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Luther Gulick’s Managerial Perspective on Public Administration: Gulick believed that we should separate politics and administration and was a huge fan of Henri Fayol whose major study is discipline was management. He believed that adherence to a core set of management principles would help organizations achieve optimum performance in working toward their goals. Gulick coined division of labor, the principle of unity of command and also span of control.
Span of control dictates that superiors should oversee a limited number of subordinates rather than a large number of subordinates. By doing this, the task of overseeing the subordinates is less daunting because you don’t have such a huge number to monitor and mentor. Gulick is also well known for POSDCRORB, which is a made up word for organizing the executive. POSDCROB stands for Planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting.
Gulick wanted the implementation of his management principles to result in organizations being characterized by an almost mechanical efficiency, where relations between superiors and subordinates were clearly defined; workers specialized in particular areas and have clearly defined roles within organizational hierarchies, and organizational resources used in the most efficient manner possible.
Paul Appleby’s Political Perspective on Public Administration: Paul Appleby believed that the public attitudes about what is required from civil servants and what the public employees believe themselves as effective administration. A public servant official must have a public servant attitude and has to want to do the job because they enjoy it and have a sense of action. If the public servant official doesn’t have the mindset and will-power to want to advocate for the public there will be no organization.
Appleby also believes that politicians were awarded their positions because of big business, but not because they had the dedication or knowledge base/experience to do the job. Appleby also mentions that there are three complementary aspects that go to differentiate government from all other institutions and activities with those being public accountability, political character, and breadth of scope, impact, and consideration.
Appleby believes government is politics and that the government tends to be less efficient because of its public nature. David Rosenbloom’s Legal Perspective on Public Administration: Rosenbloom defines public administration as the use of managerial, political, and legal theories and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial governmental mandates for the provision of regulatory and service functions for the society as a whole, or for some segments of it.
He also believes that the legal approach to public administration embodies three central values; procedural due process, the second value concerns individual substantive rights as embodied in evolving interpretations of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, the last one being judiciary values equity. The central focus of the legal perspective is one that will maximize the use of adversary procedure.
The Legal approach was, according to Rosenbloom, the most crucial. The Rule of Law involves orderliness, comprehension, and spells out when and how tasks will be completed. Rosenbloom argues that in order to carry out their tasks, public administrators must be competent in their legal and constitutional obligations and restrictions. Rosenbloom believed that “constitutional competence” should be used as a basic standard for public service professionals.
Rosenbloom’s legal approached placed emphasis on substantive rights, and equity leads it to consider the individual as a unique person in a unique set of circumstances. Herbert Simon: Public Administration According to Simon, the principles of management were vague and plagued by contradictions. Simon pointed to the vagueness and ambiguities involved in applying specialization in a real-world setting.
Simon suggests that organizations be designed with few organizational levels- a principle directly opposite to that implied by adherence to narrow spans of control in structuring relations between executives and subordinates. Simon rejects the policy-administration dichotomy and says that policy and administrative functions are performed by both political and administrative functions. Simon mainly focused on decision premises. Decision premises provide the basis for the process of decision making, while decision themselves are conclusions drawn from these premises