The Elements of Public Administraton: A Dogmatic Introduction
| Published date | 01 October 1932 |
| Author | B. W. Walker Watson |
| Date | 01 October 1932 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1932.tb01861.x |
The
A
Elements
of
Public
Administration
0.
Dogmatic Introduction
By B.
W.
WALKER
WATSON
[Being the Winning
Essay
in the Haldane Essay Competition,
1931-19321
"
I
do not choose a subject necessarily because
I
think
I
know
a
great
deal about
it,
but raiher because
I
have
at
various times put myself questions
to
which
I
do not know the answers and the choice of a title to cover them
forces me
in
the meantime to
6nd
the answers
if
I
can,
or at any rate to
determine the limits
within
which answers are
in
fact likely to be available,
and the area over which detailed or
ad
hoc
inquiry
is
necessary before
satis-
factory answers can be completed."-Sir
Josiah
Stamp.
many years ago Viscount Haldane referred to administration
the difficulty
of
deciding whether
it
is
possible to mark
off
public
administration
in
such
a
way as to enable
a
useful study
of
it
as
a
science to be undertaken. In the meantime research has been
proceeding apace, the Journal
of
the Institute
of
Public Administra-
tion has been accumulating its volumes, and university courses
have multiplied. The material is
at
hand and the time ripe for
a
reasoned review
of
these general issues.
In the course of his career
a
Civil Servant
may
ask himself many
a
puzzling question and receive only
"
a
dusty answer," or none
at all. He may wish to know whether the jumbled and scattered
Civil Service is really the chaos
it
appears to be; what the scope
of
administration may be: whether its borders
wiU
ever cease to
extend; whether its nature
is
akin to science or art, or both,
or
neither; whether the other administrations of the world differ much
from it, and,
if
so,
how and why; whether any ordinary
human
being can possibly see any administration as
a
whole, either
as
a
chaos or an organism: whether departments spring up like seeds
blown by the wayside or according to plan; whether their form can
be pruned on simple palpable lines; and whether there
is
any rhyme
or reason in thinking that the many i's and
t's
of
administration
can ever be properly dotted and crossed.
It
would seem that the most fundamental
of
all these questions,
whether public administration
is
a
science
or
an
art, must
first
be
decided
as
a
condition of answering the remainder. Without entering
397
NOT
as
a
science as well
as
an art, and
Sir
John
Anderson stressed
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