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Here is an essay on ‘Comparative Public Administration’ for class 9, 10, 11 and 12. Find paragraphs, long and short essays on ‘Comparative Public Administration’ especially written for school and college students.
Essay # 1. Meaning of Comparative Public Administration:
The Comparative Administration Group of the American Society for Public Administration which was set up in 1963 under the chairmanship of Fred Riggs to study the administrative problems of developing countries viewed in the systematic context of their social, cultural, political and economic environments has defined Comparative Public Administration as “the theory of public administration applied to diverse cultures and national setting and the body of factual data, by which it can be examined and tested.”
Fred W. Riggs Chairman of the Administrative Comparative Group (CAG) in 1967 holds that the term ‘comparative’ should be used only for empirical, nomothetic studies.
He outlines three trends in the comparative study of public administration:
(i) From normative towards more empirical approaches;
(ii) shifts from ideographic (individualistic) towards Nomothetic (universal),
(iii) shift from a predominantly non- ecological to an ecological basis for the study of public administration.
Henderson referring to the growing importance of comparative administration rightly states “Public Administration is no longer a sub area within the broader field of Public Administration but is becoming a parallel focus distinct from the current U.S. cultural focus”.
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In fact comparative administration has believed in three fold tasks:
(a) To encourage research;
(b) Teaching
(c) Formulation of more effective public policy.
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It concentrated on the administrative problems of developing countries and appraised in systematic manner, social, political, economic and cultural environments. Today the comparative public administration has started comprehending administration in global context.
As such the field of comparative research has become wide enough as to include the problems of both the developed and developing countries. The areas of research extend to bureaucracy, finance public policies and motivation. Besides the ecological perspective has drawn the attention of the scholars of comparative administration.
The comparative public administration emphasizes that:
(a) Organisations must be viewed as embedded in specific cultures and political settings,
(b) The “principles of public administration” are seriously inadequate,
(c) Both the study and practice of administration are pervasively value-loaded, and
(d) Any proper discipline must have complementary, pure and applied aspects.”
B. Guy Peters holds, “Comparative Public Administration is a specialized branch of Administration taken as a more general area of inquiry. The development of organisation and management theory at a general level can assist in our understanding of comparative public administration, but we should not expect all the answers to come even from that fertile field.
The public nature of administration and the need to understand the social, cultural and political settings of organisations make the enterprise of comparative public administration somewhat special. The borrowings from more general managerial approaches “must therefore be done quite carefully and with a proper concern for contextual and situational factors.”
To briefly summarize comparative public administration:
(a) Studies different administrative systems in their ecological settings;
(b) Emphasizes empirical study based on rigorous methods such as field observation, field- experiments and organisation-like groups;
(c) Has developed on the inter-disciplinary orientation;
(d) Lays stress on the inter-action between administration and socio-economic, cultural and political phenomena;
(e) Highlights the multi-organisational nature of public administration and importance of interaction among organisations at different levels of government; (local, state and national)
(f) Has widened the horizons of public administration by making it broader, deeper and useful.
Essay # 2. Study Comparative Public Administration:
There were a number of factors which attracted the attention of American scholars to the comparative study of public administration.
Some of these factors are the following:
(i) New scientific, theoretical and technological developments influenced the structures of administrations stimulating interest in the comparative study of administration;
(ii) The emergence of free nations after the Second World War and efforts by these nations to achieve rapid socio-economic development created new problems before public administration which led to scientific investigation and empirical studies in the field of public administration.
(iii) The assistance programmes initiated by the United States to help the newly independent countries in the task of their national development insisted on the establishment of modern personnel, budgeting and planning agencies by the recipient states.
But when these countries failed to respond, it led the academic critics to point out that the American patterns of improvements were ‘culture bound’ and could not be transported to the countries having different cultures.
Soon it came to be recognized that “exogenous” technical change required a complete understanding of the cultural context of the administrative institutions and behaviour in foreign countries, “which developed ecological perspective among the students of public administration working in developing countries.
(iv) New intellectual developments in comparative sociology, anthropology, politics and other areas stimulated the students of public administration to develop theoretical constructs with a cross-cultural, cross-national and cross-temporal relevance in their field.
(v) The behavioural movement in social sciences led the students of public administration to move away from the traditional legal formal approach and to concentrate on the facts of -actual behaviour of human beings in an administrative organisation.
Alfred Diamant is of the opinion that the students of comparative public administration can find in comparative politics a large body of substantive materials directly related to their own concerns.
According to Ferrel Heady and Sybil L. Stokes, the common characteristics of the two are comparative youth of their participants, general commitment to the outlook identified with behaviouralism, effort to be interdisciplinary in interests and techniques, effort to arrive at concepts, formulas and theories that are truly universal, bridging and embracing all cultures.”
The Comparative Administration Group in the United States has done commendable work in the field of comparative public administration. It has prepared more than one hundred research papers on various aspects of comparative administration. The group is also publishing a quarterly journal of Comparative Administration.
It has sponsored experimental teaching projects and promoted field research in comparative administration. It has widened the horizons of public administration by opening the doors of the discipline to all kinds of social sciences.
The study of comparative public administration is not merely an intellectual exercise of some young scholars. Its conclusions have important bearing on the whole range of public administration.
The major contribution is that it has helped eliminate the narrowness of “provincialism” and “regionalism”. The principles of public administration are analyzed in cross-cultural and cross-national context and to be universal they should be tested in cross-cultural settings.
Essay # 3. Trends in Comparative Public Administration:
James Colemn rightly remarked You cannot be scientific if you are not comparing Riggs refers to three prominent trends in comparative Public Administration:
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(i) a shift from normative to empirical approaches,
(ii) Within the empirical category there has been a change in emphasis from idiographic to monolithic studies
(iii) A shift in focus from non-ecological to ecological approaches.
Riggs was conscious of the first trend, was clear and candid but the two were yet in the initial developing stage. Incidentally how it is the other way round. The second and third trends have become more prominent.
There has been however gradual resurgence of normative concerns in public administration in general and comparative public administration in particular. This is possibly due to the emergence of New Public administration — a sort of post Behavioural Movement in Political Science.