International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue V, May 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186

Public Administration – Public Management interface: How Different is the ‘Management’ from the ‘Administration’?

Dr Mary Owusu Obimpeh¹ and Juliana Audria Dankwa^2
1Directorate of Human Resource, University of Cape Coast
²Centre for International Education, University of Cape Coast

Abstract: The field of public administration has gone through some evolution and still going through such paradigmatic shifts. Going beyond the traditional public administration, which had been underpinned, by bureaucracy and the quest for democracy and rules, the field evolved to public management with its most popular variant new public management, which puts greater emphasizes on market orientation and adoption of private sector management principles into the public sector. However, to what extent is public management dissimilar with the traditional notion of public administration? Is public management significantly different from public administration? Is it a genuinely new area of academic enquiry or is it merely an old subject that is being dusted off and recycled? Does public management designate a coherent theoretical and methodological approach? Adopting content analysis of extant literature, these cross-cutting questions are adequately addressed in this paper with an emphasis on the nexus between public administration and public management. The paper concludes with the interconnection between the public administration, public management and the emerging approaches.

Keywords: public administration; new public service; public management; service delivery; market mechanisms

I. INTRODUCTION

The quest for universal administrative standards to promote the effective application of public laws and policies gave birth to the field of public administration. (Waldo, 1948; Wilson, 1887). Wilson argued for a distinction between politics and administration, arguing that the former was more concerned with democracy, justice, and equality, while the latter was more concerned with efficiency, as he postulated that “administration lies beyond the proper domain of politics; administrative questions are not political questions” (Wilson, 1887). According to Waldo (1948) “the means and measurements of efficiency, it was felt and strongly stated, were the same for all administrations: democracy, if it were to survive, could not afford to ignore the lessons of centralization, hierarchy and discipline. Bureaucracy as an organisational type has seen its heyday in the field of public administration, owing to Woodrow Wilson’s Transfer of Administrative Principles. That notwithstanding, the field has gone through paradigmatic evolution over time by a quest for management paradigm derived from the discipline of business administration.