The Administrator as Trustee of the Public Interest

Abstract

Recent articles in Administration & Society have probed the question of administrative discretion, with most advocating an expanded sphere of responsibility for the administrator. This article argues that calls for greater discretion are useful from a normative viewpoint, but that administrative practice is constrained by the relationship between the administrator and the governing body. A typology of discretion is offered which distinguishes between normative theory and descriptive theory, or theory-in-use. An examination is made of the literature and practice of local administration as a locus for evaluating how administrators determine their sphere of discretion in daily practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.