Public Administration as a Developing Discipline: Part 1: Perspectives on Past and Present

The most comprehensive volume available on this topic, Public Administration as a Developing Discipline, in two parts, provides past, present, and future perspectives on the development of public administration. The book focuses on how public administration evolved to its present state, its historical missions and traditions, and how these historic missions and traditions can be better fulfilled in the future through the use of organization development, a specific technology conditioned by specific values.

Part I: Perspectives on Past and Present sketches the broad context of the conceptual development of public administration, providing perspectives on the past, evaluations of the present, and speculations on trends for miniparadigms in the future. Part 2: Organiza-tion Development as One of a Future Family of Miniparadigms outlines one specific approach toward facilitating the conceptual development of the discipline-the laboratory approach to organization development. Organization development is both strategically significant in coming to grips with some managerial phenomena, and tactically manage-able at this period in the developmental history of public administration. The focus is diverse: on large organizations and small; on values and research results; on applications as well as scientific study.

Public Administration as a Developing Discipline is an outstanding textbook and refer-ence book for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in political science, espe-cially in the many public administration degree programs that have been developed in departments of political science, in separate schools for public sector management, or in generic management programs.