The Myth of the Bureaucratic Paradigm: What Traditional Public Administration Really Stood For

Abstract

For a decade, public administration and management literature has featured a riveting story: the transformation of the field's orientation from an old paradigm to a new one. While many doubt claims concerning a new paradigm—a New Public Management—few question that there was an old one. An ingrained and narrowly focused pattern of thought, a “bureaucratic paradigm,” is routinely attributed to public administration's traditional literature. A careful reading of that literature reveals, however, that the bureaucratic paradigm is, at best, a caricature and, at worst, a demonstrable distortion of traditional thought that exhibited far more respect for law, politics, citizens, and values than the new, customer‐oriented managerialism and its variants. Public administration as a profession, having let lapse the moral and intellectual authority conferred by its own traditions, mounts an unduly weak challenge to the superficial thinking and easy answers of the many new paradigms of governance and public service. As a result, literature and discourse too often lack the recognition that reformers of institutions and civic philosophies must show how the capacity to effect public purposes and accountability to the polity will be enhanced in a manner that comports with our Constitution and our republican institutions.