ABSTRACT
The millions of men and women who work in government agencies represent an extraordinary variety of skills and occupations, from architecture to zoology. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine an occupation that does not have a few of its practitioners laboring away in one corridor or another of governments throughout the world. One consequence of this diversity is that the terms we commonly apply to their collective activities-public administration or public management-are not as descriptive as we might like. Even if we reserve our usage of public manager (as we probably should) for those who exercise some supervisory or discretionary authority, we can still encounter difficulties. Although they are all public administrators by this definition, a nurse in a city public health department, for instance, will likely not feel a close kinship with an engineer in the traffic department or an analyst in the budget office.
