ABSTRACT
In the first chapter, we traced the development of the Old Public Administration and the New Public Management. Before moving on, it will be helpful to review some of the themes that emerged in that analysis. First, for at least the first three quarters of the twentieth century, the mainstream model of public administration was that articulated by writers such as Woodrow Wilson, Frederick Taylor, Luther Gulick, and Herbert Simon. Even though many of its advocates portrayed orthodox public administration as neutral with respect to values, it wasn’t. It was a normative model for the conduct of public agencies. Among the value choices made in the construction of this model were a particular description of the public administrator’s role, especially in relation to the political (or policy) process, the choice of efficiency (as opposed to responsiveness, etc.) as the primary criterion for assessing the work of administrative agencies, and an emphasis on designing public agencies as largely closed systems, featuring a single “controlling” executive having substantial authority and operating in a top-down fashion. Perhaps the most striking feature of this model, evident in its early versions but especially clear in its later versions, was the use of “rational choice” as the primary theoretical foundation of public administration.
