Paradigms of Public Administration

Public Administration as a Dynamic Balance and Integrative Science Across Politics, Management, and Law: Rosenbloom’s Framework and Chinese Experiences

“…Meanwhile, many researchers have also clearly analyzed the distinctions between PA and management. For example, Henry (2011) argued, “Management had some distinct and beneficial influences on public administration. Among them was its pressure on public administrationists to develop new methodologies of management that worked where traditional, private-sector methods did not .…”

“…35-36). Although “defining the ‘public’ in public administration has long been a knotty problem for academics,” Henry also noted that “publicness and privateness in society are comprised of three dimensions: agency, interest, and access” (see Henry, 2011, p. 36). Furthermore, after emphasizing and discussing the distinction between politics and administration, Wilson (1941) also analyzed “the distinction between constitutional and administrative questions” (p. 495).…”

“…17-26), differences between politics and administration do exist (Goodnow, 1900; Wilson, 1941), and this is the foundation we will use to distinguish PA from political science. Compared with management, PA places greater emphasis on public affairs, and the emphasis on “publicness” is the largest difference between public and private (or business) administration or management (Bozeman & Moulton, 2011; Henry, 2011). Compared with law, which emphasizes formative laws, PA places a greater emphasis on laws and rules of administration and public management (either formal or informal), and here I define institutions as the formal and informal rules behind human-devised constraints that structure human interactions (Goodnow, 1893, 1905; North, 1990; E.…”

“…Furthermore, as we found in both China and the United States, when too much attention is paid to the relationship between PA and politics for many years, attention may shift toward the management perspective; when too much attention is paid to management over time, attention may shift toward politics; and when the legal approach and PA’s relationship with law have been neglected, attention will shift to focus on them. All these factors indicate that the development of PA is a dynamic process that involves balancing the relationship between politics, management, and law, and that “perhaps public administration has achieved, at last, a beneficent balance between its locus and its focus” as suggested by Nicholas Henry (2011, p. 42). Zalmanovitch (2014) even suggested viewing PA as “a social science of results” for the above three pillars rather than as “a profession relying on a generic viewpoint” and argued that “at any given time, one pillar may be emphasized over the other two” (p. 808).…”

“…As stated above, compared with politics, management, and law, the core research problems of PA should be administration, public management, and the laws and rules of administration and public management (Table 4). Considerable attention to these three core problems and a unique approach could be called the “PA-itself” approach, as coined by Henry (2011), that separates PA from politics, management, and law. Thus, although to some extent I agree with the concept of PA as a social science of results, as Zalmanovitch (2014) posited, I do not fully agree with his belief that PA is not a profession that relies on a generic viewpoint.…”