ABSTRACT
In this chapter I choose to speak on the subject of “administration in the coming public era.” The burden of my argument is that history moves back and forth in sweeping arcs of change and that public administration is swept up along these epochs of change, both changing each epoch and being changed by it. In broad terms, the arc of change moves from an individualistic, corporate, market, and private ethos at one pole to a collective or public ethos at the other pole. We are, I shall argue, at the ending point of an individualistic or corporate era, which began at about the middle of the 20th century, and are just now entering a new era characterized by a distinctly strengthening public ethos. The theories and practices of public administration are, I shall argue, central to this emerging public era.
