Towards A Theoretical Definition of Public Administration

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the Theoretical Definition of Public Administration.The study seeks to identify the definitions, the meaning and the evolution of public administration.From the study, it can be deduced that public administration is a dynamic force which definition has not fully come to its perfection.The works of scholars as regard what they postulated were reviewed.The problems associated with public administration were identified during the cause of this study and recommendations on how best public administration could be managed were made. I. IntroductionPublic administration is the implementation of government policy and an academic discipline that studies this implementation and that prepares civil servants for this work.As a "field of inquiry with a diverse scope" its "fundamental goal is to advance management and policies so that government can function."Some of the various definitions which have been offered for the term are: "the management of public programs"; the "translation of politics into the reality that citizens see every day"; and "the study of government decision making, the analysis of the policies themselves, the various inputs that have produced them, and the inputs necessary to produce alternative policies."Public administration is "centrally concerned with the organization of government policies and programmes as well as the behavior of officials (usually non-elected) formally responsible for their conduct" Many unelected public servants can be considered to be public administrators, including heads of city, county, regional, state and federal departments such as municipal budget directors, human resources (H.R.)administrators, city managers, census managers, state [mental health] directors, and cabinet secretaries.Public administrators are public servants working in public departments and agencies, at all levels of government.In the US, civil servants and academics such as Woodrow Wilson promoted American civil service reform in the 1880s, moving public administration into academia.However, "until the mid-2Oth century and the dissemination of the German sociologist Max Weber"s theory of bureaucracy" there was not "much interest in a theory of public administration."The field is multidisciplinary in character; one of the various proposals for public administration"s sub-fields sets out six pillars, including human resources, organizational theory, policy analysis and statistics, budgeting, and ethics.

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