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

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"–no one questions 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, an demonstrable distortion of traditional thought, which exhibited far more respect for law, politics, citizens, and values than the new, customer-oriented managerialism and its variants. In failing to contest the revisionists, public administration as a profession has been unduly careless of its own traditions, deserting vital and significant insights and acquiescing in calumnies that, even if they have a grain of truth, disfigure a fine intellectual heritage. The result is an intellectual rootlessness and an analytical negligence that allow vague, anti- or pseudo-democratic ideas to flourish and basic issues of responsible management to go unaddressed.