Public administration

Such neat and prosperous civilisations as Harappa and Mohenjo-daaro must have had a disciplined, benevolent and uncorrupt cadre of public servants. In support of this, there are many references to Brihaspati's works on laws and governance. An interesting extract from Aaine-Akbari [vol.III, tr. by H. S. Barrett, pp217–218] written by Abul Fazl, the famous historian of Akbar's court, mentions a symposium of philosophers of all faiths held in 1578 at Akbar's instance. This sounds credible in the context of Akbar's restless desire to find truth, reflected in his launching a new religion called Din-e-elaahi. The account under advisement is given by the well-known historian Vincent Smith, in his article titled "The Jain Teachers of Akbar". Some Charvaka thinkers are said to have participated in the symposium. Under the heading "Naastika" Abul Fazl has referred to the good work, judicious administration and welfare schemes that were emphasised by the Charvaka law-makers. Somadeva has also mentioned the Charvaka method of defeating the enemies of the nation. He has referred to thirteen enemies who remain disguised in the kingdom for their selfish interests. They may contain a few relatives of the king and subsidiary rulers, but they should not be spared. They should be rigorously punished like any other such opponent. Kautilya, as already mentioned, has given a detailed scheme to remove the enemies in the garb of friends. The Charvaka stalwart, Brihaspati, is so much more ancient than Kautilya and Somadeva. He appears to be contemporaneous with the Harappa and Mohenjo-daaro culture.

The central point of traditional religious ritual is to earn ready money for its perpetrators. All unproductive, barren rites designed for various moments in human life starting from several months prior to birth and extending over several years beyond death in the form of the annual sraddha, many of which are current even today, are but channels to feed the priests. They are unreal, imagined and wasteful. While they are unreal, imagined and wasteful; the feeding is real.

This cunning paradox was realised by the Charvaka for its real worth. They wanted financial causes to produce financial results. Imagined causes only produced imagined results not real ones.[22][23]

Dating back to Antiquity, Pharaohs, kings and emperors have required pages, treasurers, and tax collectors to administer the practical business of government. Prior to the 19th century, staffing of most public administrations was rife with nepotism, favouritism, and political patronage, which was often referred to as a "spoils system". Public administrators have long been the "eyes and ears" of rulers. In medieval times, the abilities to read and write, add and subtract were as dominated by the educated elite as public employment. Consequently, the need for expert civil servants whose ability to read and write formed the basis for developing expertise in such necessary activities as legal record-keeping, paying and feeding armies and levying taxes. As the European Imperialist age progressed and the militarily powers extended their hold over other continents and people, the need for a sophisticated public administration grew.

The field of management may well be said to have originated in ancient China,[24] including possibly the first highly centralized bureaucratic state, and the earliest (by the second century BC) example of an administration based on merit through testing.[25] Far in advance of the rest of the world until almost the end of the 18th century, Sinologist Herrlee G. Creel and other scholars find the influence of Chinese administration in Europe by the 12th century, for example, in Fredrick II's promulgations, characterized as the "birth certificate of modern bureaucracy".[26][27][28][29] Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in Guangzhou, argued in his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China (1847) that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only," and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic.[30] Influenced by the ancient Chinese imperial examination, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854 recommended that recruitment should be on the basis of merit determined through competitive examination, candidates should have a solid general education to enable inter-departmental transfers, and promotion should be through achievement rather than "preferment, patronage, or purchase".[31][30] This led to implementation of Her Majesty's Civil Service as a systematic, meritocratic civil service bureaucracy.[32] Like the British, the development of French bureaucracy was influenced by the Chinese system. Voltaire claimed that the Chinese had "perfected moral science" and François Quesnay advocated an economic and political system modeled after that of the Chinese.[33] French civil service examinations adopted in the late 19th century were also heavily based on general cultural studies. These features have been likened to the earlier Chinese model.[34]

Though Chinese administration cannot be traced to any one individual, emphasizing a merit system figures of the Fa-Jia like 4th century BC reformer Shen Buhai (400–337 BC) may have had more influence than any other, and might be considered its founder, if not valuable as a rare pre-modern example of abstract theory of administration. Creel writes that, in Shen Buhai, there are the "seeds of the civil service examination", and that, if one wishes to exaggerate, it would "no doubt be possible to translate Shen Buhai's term Shu, or technique, as 'science'", and argue that he was the first political scientist, though Creel does "not care to go this far".[35]

The eighteenth-century noble, King Frederick William I of Prussia, created professorates in Cameralism in an effort to train a new class of public administrators. The universities of Frankfurt an der Oder and University of Halle were Prussian institutions emphasizing economic and social disciplines, with the goal of societal reform. Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi was the most well-known professor of Cameralism. Thus, from a Western European perspective, Classic, Medieval, and Enlightenment-era scholars formed the foundation of the discipline that has come to be called public administration.

Lorenz von Stein, an 1855 German professor from Vienna, is considered the founder of the science of public administration in many parts of the world. In the time of Von Stein, public administration was considered a form of administrative law, but Von Stein believed this concept too restrictive. Von Stein taught that public administration relies on many preestablished disciplines such as sociology, political science, administrative law and public finance. He called public administration an integrating science, and stated that public administrators should be concerned with both theory and practice. He argued that public administration is a science because knowledge is generated and evaluated according to the scientific method.

Modern American public administration is an extension of democratic governance, justified by classic and liberal philosophers of the western world ranging from Aristotle to John Locke[36] to Thomas Jefferson.[37][38]

Woodrow Wilson

In the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson is considered the father of public administration. He first formally recognized public administration in an 1887 article entitled "The Study of Administration". The future president wrote that "it is the object of administrative study to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or of energy".[7] Wilson was more influential to the science of public administration than Von Stein, primarily due to an article Wilson wrote in 1887 in which he advocated four concepts:

• Separation of politics and administration
• Comparative analysis of political and private organizations
• Improving efficiency with business-like practices and attitudes toward daily operations
• Improving the effectiveness of public service through management and by training civil servants, merit-based assessment

The separation of politics and administration has been the subject of lasting debate. The different perspectives regarding this dichotomy contribute to differentiating characteristics of the suggested generations of public administration.

By the 1920s, scholars of public administration had responded to Wilson's solicitation and thus textbooks in this field were introduced. A few distinguished scholars of that period were, Luther Gulick, Lyndall Urwick, Henri Fayol, Frederick Taylor, and others. Frederick Taylor (1856–1915), another prominent scholar in the field of administration and management also published a book entitled The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). He believed that scientific analysis would lead to the discovery of the "one best way" to do things or carrying out an operation. This, according to him could help save cost and time. Taylor's technique was later introduced to private industrialists, and later into the various government organizations (Jeong, 2007).[39]

Taylor's approach is often referred to as Taylor's Principles or Taylorism. Taylor's scientific management consisted of main four principles (Frederick W. Taylor, 1911):

• Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
• Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
• Provide "detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task" (Montgomery 1997: 250).
• Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system (approach): "It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone."[40]

The American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) the leading professional group for public administration was founded in 1939. ASPA sponsors the journal Public Administration Review, which was founded in 1940.[41]

Contemporary scholars [42][43][44][45] are reclaiming a companion public administration origin story which includes the contributions of women. This has become known as the “alternative” or “Settlement” model of public administration.[46] During the 19th century upper class women in the United States and Europe organized voluntary associations that worked to mitigate the excesses of urbanization and industrialization that plagued their towns and cities. Eventually, these voluntary associations became networks that were able to spearhead changes to policy and administration.[47][48] These women's civic clubs worked to make cities and work spaces safer (cleaner streets, water and sewage, workplace regulation) and more suited to the needs of their children (playgrounds, libraries, juvenile courts, child labor laws). These were administrative and policy spaces ignored by their fathers and husbands. The work of these clubs was amplified by newly organized non-profit organizations (Settlement Houses), usually situated in industrialized city slums filled with immigrants.[49][50][51][52]

The Settlement movement and its leaders such as Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, and Florence Kelley were instrumental in crafting the alternative, feminine inspired, model of public administration.[53][54] This settlement model of public administration, had two interrelated components - municipal housekeeping and industrial citizenship.[55][56] Municipal housekeeping[57] called for cities to be run like a caring home. The city, should be conceived as an extension of the home where families could be safe and children cared for. Clean streets, clean water, playgrounds, educational curricular reform, and juvenile courts, are examples of reforms associated with this movement. Industrial citizenship[58] focused on the problems and risks of labor force participation in a laissez faire, newly industrialized economy. Reforms which mitigated workplace problems such as child labor, unsanitary workplaces, excessive work schedules, risks of industrial accidents, and old age poverty were the focus of these efforts. Organized settlement women’s reform efforts led to workplace safety laws and inspections. Settlement reformers went on to serve as local, state and federal administrators. Jane Addams was a garbage inspector, Florence Kelley served as the chief factory inspector for the State of Illinois, Julia Lathrop was the first director of the Women’s Bureau and Francis Perkins was Secretary of Labor during the F. Roosevelt Administration[59][60] [61]

Reforms that emerged from the New Deal (e.g., income for the old, unemployment insurance, aid for dependent children and the disabled, child labor prohibitions and limits on hours worked etc.) were supported by leaders of the Settlement movement. Richard Stillman [62] credits Jane Addams, a key leader of the Settlement movement and a pioneer of public administration with “conceiving and spawning” the modern welfare state. The accomplishments of the Settlement movement and their conception of public administration was ignored in the early literature of public administration. The alternative model of Public Administration was invisible or buried for about 100 years until Camilla Stivers published Bureau Men and Settlement Women in 2000.[63]

Settlement workers explicitly fought for social justice as they campaigned for reform.[64] They sought policy changes that would improve the lives of immigrants, women, children, sick, old and impoverished people. Both municipal housekeeping and industrial citizenship applied a pragmatic, ethic of care informed by feminine experience to policy and administration.[65] While they saw the relevance of the traditional public administration values (efficiency, effectiveness, etc.) and practices[66][67] of their male reformist counterparts, they also emphasized social justice and social equity. Jane Addams, for example, was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people (NAACP).[68]

Luther Gulick (1892–1993) was an expert on public administration.

The separation of politics and administration advocated by Wilson continues to play a significant role in public administration today. However, the dominance of this dichotomy was challenged by second generation scholars, beginning in the 1940s. Luther Gulick's fact-value dichotomy was a key contender for Wilson's proposed politics-administration dichotomy. In place of Wilson's first generation split, Gulick advocated a "seamless web of discretion and interaction".[69]

Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick are two second-generation scholars. Gulick, Urwick, and the new generation of administrators built on the work of contemporary behavioural, administrative, and organizational scholars including Henri Fayol, Fredrick Winslow Taylor, Paul Appleby, Frank Goodnow, and Willam Willoughby. The new generation of organizational theories no longer relied upon logical assumptions and generalizations about human nature like classical and enlightened theorists.

Gulick developed a comprehensive, generic theory of organization that emphasized the scientific method, efficiency, professionalism, structural reform, and executive control. Gulick summarized the duties of administrators with an acronym; POSDCORB, which stands for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. Fayol developed a systematic, 14-point treatment of private management. Second-generation theorists drew upon private management practices for administrative sciences. A single, generic management theory bleeding the borders between the private and the public sector was thought to be possible. With the general theory, the administrative theory could be focused on governmental organizations. The mid-1940s theorists challenged Wilson and Gulick. The politics-administration dichotomy remained the centre of criticism.

During the 1950s, the United States experienced prolonged prosperity and solidified its place as a world leader. Public Administration experienced a kind of heyday due to the successful war effort and successful post war reconstruction in Western Europe and Japan. Government was popular as was President Eisenhower. In the 1960s and 1970s, government itself came under fire as ineffective, inefficient, and largely a wasted effort. The costly American intervention in Vietnam along with domestic scandals including the bugging of Democratic party headquarters (the 1974 Watergate scandal) are two examples of self-destructive government behaviour that alienated citizens.

The costly Vietnam War alienated U.S. citizens from their government. Pictured is Operation Arc Light, a U.S. bombing operation.

There was a call by citizens for efficient administration to replace ineffective, wasteful bureaucracy. Public administration would have to distance itself from politics to answer this call and remain effective. Elected officials supported these reforms. The Hoover Commission, chaired by University of Chicago professor Louis Brownlow, to examine reorganization of government. Brownlow subsequently founded the Public Administration Service (PAS) at the university, an organization which has provided consulting services to all levels of government until the 1970s.

Concurrently, after World War II, the whole concept of public administration expanded to include policymaking and analysis, thus the study of "administrative policy making and analysis" was introduced and enhanced into the government decision-making bodies. Later on, the human factor became a predominant concern and emphasis in the study of public administration. This period witnessed the development and inclusion of other social sciences knowledge, predominantly, psychology, anthropology, and sociology, into the study of public administration (Jeong, 2007).[39] Henceforth, the emergence of scholars such as, Fritz Morstein Marx with his book The Elements of Public Administration (1946), Paul H. Appleby Policy and Administration (1952), Frank Marini 'Towards a New Public Administration' (1971), and others that have contributed positively in these endeavors.

Stimulated by events during the 1960's such as an active civil rights movement, the Vietnam war and war protests, assassinations of a president and civil rights leaders, and an active women’s movement, public administration changed course somewhat. Landmark legislation such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also gave public administrators new responsibilities. These events were manifest in the public administration profession through the new public administration movement. “Under the stimulating patronage of Dwight Waldo, some of the best of the younger generation of scholars challenged the doctrine they had received”.[70] These new scholars demanded a more policy-oriented public administrators that incorporated “four themes: relevance, values, equity and change”.[71] All of these themes would encourage more participation among women and minorities.[72] Stimulated by the events of the 60s, the 1970s brought significant change for the American Society for Public Administration. Racial and ethnicity minority and women members organized to seek greater participation.[73] Eventually, the Conference on Minority Public Administrators and the Section for Women in Public Administration were established.[74]

In the late 1980s, yet another generation of public administration theorists began to displace the last. The new theory, which came to be called New Public Management, was proposed by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler in their book Reinventing Government.[75] The new model advocated the use of private sector-style models, organizational ideas and values to improve the efficiency and service-orientation of the public sector. During the Clinton Administration (1993–2001), Vice President Al Gore adopted and reformed federal agencies using NPM approaches. In the 1990s, new public management became prevalent throughout the bureaucracies of the US, the UK and, to a lesser extent, in Canada. The original public management theories have roots attributed to policy analysis, according to Richard Elmore in his 1986 article published in the "Journal of Policy Analysis and Management".[76]

Some modern authors define NPM as a combination of splitting large bureaucracies into smaller, more fragmented agencies, encouraging competition between different public agencies, and encouraging competition between public agencies and private firms and using economic incentives lines (e.g., performance pay for senior executives or user-pay models).[77] NPM treats individuals as "customers" or "clients" (in the private sector sense), rather than as citizens.[78]

Some critics argue that the New Public Management concept of treating people as "customers" rather than "citizens" is an inappropriate borrowing from the private sector model, because businesses see customers as a means to an end (profit), rather than as the proprietors of government (the owners), opposed to merely the customers of a business (the patrons). In New Public Management, people are viewed as economic units not democratic participants which is the hazard of linking an MBA (business administration, economic and employer-based model) too closely with the public administration (governmental, public good) sector. Nevertheless, the NPM model (one of four described by Elmore in 1986, including the "generic model") is still widely accepted at multiple levels of government (e.g., municipal, state/province, and federal) and in many OECD nations.

In the late 1990s, Janet and Robert Denhardt proposed a new public services model in response to the dominance of NPM.[79] A successor to NPM is digital era governance, focusing on themes of reintegrating government responsibilities, needs-based holism (executing duties in cursive ways), and digitalization (exploiting the transformational capabilities of modern IT and digital storage).

One example in the deployment of DEG is openforum.com.au, an Australian non-for-profit eDemocracy project which invites politicians, senior public servants, academics, business people and other key stakeholders to engage in high-level policy debate. Another example is Brunei's Information Department in deploying Social Media technology in improving its Digital Governance process.[80] The book chapter work concludes that digital dividends can be secured through the effective application of Social Media within the framework of Digital Era Governance.[80]

Another new public service model is what has been called New Public Governance, an approach which includes a centralization of power; an increased number, role and influence of partisan-political staff; personal-politicization of appointments to the senior public service; and, the assumption that the public service is promiscuously partisan for the government of the day.[81]

In the mid-1980s, the goal of community programs in the United States was often represented by terms such as independent living, community integration, inclusion, community participation, deinstitutionalization, and civil rights. Thus, the same public policy (and public administration) was to apply to all citizens, inclusive of disability. However, by the 1990s, categorical state systems were strengthened in the United States (Racino, in press, 2014), and efforts were made to introduce more disability content into the public policy curricula[82] with disability public policy (and administration) distinct fields in their own right.[83][84] Behaviorists have also dominated "intervention practice" (generally not the province of public administration) in recent years, believing that they are in opposition to generic public policy (termed ecological systems theory, of the late Urie Bronfenbrenner).

Increasingly, public policy academics and practitioners have utilized the theoretical concepts of political economy to explain policy outcomes such as the success or failure of reform efforts or the persistence of suboptimal outcomes.[85]

In 1971, Professor William Niskanen proposed a rational choice variation which he called the "budget-maximizing model". He claimed that rational bureaucrats will universally seek to increase the budgets of their units (to enhance their stature), thereby contributing to state growth and increased public expenditure. Niskanen served on President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors; his model underpinned what has been touted as curtailed public spending and increased privatization. However, budgeted expenditures and the growing deficit during the Reagan administration is evidence of a different reality. A range of pluralist authors have critiqued Niskanen's universalist approach. These scholars have argued that officials tend also to be motivated by considerations of the public interest.

The bureau-shaping model, a modification of Niskanen, holds that rational bureaucrats only maximize the part of their budget that they spend on their own agency's operations or give to contractors and interest groups. Groups that are able to organize a "flowback" of benefits to senior officials would, according to this theory, receive increased budgetary attention. For instance, rational officials will get no benefit from paying out larger welfare checks to millions of low-income citizens because this does not serve a bureaucrats' goals. Accordingly, one might instead expect a jurisdiction to seek budget increases for defense and security purposes in place programming. If we refer back to Reagan once again, Dunleavy's bureau shaping model accounts for the alleged decrease in the "size" of government while spending did not, in fact, decrease. Domestic entitlement programming was financially deemphasized for military research and personnel.

Comparative public administration or CPA is defined as the study of administrative systems in a comparative fashion or the study of public administration in other countries. There have been several issues which have hampered the development of comparative public administration, including: the major differences between Western countries and developing countries; the lack of curriculum on this sub-field in public administration programs; and the lack of success in developing theoretical models which can be scientifically tested. Even though CPA is a weakly formed field as a whole, this sub-field of public administration is an attempt at cross-cultural analysis, a "quest for patterns and regularities of administrative action and behavior."[88] CPA is an integral part to the analysis of public administration techniques. The process of comparison allows for more widely applicable policies to be tested in a variety of situations.

Comparative public administration emerged during the post-World War II period in order to seek international developmental strategies which aided in the containment of communism during the Cold War. (Riggs 1954, Heady 1960)[89] The developers of this field expanded on a general theory, a research agenda, and generalized "lessons learned". (Riggs 1954, Heady 1960) A prominent figure of Public Administration, Woodrow Wilson, commented on the study by saying, "Like principles of civil liberty are everywhere fostering like methods of government; and if comparative studies of the ways and means of government should enable us to offer suggestions which will practicably combine openness and vigor in the administration of such governments with ready docility to all serious, well-sustained public criticism, they will have approved themselves worthy to be ranked among the highest and most fruitful of the great departments of political study".[90] As the financial state of the powering countries began to stabilize toward the decline of the Cold War, the field of CPA began to diminish.[89] The resulting decline caused the lack of further expansion of this study making it irrelevant.

Comparative public administration lacks curriculum, which has prevented it from becoming a major field of study. This lack of understanding of the basic concepts that build this field's foundation has ultimately led to its lack of use. For example, William Waugh, a professor at Georgia State University has stated "Comparative studies are difficult because of the necessity to provide enough information on the sociopolitical context of national administrative structures and processes for readers to understand why there are differences and similarities."[91] He also asserts, "Although there is sizable literature on comparative public administration it is scattered and dated."[91]

Waugh argues that public administration requires an understanding of different administrative structures and a comparison of different public administration models. The literature to build this base of knowledge is scattered and often hard to obtain. The lack or ill-formed use of comparative public administration has been detrimental for many countries, including the United States. Fred Riggs a political scientist, states that "comparisons to the United States also can be problematic, because of the tendency of many American scholars to presume the American organizational structures and processes are models for other nations to emulate, which was a failing of early developmental administrative studies."[91] In this, he claims the misuse and misapplication of comparative public administration has led to it being underdeveloped.

The development and better use comparative public administration could lead to better understanding. In 2002, the National Security Strategy was used in the battle of hearts and minds.[92] They tried to assimilate with an Arab and Islamic audience to push American values and democracy in an attempt to stop terrorism, when in fact the lack of comparison on the public level was ineffective and backfired.[92] The lack of willingness to understand their culture led to more tension in the Middle East.[92] In conclusion of these events there are not enough resources directed to the study of comparative public administration. For a basic understanding of sociopolitical structure of a society or culture is a key component of comparative public administration.

Despite all of its set backs there are examples of the application of well-formed Comparative Public Administration working in the world today. One of which is the comparison on the national level David Clark an author in this field states "In spite of similarities in public management reform rhetoric, it is argued that there is increasing divergence in the philosophy & practice of public service in the two nations, & and these differences reflect regimes that incorporate different ideals of citizenship."[93] This highlights the benefit of proper comparison of public administration. By examining patterns that emerge in international public sectors one can identify similarities and differences in many things including ideals of citizenship on the local level. Although the United States failed use of Comparative Public Administration in the Middle East is noted, they did properly incorporate it domestically. "During the Clinton administration, the focus on residential energy consumption in the United States was elevated to a high level with the inauguration of the Million Solar Roofs initiative, in which the Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored workshops, developed a pool of existing federal lending and financing options, and worked with partners in the solar and building industries to remove market barriers to strengthen grassroots demand for solar technologies".[94]

This grassroots demand may have come from the comparative knowledge that concluded "In the United States, residential and commercial buildings combined now use 71% of all electricity produced and account for 79% of all electricity expenditures. Annual CO₂ emission attributed to electricity consumption in these U.S. buildings constitute 43% of the country's annual total CO₂ emission, which is approximately equivalent to the total CO₂ emission of Japan, France, and the United Kingdom combined. These levels support the claim of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that energy use in buildings offer more potential for reducing carbon emission than any other single sector in the United States and abroad.".[94] This example compares CO₂ emission in the United States to other countries and through the buildings sector; the US could cut down on CO2 emission. The field of comparative public administration is often misunderstood for the definition itself is complex and requires layers of understanding. The field will require many more years of collaborative research before it becomes a widely recognized academic study.

Universities offer Undergraduate level Bachelor's degrees such as a Bachelor of Science (BS) and/or Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Public Administration or Government, Political Science, and International Affairs with a academic concentration or specialization in Public Policy and Administration. At a number of universities undergraduate level public administration and nonprofit management education is packaged together (along with international relations and security studies) in a degree in political science.

Sciences Po, Havre Campus

Some public administration programs have similarities to business administration programs, in cases where the students from both the Master's in Public Administration (MPA) and Master's in Business Administration (MBA) programs take many of the same courses. In some programs, the MPA (or MAPA) is more clearly distinct from the MBA, in that the MPA often emphasizes substantially different ethical and sociological criteria that pertain to administering government programs for the public good that have not been key criteria for business managers, who typically aim to maximize profit or share price. The MPA is related to similar graduate-level government studies programs including Master of Arts (MA) programs in public affairs, public policy, and political science. MPA degrees may be more likely to include program emphases on policy analysis techniques or other topical focuses such as the study of international affairs as opposed to MA degrees, which tend to focus on constitutional issues such as separation of powers, administrative law, contracting with government, problems of governance and power, and participatory democracy. Some MPA degrees may be more oriented towards training students to undertake public service work tasks, whereas some MA programs may have a more academic, theoretical focus. Some universities offer their Masters in public administration as an MA degree (e.g., Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and the University of Kerala in India).

Some universities offer mid-career Master's programs, sometimes called an MC/MPA, that can be taken part-time (often outside of business hours) by public servants and public service managers who are working full-time. Community programs may offer internships or continuing education credits. One example is the Maxwell School's mid-career Masters at Syracuse University, which was launched by Robert Iversen in the 1970s.

There are two types of doctoral degrees in public administration: the Doctor of Public Administration (DPA) and the Ph.D. in public administration. The DPA is an applied-research doctoral degree in the field of public administration, focusing on the practice of public administration more than on its theoretical aspects. The DPA requires coursework beyond the Masters level and a thesis, dissertation or other doctoral project. Upon successful completion of the doctoral requirements, the title of "Doctor" is awarded and the post-nominals of D.P.A. can be used. Some universities use the Ph.D. as their doctoral degree in public administration (e.g., Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and the University Of Kerala in India). The Ph.D. is typically sought by individuals aiming to become professors of public administration or researchers. Individuals pursuing a Ph.D. in public administration often pursue more theoretical dissertation topics than their DPA counterparts.

Notable scholars of public administration have come from a range of fields. In the period before public administration existed as its own independent discipline, scholars contributing to the field came from economics, sociology, management, political science, administrative law, and, other related fields. More recently, scholars from public administration and public policy have contributed important studies and theories.

• O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University
• University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs
• Leiden University
• Blavatnik School of Government
• Erasmus University Rotterdam
• Hertie School in Berlin
• Harvard Kennedy School of Government
• London School of Economics
• Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
• Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
• Sciences Po Paris
• University of Warwick

Many entities study public management in particular, in various countries, including:

• In the US, the American Society for Public Administration. Indiana University Bloomington
• In Canada, the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, the Observatoire de l'Administtation publique, and various projects of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and Infrastructure Canada
• In the UK, Newcastle Business School, Warwick Business School, the London School of Economics, University College London, the UK local democracy project and London Health Observatory.
• In the Netherlands, Erasmus University Rotterdam
• In Australia, the Institute of Public Administration Australia.
• In France, the École nationale d'administration, the Sciences Po School of Public Affairs, the INET, National Institute of Territorial Studies, and the IMPGT, Institute of Public Management and Territorial Governance in Aix-en-Provence, Aix-Marseille University.
• In Belgium, the Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven.
• In Germany, the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer, the Hertie School of Governance, the Bachelor and Master of Politics, Administration & International Relations (PAIR) at the Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, and the Bachelor and Master of Public Policy & Management and the Executive Public Management Master of University of Potsdam.
• In Switzerland, the University of Geneva and the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration (IDHEAP).
• In Italy, the SDA Bocconi School of Management, the graduate business school of Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.
• In Cyprus, the Cyprus International Institute of Management or CIIM.
• In Ireland, the Institute of Public Administration, Dublin.
• In South Africa, Regenesys Business School through the Regenesys School of Public Management and MANCOSA.[104]

Comparative public management, through government performance auditing, examines the efficiency and effectiveness of two or more governments.

• Public Policy and Administration, ISSN 1749-4192, (electronic) ISSN 0952-0767 (print), SAGE Publications and Joint University Council of the Applied Social Sciences
• International Journal of Public Sector Management, ISSN 0951-3558, Emerald Group Publishing
• Public Management Review, ISSN 1471-9045 (electronic) ISSN 1471-9037 (paper) Routledge
• Public Works Management & Policy, ISSN 1552-7549 (electronic) ISSN 1087-724X (paper), SAGE Publications

• Janicke, M. (1990). State Failure. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Kanter, R. M. (1985). The Change Masters: Corporate Entrepreneurs at Work. Hemel Hempstead: Unwin Paperbacks.
• Lane, R. E. (1991). The Market Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Lynn, L. E., Jr. (1996). "Public Management as Art, Science, and Profession." Chatham House, CQ Press.
• Lynn, L. E., Jr. (2006). "Public Management: Old and New." Routledge.
• Raczkowski, K. (2016). "Public Management: Theory and Practice." Springer