The Study of Administration

"The Study of Administration" is an 1887 article by Woodrow Wilson in Political Science Quarterly. It is widely considered a foundational article in the field of public administration, making Wilson one of the field's founding fathers, along with Max Weber and Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Although colleges were already teaching public administration in the 1880s, it was considered a sub-field of political science. Wilson argued that it should be treated as its own field of study, with public administrators being directly responsible to political leaders. He believed that politicians should be accountable to the people and that political administration should be treated as a science, and its practitioners given authority to address issues in their respective fields.

In his introduction to the second edition of The Administrative State, Dwight Waldo indicated that Public Administration in the postwar period had found new foci and disciplines, in addition to political science, that were relevant to its subject of study. These included social psychology, economics, sociology, and business administration (Waldo 1984, liv). He had argued previously that the nature and boundaries of the study were problematical (Waldo 1968, 5), and he suggested that public administration ought to be pursued from a "professional perspective" (p. 9). Using Kuhn's terminology, Vincent Ostrom (1974, 14; 18) argued that Public Administration faced a paradigmatic crisis because of the proliferation of prevailing theories, the methodological experimentation, the explicit discontent among scholars, the large amount of philosophical speculation, and the debate surrounding fundamental epistemological issues. Ostrom's solution was to develop Public Administration as a science of association. Golembiewski (1977a and b) has suggested that the discipline of Public Administration ought to be developed by means of a "family of miniparadigms" such as organizational development.

In a review of Public Administration research Perry and Kraemer (1986, 221) considered Fritz Mosher's remark of thirty years earlier still relevant. Before 1970, Rhodes argued, British public administration was atheoretical, historical, and focused on administrative engineering (Hood 1990, 6; Rhodes 1996, 508). Since then the British have turned their attention more and more toward organization theory, policy analysis, state theory, rational choice, and public management. Chevallier (1996, 69) wrote that in the 1960s the legal, the managerial, and the sociological models in which Public Administration was grounded in France were tearing the study apart. While he reported that this period of doubt had come to an end by the late 1980s, thanks to the emerging "paradigm" [sic] of public policy, he concluded that Public Administration would remain wedged between legal dogma, public management theory, and political science, and thus it would continue to have difficulty staking an exclusive claim to its subject of interest (p. 70). With respect to Germany, methodological and theoretical weakness have been mentioned, although the identity of Public Administration was rooted in its legitimacy as a study of and for reform (Seibel 1996, 78). In this respect German Public Administration is reminiscent of the roots of American Public Administration around the turn of the century. In the Scandinavian countries (Beck Jorgenson 1996) and the Netherlands (Kickert 1996), an identity crisis existed as well, which was, as elsewhere, related to the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of the study. The Dutch emeritus Van Braam recently (1998) observed that the scientific authority of Public Administration will continue to be seriously challenged as long as we cannot agree on the core that constitutes the study. While for practical reasons many accept the coexistence of various core concepts, Van Braam argues—more strongly than Perry—that such will not lead to a coherent and theoretically unified study (p. 49).