ABSTRACT
Social administration as an academic subject is the study of certain collective activities undertaken by governments, voluntary organisations or, in some cases, by commercial organisations with government support, whose ostensible aim is to improve the welfare of the people of a nation-state. From the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century it was generally accepted that science was concerned with the discovery of truth in the sense of verifiable facts or propositions. Behavioural scientists in psychology and other disciplines have disputed Weber's argument. The objectivity of the social sciences is also problematic in another sense, namely whether there are objective truths that are separable from the values of those who observe and analyse phenomena. The problem in the social sciences is that of dealing with the complexity of human behaviour and the influences on it, in such a way as to separate out particular causes and effects.
