A future US president helped turn running government into an academic field
In an 1887 article, The Study of Administration, Woodrow Wilson argued that scholars should work out what government can properly do and how to do it at the least cost in money and energy. It earned him the title of father of American public administration, long before he became president himself.
Wilson was not the first to treat administration as a subject. In the eighteenth century Frederick William I of Prussia created professorships in cameralism to train a new class of officials, and universities at Frankfurt an der Oder and Halle taught economic and social disciplines aimed at reform, with Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi among the best-known professors. In 1855 Lorenz von Stein, teaching in Vienna, rejected the idea that administration was merely a branch of administrative law. He called it an integrating science drawing on sociology, political science, law and public finance, concerned with both theory and practice, and many regard him as the founder of the discipline.
The practical need is ancient. States have always required treasurers, tax collectors and other officials, and the uniform bricks and public granaries and baths of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro hint at organised public servants. In medieval times literacy and arithmetic were largely confined to the educated elite, which made those skills the basis of official careers in record-keeping, paying armies and collecting taxes. Until the nineteenth century, though, most administrations were staffed through nepotism, favouritism and patronage, the so-called spoils system.
By the 1920s textbooks had appeared, and figures such as Luther Gulick, Lyndall Urwick, Henri Fayol and Frederick Taylor dominated. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management promised that analysis could reveal the best way to perform any operation, a method taken up first by industrialists and then by governments. In the mid-twentieth century Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy sparked new theoretical interest.
Definitions keep multiplying. Paul Appleby in 1947 described it as leadership in public affairs answerable for executive action, and a year later Gordon Clapp, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, described it as an instrument for realising democratic society more fully. More recent scholars concede that the field has no generally accepted definition and still argue over whether it belongs to political science or administrative science.
Source: Public administration
