CHAPTER 3 CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL
3.2 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 100
Public administration developed along with society and is as old as humanity itself. There is yet no general consensus about the definition of public administration (Fox & Meyer 1995:3). Public administration exists as an activity and an academic discipline. However, it is widely accepted that public administration is virtually omnipresent and exerts a constant influence on the lives of people. Public administration is the machinery, as well as the integral process, through which the government performs its functions (Nnoli 2000:44).
Although there might be many practices of businesslike efficiency universally
applicable across regimes, matters of social convenience and advancement, even the associated organisational arrangements and administrative processes, were fundamentally of a political nature and regime-specific (Cook 2007:7). Cook (2007:7) argues that the enterprise was not just a matter of insuring the democratic accountability of government bureaucracy in the rather reductionist sense that seems to dominate current political thinking and practice. Cook (2007:7) is of the opinion that political leadership would link administrative expertise, political habits and traditions, public thought, and political experience in a grand, creative synthesis that would fortify and enrich democracy.
According to Nnoli (2000:44), public administration is a network of human relationships and associated activities extending from government to the lowest paid and powerless individual charged with keeping in daily touch with all resources, natural and human, and all other aspects of the life of the society with which the government is concerned. The study adopted Nnoli‟s definition that :
“Public administration is a system of roles and role relationships which defines in as clear and practicable terms as possible and in as much detail as possible the intentions and programmes of government; the means available internally and externally to accomplish them; where, when and how they are to be accomplished; who is to benefit from them; and, finally, it is a system that causes these intentions and programmes to be realised in real life. It is a pattern of routinised activities, involving decision-making, planning, advising, co- ordination, negotiation, conciliation, arbitration, command and data gathering, through which the government carries out its responsibilities”.
(Nnoli 2000 : 44).
As an academic discipline, Public Administration is of fairly recent origin when compared to the practice of public administration as an activity (Nnoli 2000:45).
Public Administration refers to the technical discipline as a field of study (Cloete 1998:14). Stated differently, it is a science concerned with the study of administrative processes, governmental activities and interdependent variables, while public administration as an activity refers to a practical phenomenon
(Cloete 1998:14). In practice, therefore, public administration is indicative of the rendering of public service.
Wolin (2001:13) maintains that the ascent of western civilisation, including advancements in science and technology, in economic organisation, and in world exploration, along with the growth of populations energised by new social, economic, and political ideas, brought a shift in perspective “from the acquisition of power to its production”. Kettl (2002:79) argues that “power is only one of the considerations that must be weighed in administration, but of all it is the most overlooked in theory and the most dangerous to overlook in practice”. Kettl (2002) wanted theorists and practitioners to attend to the power production problem, that is, how administrators could generate an adequate amount of power that would allow them to put public policies into effect.
In order to advance the missions of their agencies, administrators have to produce power by devising strategies, creating alliances, and neutralising opposition (Kettl 2002:81). This way of thinking about, and acting toward, public administration and management has become the principal focus of the executive management orientation in the study and practice of public administration and management (see, for example, Heymann 1987, Behn 1997:3, Rainey 1990, and Maynard-Moody & Musheno 2003). The current dominant conceptualisation of the field of public management in both study and practice thus can be said to combine the executive management focus on strategies and tactics aimed at advancing agency missions, with the mantra of performance that places the onus for the measurement and administration of results on middle managers (Brudney, O‟Toole & Rainey 2000 :4).
Public administration and management consists of public executives and managers employing “judgment or discretion” in the design and deployment of organisational, fiscal, financial, budgetary, analytical, and human capital resources and techniques (Lynn 2001:145). Behn (1997:3) argues that “public” in
public management refers to public purposes or the public good, and on this basis, even individuals running purely private entities are public managers if they are engaged in pursuing a public purpose. Public managers therefore produce goods or services people enjoy and value, and the wealth they generate directly improves the lives of those associated with their enterprises and thus improves the lives of their communities and even society at large. For public managers, however, the fusion of the instrumental and the constitutive is not just inadvertent or occasional, it is central, frequent, and permanent (Behn 1997:7). Howlett and Ramesh (2003:7) states that not only must public managers wield administrative power in service to political purposes that are always in contention, they wield that power in ways that raise questions and seek answers about what administrative power is, what public purposes are and should be, and how people‟s lives, their individual and group interrelationships, their interactions with social and political institutions, will be altered by those purposes and the strategies and methods used to try to achieve them.
According to Cook (2007:10), public managers not only engage in the task of considering and reconsidering public purposes, they also consider “what public means, and what the relationship between public and private is and should be”.
Cook (2007:10) further states that the fusion of the instrumental and the constitutive most distinguishes public management, and that it is the struggle of public executives and managers, and front-line workers as well, to negotiate a careful and conscious recognition of the constitutive as they work to generate and deploy administrative power in pursuit of contested public purposes. It can therefore be maintained that the time and energy of public managers should always be devoted primarily to the strategies and tactics, as well as the demonstrations of results, that are the keys to the efficient, competent, and responsible realisation of public purposes (Cook 2007:11). According to Cook (2007:11), this is what thoughtful citizens and their elected representatives generally regard as good governance.