Then and Now Public Administration, 1953–1999
| Published date | 01 June 1999 |
| Date | 01 June 1999 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00205 |
| Author | Andrew Dunsire |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Then and Now
Public Administration, 1953±1999
ANDREW DUNSIRE*
University of York
The year this journal was launched, 1953, was also the year I started
teaching Public Administration. Since then, both the ®eld and the subject in
this country have undergone upheavals variously labelled `permanent revolu-
tion', `culture shift', `new paradigm': or, from `traditional public administration'
to `New Public Management' or `governance'. It has almost been exciting.
But this story has already been told many times, and often at much greater
length than I have here: W. A. Robson in 1975 and Rod Rhodes in 1991 in this
journal; Christopher Hood, Stewart and Walsh, and Rhodes more recently; as
well as a whole special issue of Public Administration in 1995, not to mention
American, European{ and other treatments.1 My contribution will be a
personal overview, and I shall try to answer Robson's call for more attention to
the relation between `the world of thought and the world of action',2 or what I
am calling the subject and the ®eld, by treating each separately in parallel,
before and after 1975, the half-way point.
The `®eld', here, is the real-world activity, the creation and delivery of public
services and the structures and people through which that is done. By `the
subject' I mean the academic study of this ®eld, both the teaching and the
scholarly research, based mainly in universities and colleges. The Robson
question is how far changes in one produce changes in the other.
* The author thanks Professors Rod Rhodes, Christopher Hood and Richard Chapman, and the
journal's reviewer, for valuable comments on earlier drafts.
{ The pioneering work of American scholars in many aspects of Public Administration theory
(e.g. in bureaucracy theory, organization theory, public policy, implementation theory, public
choice theory, etc.) is fully acknowledged (see e.g. N. B. Lynn and A. Wildavsky Public
Administration: the State of the Discipline (Chatham NJ, Chatham House, 1990)). The in¯uence of
German and other European scholars in recent decades (e.g. Habermas, Luhmann, Mayntz) is also
respectfully acknowledged. In each case citations are given sparingly because of the limitations of
the given topic, and of space.
1 W. A. Robson, `The study of public administration then and now', Political Studies, 23 (1975),
194±201; R. A. W. Rhodes, `Theory and methods in British public administration: the view from
Political Science', Political Studies, 39 (1991), 533±54; C. C. Hood, Beyond the Public Bureaucracy
State? Public Administration in the 1990s. Extended text of an inaugural lecture, 16 January 1990
(London, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1990); C. C. Hood, The Art of the
State: Culture, Rhetoric and Public Management (Oxford, Clarendon, 1998); J. Stewart and K.
Walsh, `Change in the management of public services', Public Administration, 70 (1992), 499±518;
R. A. W. Rhodes with C. Dargie, A. Melville, and B. Tutt, `The state of public administration: a
professional history, 1970±1995', Public Administration, 73 (1995), 1±16; R. A. W. Rhodes,
Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Re¯exivity and Accountability (Bucking-
ham, Open University Press, 1997).
2 Robson, `The study of public administration then and now', p. 201.
# Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Review Section
361
The Field in 1953
By 1953 food rationing had nearly ended, but the Second World War ± with its
remarkable display of national unity of purpose despite (or because of) a virtual
command economy and directed society ± was still very much in people's
minds, as were the privations of the 1930s. There existed a general will to leave
authoritarian powers with the state (central and local), in order to overcome
Beveridge's `®ve giants on the road to reconstruction' (disease, ignorance,
squalor, idleness, and want);3 to plan better land use; to rationalize transport
and public utilities. The Churchill Government, while denationalizing iron and
steel, still claimed credit for building 327,000 new houses in 1953. It was state
action that got things done.
The institutions of that generation's state action we now see as historically
and comparatively `statist' ± bureaucratic, hierarchical, and centralized. As a
creed, or conceptual model, it can be summed up in Stewart and Walsh's six
principles of `traditional public administration'4 (I paraphrase):
1. public provision of a function is more equitable, reliable and democratic
than provision by a commercial or voluntary body;
2. where a ministry or other public authority is responsible for a function, it
normally carries out that function itself with its own sta;
3. where a public body provides a service, it is provided uniformly to
everyone within its jurisdiction;
4. operations are controlled from the headquarters of the public body
through a hierarchy of unbroken supervision;
5. employment practices (including recruitment, promotions, grading,
salary scales, retirement and pensions) are standardized throughout
each of the public services (e.g. the civil service, the local government
service, the armed services);
6. accountability of public servants to the public is via elected representative
bodies.
Two glosses are necessary. First, it must be understood that this `traditional'
pattern was the British outcome of the modernizing movements of the nine-
teenth century in many countries, each of which had its own aetiology, but
which to an extent shared a common diagnosis and a common remedy: the
replacing of a particularistic irresponsible personal authority by a system of
salaried ocials appointed on merit and constrained by universalistic, ascert-
ainable decision rules (conforming more or less to Weber's stereotype), in a
clari®ed and uniform system of accountable public authorities.
So England and Wales got their `shiny new'5 system of town, district and
county elected councils, with expert ocials, and a tidied-up central system of
ministerial departments responsible to Parliament via a named member of the
government,6 which took over from haphazard parochial, statutory and volunt-
ary bodies the provision of environmental health, education and relief of
3 Sir W. Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge Report), Cmd 6404
(London, HMSO, 1942).
4 Stewart and Walsh, `Change in the management of public services', p. 509.
5 C. Sladen, Book review, in Teaching Public Administration, 17 (1997), 58±61.
6 B. B. Schaer, The Administrative Factor: Papers in Organization, Politics, and Development
(London, Frank Cass, 1973), ch. 1.
# Political Studies Association, 1999
362
Review Section
poverty. (Scotland and Ireland had their own distinct but corresponding
systems.) In a mythical `public service bargain', civil servants oered loyalty,
pro®ciency, anonymity, and sacri®ce of some political rights, in return for
permanency, high salaries and pensions, and honourable social status.7 With the
addition between the Wars of the `Morrisonian' public corporation, allowing
ministerial control `at arm's-length' (of e.g. broadcasting, transport in London,
and the post-war nationalized industries), this was the `modernized' or `progres-
sive' system that waged the Second World War, and that has come to be called
`traditional'.
The second gloss is to distinguish between the clarity of the conceptual model
and the relative untidiness of the actual historical institutions, which might not
conform to all of the `six principles'. For example, local government councils
then had a large measure of statutory and de facto autonomy, leading to variety
of provision; and apart from that, some of them were `one-party states', some
were dominated by a local `city boss', some were notably corrupt,8 and so were
not as equitable, reliable or democratic as the model portrayed. The admini-
stration of the government's Legal Aid scheme (1949) was farmed out from the
start to a `private' body, the Law Society (in Scotland, an equivalent body had
to be set up for the purpose!). `Uniform provision' of a service may be the
aspiration, but in huge operations such as the national insurance scheme or the
National Health Service, widely-diering interpretations are probably inevi-
table. The National Assistance Board set up in 1948 was statutorily independent
of direct Parliamentary control, and hence of Ministerial `unbroken super-
vision', in its day-to-day casework. Ministers could not in practice keep their
hands o the nationalized industries, `arm's-length' or not. And so on. The
reality is always more messy than the model.
None the less, the six principles of the `traditional' model capture the main
elements of the structure, and of the ethos, that ushered in the relatively
prosperous period of the `post-war settlement'. It was a system based on faith in
bureaucratic rationality and professionalism; its ruling values were equity,
reliability, justice, and conspicuous probity. It saw the apotheosis in the Civil
Service of the generalist Administrative Class `mandarin', of wise judgement
and experienced discretion, presiding over a uni®ed service recruiting level for
level from the reformed education system, attracting foreign visitors (even from
France) to marvel and emulate.
The Subject in 1953
The subject in 1953 comprised the description, and to an extent...
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