Public Administration or Public Implementation

Abstract

This paper argues that a number of contemporary factors conspire to place the study of public administration in Britain in a peculiarly critical condition. In the first place public administration as a discipline contains within itself inherent weaknesses which are unique to it. In addition, the past 20 years have seen the development of certain intellectual fashions which necessarily threaten the discipline and its characteristic paradigm. All is made more acute by a scepticism towards social democracy felt throughout the western world but reaching an apotheosis in Britain. Here we have experienced the catalytic presence of a Government with a propensity to see public administration in simplistic instrumental terms: that is, as a machine for implementation of the "can do" kind. Thus the discipline suffers from a deep malaise compounded by an increasingly inhospitable climate.