public administration's development as an academic field may be conceived as a succession of four overlapping paradigm. As Robert T. Golembiewski has noted in a perceptive essay on the evolution of the field, each phase may be characterized according to whether it has "locus" or "focus". Locus is the institutional "where" of the field. A recurring locus of public administration is government bureaucracy, but this has not always been the case and often this traditional locus has been blurred. Focus is the specialized "what" of the field. One focus of public administration has been the study of certain "principles of administration," but, again, the foci of the discipline have altered with the changing paradigms of public administration. As Golembiewski observers, the paradigms of public administration may be understood in terms of locus or focus ; when one has been relatively sharply defined, the other has been relatively ignored in academic circles and vice-versa. We shall use the notion of loci and foci in reviewing the intellectual development of public administration.