avoided any controversy as to the precise nature of administrative action.
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