William Bransah
School of finance & Financial Management | Business University of Costa Rica
Email: bransahwilliam@gmail.com
Abstract
The behavioral approach to public administration owes its genesis to the Human Relations Movement of the 1930s. The movement started off as a protest to the traditional approaches to public administration that focused on organizations, institutionalization, rules, and code of conducts etc with absolutely no mention of people who are the center of all these activities. The pioneering work done by Taylor and the emergence of Scientific Management created quite stir not just in the industrial sector but also in management and study of public administration. Henry Fayol worked on his Fayolism at around the same time as Taylor and came up with different set of functions and principles for the management bringing in terms like discipline, unity of command, equity and team spirit. The structural functional approach to public administration is a term adapted from sociology and anthropology which interprets society as a structure with interrelated parts. This approach was developed by the celebrated anthropologist Malinowski and Radcliff Brown. So, according to them, a society has a structure and functions. These functions are norms, customs, traditions and institutions and can be analogized as organs of a body, as explained by Herbert Spencer. All these functions need to work together to make the body function as a whole. Having explained the broader meaning of the term; it makes more sense for us to understand it from the perspective of public administration which would guide our further analysis of the topic. During his stint as a Researcher at the Foreign Policy Association in USA, Fred Riggs came across an interesting phenomenon regarding the American Public Administration. He found them to be extremely narcissistic in their approach which believed that the American way of administration was unique without any counterparts elsewhere in the world and that it was capable of answering all the administrative problems emerging in the new developing countries.
Keywords: Public Administration, Behavioral Systems Approach, Structural Functional Approach