Paradigms of Public Administration

Henry, Nicholas

doi:10.2307/974540

Cited by 89 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…As George Frederickson (1980: 16) put it: 'the publication of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions has caused a scurrying to find the paradigm in every field in social sciences'. In PA, Henry (1975Henry ( , 1986 traced the evolution of the field by identifying a number of paradigms that he organized around three themes: focus, or what to study; locus, or where to find it; and the place of values. Others thought that organization theories lend themselves to analysis as paradigms, but rather in the incommensurable sense of Burrell and Morgan.…”

Section: Paradigms In Social and Applied Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is the New Public Management a Paradigm? Does it Matter?

Gow

Dufour

2000

International Review of Administrative Sciences

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Since the appearance of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1970, Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm has been widely used in the social sciences even though its author was not sure about its applicability outside the hard sciences of nature. In the field of public administration and management, the approach known as 'New Public Management' (NPM) has been seen by many as the new paradigm that is replacing the classic bureaucratic or Weberian paradigm of 'public administration' (PA). However, there has been little reflection concerning the validity of using in this way the notion as it was developed by Thomas Kuhn.The question of whether or not NPM is a new paradigm merits attention for a number of reasons. First, does the introduction of ideas borrowed from business management and economics constitute a fruitful transfer or borrowing (Kuhn, 1970: 29) or a spurious one (Bendor, 1976;Ramos, 1978)? Second, the question of paradigms leads us to reflect on the degree of difference between the supposed new paradigm of NPM and the old one of PA. Is it a revolution that challenges the former paradigm and ultimately leads to its replacement? Finally, inquiring into paradigms informs us of the nature of knowledge in NPM and by extension PA.Here we enter into the realm of epistemology and raise a more universal question about social science: Are we really taking part in a 'conversation that is aware of itself ' (McSwite, 1997: 4)?In what follows Kuhn's theory is recalled, NPM is presented and analyzed in terms of it. In a third section NPM and PA are compared before an overall assessment is attempted in the conclusion. While we claim universality for our theoretical content, the practical difficulties cited, with which the traditional PA paradigm met, are mostly Canadian. Kuhn's theory of paradigms and its application to the social sciencesKuhn's theory was inspired by the desire to put order into the study of the external conditions giving rise to scientific discoveries. What emerged was a

show abstract

Section: Paradigms In Social and Applied Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is the New Public Management a Paradigm? Does it Matter?

Gow

Dufour

2000

International Review of Administrative Sciences

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Notoriously a "borrowing discipline," it has taken much from "economics, business administration, sociology, psychology, and political science" (Fry, 1998, p. 12). It borrowed from no field more than political science and operated as a branch/subset of political science until the second half of the twentieth century (Henry, 1975;Shafritz, Hyde, & Parkes, 2004). As public administration began to accumulate academic legitimacy, the number of journals focused on the unique study and concerns of the field increased, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.…”

Section: Becoming a Distinct Fieldmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Although public administration has been accumulating academic legitimacy since the 1920s, its formation into an academic discipline is a debated topic (Henry, 1975). Notoriously a "borrowing discipline," it has taken much from "economics, business administration, sociology, psychology, and political science" (Fry, 1998, p. 12).…”

Section: Becoming a Distinct Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Administration Without Consideration

Edlins

2013

Administrative Theory & Praxis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Although there are debates about whether paradigms exist in public administration, the concept has been useful. The generally accepted paradigms in public administration, such as traditional public administration (TPA) and new public management (NPM), are helpful in studying the content and dynamics of policy change and also in determining the dynamics of the field of public administration's identity and the manner in which governments are shaped and function (Henry, ; Lovrich, ; Capano, ). The experiences of some countries show that while each paradigm has been the dominant movement during a particular period, for example, the TPA during towards the end of the 19th and large part of the 20th centuries and the NPM in the last two to three decades (Schedler et al ., ), history has shown that public sector reforms ‘recur with each new piece woven—sometimes seamlessly—into the next’ (Jones and Kettl, , 462).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining Hybridity in Public Administration: An Empirical Case of Bhutan's Civil Service

Ugyel

2014

Public Admin & Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

SUMMARYPublic administrations are mostly hybrid in nature with a combination of characteristics of different paradigms and models. In the first part of the paper, I use the notion of paradigms to explain a form of hybridity in public administration. The concept of paradigms in public administration is helpful in identifying a typology of the ideal types and their characteristics based on the main paradigms and models of public administration: the patronage system, the traditional public administration, the new public administration, and other emerging models such as public value management, responsive governance, and new public service. In the second part of the paper, through the trajectory of Bhutan's public administration history, we observe that its public administration exhibits characteristics that sit across the various paradigms and models of public administration. Thus, in doing so, the paper makes a significant contribution in applying the ideal type typology to explain how hybridity in public administration occurs in practice.

show abstract

Paradigms of Public Administration

Cited by 89 publications

References 0 publications

Is the New Public Management a Paradigm? Does it Matter?

Is the New Public Management a Paradigm? Does it Matter?

Administration Without Consideration

Explaining Hybridity in Public Administration: An Empirical Case of Bhutan's Civil Service

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About