Overall Character of NPA

New Public Administration

1.    Relevance- It refers to the fact that new public administration emphasizes that the study of public administration should be consistent with the government in action. It should deal with the issues and problems that the government in confronting and thereby help the government in action to address and solve those problems.

2.  Value- It means that public administration should be purposive in nature i.e. the public administration should strive to achieve the constitutional values and the ethos of the society. It promoted a value laden public administration and rejected fact administration/ value free administration.

3.      Equity- NPA intended to bring about an egalitarian society or an equalitarian society. The public administration should strive to disproportionately share its resources with poor, neglected, marginalizes or disempowered class of persons. It emphasized that public administration should focus on positive discrimination.

4.      Change- Public administration is being emphasized to become an instrument to move away from the undesirable state of affairs to the desirable state of affairs. Thus, it has to be change oriented. As a discipline, public administration should not develop theory for the sake of developing theories. It should study the areas which the government is facing and only those tools and techniques should be developed which will be useful for the government. Government in action or the bureaucracy should always be purposive and should be focused on its goal.

George Frederickson

He identified five major characteristics of NPA.

1.      Change and Administrative Response- This aspect has already been discussed earlier. NPA emphasized that change is an inevitable reality and the administration should always try to address these changes.

2.    Rationality- NPA emphasized that the administration should always be rational. Its decisions and various premises should be based on rationality. NPA has also emphasized on participation, what to achieve and how to achieve should be decided with the help of people’s participation.

3.   Workers participation in management- This means that there should be democratization within the administration. A democratic humanistic approach while managing the organization should be adopted.

4.   Structure- NPA rejected a hierarchic, top down and a rigid structure while advocating the flexible, flatter and organic structure.

5.   Education and training in administration-Frederickson has emphasized that under NPA, administration was considered as a specialized activity in itself. Thus, it was believed that it should be handled with expertise, knowledge and skill. Thus, thereby the need for the education and training in administration. NPA emphasized on professionalizing the public administration.

Golembiewski’s views relating to NPA

He developed the concept of anti-goals (What all NPA rejected) and goals (What all NPA accepted). There are three anti-goals and five goals.

Anti-Goals

1.      NPA is anti-positivistic and anti-behavioural because it adopts a value-laden approach whereas behavioural theories are value-free or value-neutral in nature.

2.      NPA is anti-technical. NPA rejected the traditional view that man surrenders to the logic of the machine i.e. NPA rejected the mechanistic approach or man being merely a cog in the wheel. NPA is humanistic in its approach.

3.      NPA is anti-bureaucratic or anti-hierarchic. NPA rejected the rigid top down administration and replaced it with more flatter and more decentralized approach.

Goals

1.      Nothing is perfect. Everything has a scope of improvement.

2.      It emphasized on social equity.

3.      It emphasized on administrative responsibility, ethics and honesty.

4.      It emphasized on rationality.

5.      It emphasized on innovation and change.

Miscellaneous Quotations on NPA

1.      NPA has brought public administration closer to politics.

2.      NPA has brought public administration close to political science and sociology while driving it away from the management science.

3.      NPA is both, deductively nomological and inductively probabilistic- NPA being value laden in approach emphasizes concepts like democracy, secularism etc. Every position has to operate on the basis of rationalism, scientism.