Assignment Code: BPAC-132/ASST/TMA/2022-23

Course Code: BPAC-132

Assignment Name: ADMINISTRATIVE THINKERS

Year: 2022-2023

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

Total Marks: 100

Assignment A

Answer the following in about 500 words each.

1. Discuss the Woodrow Wilson’s views on Public Administration. 20

Ans) Wilson thought that American Public Administration was an important area that needed major changes. He turned his doctoral thesis into his first book, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (1885), which compared the American presidential form of government to the parliamentary form of government. He came to the conclusion that reforms were the only way to make the American system more efficient and accountable. (Cooper, ibid.) Wilson's The Study of Administration came out in 1887 in the Political Science Quarterly. It is thought to be a classic text on public administration. Wilson started this article by making a good point: it wasn't until recently that the practical science of administration got its place in college courses where it belongs. This late realisation that "I need to learn more about administration" could be because we've all been "taking things for granted" for years.

Administration and Politics as Two Distinct Domains

Wilson's most important contribution to the study of administration was making the difference between administration and politics. "The field of administration is a field of business," he said. It is far from the busyness and fighting of politics." Politics and administration were two different kinds of things. Even though politics determines what administrative duties are, it shouldn't get in the way of them being done. Since politics and administration often got mixed up, he thought that civil service reform and administrative reform in general could help keep politics and administration separate. If politics were kept out of administration, it would be easier to appoint people and carry out executive duties. It would also help establish the sacredness of public office and restore public trust (/bid).

We can say that Wilson's 1887 essay, "Study of the Administration," was a study of the government. Was the start of the important debate about the field of public administration. For Wilson, political science was much older than public administration. All this time, we were worried about the Constitution, laws, and political theories, but we never thought about who puts laws and policies into place and who helps them. Wilson thought that running the government should be like running a business. He thought that politics shouldn't get in the way of running the government. He took a scientific approach to running the government.

Method of Administration

Is the American government run well enough? Wilson said, "We've been on our feet for too long now to learn how to walk." We are a practical people who have gotten so good at self-government after hundreds of years of practise that we can hardly tell if the system we are using is awkward or not because it is so easy for us to use any system.

Wilson told the people of the United States to look at the science of administration without bias. The science that was borrowed could be changed or filtered to fit the American constitution, administration, and politics. Most importantly, America's future science of administration should be based on democratic principles . The public is the best judge of how well public administration works. Wilson said that "public opinion" meant the views of smart critics of the government that were produced by political science departments at well-known colleges. Even though it was good to see how quickly political studies were growing in the country and how many well-informed critics were being trained in the basics of government, he thought it was just as important to train people who would be in charge of "running the government." For public opinion to get better, well-trained civil servants had to act in a good way. He said that good behaviour is a firm and wholehearted commitment to the policies of the government and a direct and unavoidable responsibility to what the public thinks. The only way to have a civil service or bureaucracy that works for everyone would be to take it out of State and organisational politics.

2. Highlight the major contributions of Peter Drucker. 20

Ans)

Nature of Management

Drucker didn't like "bureaucratic management," and he thought that management should be creative and innovative. The main goal of management is to help people come up with new ideas. He thinks that the idea of innovation is quite broad. It includes coming up with new ideas, combining old and new ideas, adapting ideas from other fields, and acting as a spark to get other people to innovate. Most people put Drucker in the "empirical school of management." He thought of Management as both a job and a field of study. Management is a field that has its own tools, skills, techniques, and ways of doing things.

Management Functions

Drucker says that the institution's management is like an organ. It doesn't do anything by itself, and it doesn't even exist. He sees Management through the tasks it does. So, a manager has three main jobs that he has to do so that the institution can help:

1. The specific purpose and mission of the institution whether business, hospital, or university.

2. Making work productive and the worker achievement-oriented; and

3. Managing social impacts and social responsibilities.

Restructuring Government

Drucker didn't like the bureaucratic structure because it led to too many problems. Because of this, he wanted it to be changed. So, he focused on the three most important parts of an effective organisation structure, which are: Enterprises should be set up to work well.

1. It should contain the least possible number of managerial levels; and

2. It must make possible the training and testing of tomorrow’s top manager responsibility to a manager while still he is young.

Federalism

Drucker was a supporter of the idea of Federalism. It means that control is centralised in a decentralised structure, and a decentralised structure is much more than just giving away power. It makes a new Constitution and a new way to organise things. Drucker pointed out how closely connected the decisions made by the top management and the decisions made by the independent unit are. In a federal organisation, those in charge at the local level should have a say in how much power they have.

Management by Objectives

Management by Objectives (MBO) is thought to be one of Drucker's most important contributions to the management field. In 1954, he came up with this idea. Edward C. Schleh has made another change to MBO, which is now known as "Management by Results." MBO includes ways to plan, set standards, evaluate performance, and motivate people. Drucker says that MBO is not just a management method, but also a management philosophy. It changes the core ideas of management from working out to self-control. MBO works both from the bottom up and from the top down. At the organisational level, MBO connects the goals of one level to those of the next. At the personal level, it gives clear goals for performance.

Organisational Changes

Since society is changing quickly, people should come up with philosophies to deal with the changes and see them as opportunities to make society better. This can be done by making organisations more dynamic, which can adapt to changes much faster than organisations that don't change. Drucker's contributions have had a huge effect on how businesses are run. "When Drucker says that a worker is more than just a part of a machine, he shows that he has good foresight and knows how modern production is likely to change in the future.

Assignment B

Answer the following in about 250 words each.

3. Briefly discuss the types of authority put forward by Weber. 10

Ans)

Traditional Authority

Authority was called "traditional" when people obeyed the head's orders because that was how things had always been done and because the head's power came from his position, which he had inherited. The "sanctity" of the order and the customs and traditions that had been followed since the beginning of time gave it its right to rule. The person with traditional authority was not called a "superior," but a "chief" or "head." This includes patriarchs, leaders of tribes, and other people like that. Weber pointed out that in traditional authority, the people who run things aren't usually officials, but rather one's own family and friends.

Charismatic Authority

Weber used the Greek word "charisma" and defined it as "the quality of a person's personality that sets him apart from other men and makes them treat him as if he has supernatural or superhuman powers or qualities, or at least as if he has powers or qualities that make him stand out from other people." As long as the followers thought the leader was important, they would follow his orders without question. Sahni and Vayunandan (2010) say that in charismatic authority, no formal procedures or legal rules are followed when people are hired, promoted, or paid.

Legal-Rational Authority

Weber thought that "legal-rational authority," one of the three types of authority, was the most important for modern organisations. As was already said, Weber studied industrial society in a systematic way and predicted the changes in bureaucratic structure that would come with it, such as specialisation, formalised rules and regulations, centralised authority, hierarchical structure, chain of command, competition, etc. But this idea doesn't include everyone who works in bureaucracy.

4. Describe the experiments conducted by Elton Mayo and its outcomes. 10

Ans) Human Relations theory is based on the work of Elton Mayo, who did a lot of research at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company near Chicago, US, between 1924 and 1932.

The Illumination Experiments

In this experiment, workers were watched to see how the amount of light affected their work. The workers were split into two groups: those who did the experiment and those who did not. The results of these tests were not clear, though, because production in the experimental group seemed to have nothing to do with the amount of light and actually went up when things got worse.

Relay Assembly Test Room

The work in the Relay Assembly Test Room was boring and always the same. It meant putting together a lot of small parts to make telephone relays. Six women workers were moved from where they usually worked to a different area. The researchers chose two assemblers who knew each other and got along well.

Interviewing Programme

Another important part of the experiments was the Interviewing Programme. It was used to find out how the workers felt about their bosses and how their jobs were going in general. This gave the workers a chance to talk about the company, the management, and the working conditions. It also gave them a chance to "let off steam" in a friendly setting.

The Bank Wiring Observation Room

In another experiment, 14 people were watched as they worked in a Bank Wiring Room. It was noticed that the men made their own unofficial groupings, or cliques. The groups developed their own informal ways of getting along with each other.

5. Write a note on Dwight Waldo’s views on Public Administration. 10

Ans)

Administration and Politics: Two Related Domains

During the 1920s and 1930s, many people thought that politics and government should be kept separate. Also called the politics-administration dichotomy, it has its roots in the Progressive Reformism of Western cultural history (Marini,1993). The idea behind the politics-administration dichotomy was to keep political manoeuvring separate from administrative work.

Dwight Waldo had ideas that went against the standard way of running a government. In his work in public administration, he saw how politics and administration were linked. This is why he didn't like the idea or model of a strict separation between politics and administration, which was meant to prevent politics from becoming too bureaucratic and administration from becoming too political (Svara, op.cit.). In the words of H. George Frederickson, Waldo's critique of public administration "especially the assumption that public administration is the neutral and objective management of State affairs" (Lowery, 2001).

Administration and Politics: A Nuanced View

In his early writings, from the 1940s to the 1950s, Waldo took a pragmatist view in which politics and administration were seen as two sides of the same coin, rather than politics versus administration. Herbert Simon, Paul Appleby, H. George Frederickson, Kevin B. Smith, and many others gave Waldo credit for breaking down the idea that politics and administration were two different things before World War II (Brown and Stillman, 2004). (1986). In the seventh chapter of "The Administrative State," written in 1948, Waldo came up with the word "heterodoxy" to describe the critical position against the politics-administration dichotomy in the middle of the 20th century. Waldo saw himself as a representative of heterodoxy. Waldo's critical view of dichotomy was shown in his other works, such as "The Study of Public Administration" (1955) and his "Perspectives on Administration" lecture series (1956). So, most of Waldo's early writings showed that he was unhappy with the difference between politics and administration (Overeem, 2008).

Assignment C

Answer the following in about 100 words each.

6. Comment on Kautilya’s views on Authority and Accountability. 06

Ans) Both having power and being responsible go hand in hand. That seems to be why the King has all the power of the state and is also responsible for the progress and happiness of the people who live under him. He is supposed to go after the goal by using his power in the right way. Kautilya believed in a system of authority and made rules about how people and government workers should be punished for breaking the law. All administrative thinkers and practitioners agree that a public official should have to answer to the law as well as the institution they work for.

7. List out the bases of Integration as suggested by M.P.Follett. 06

Ans) Follett says that the first step toward integration is to not hide the differences but to bring them out into the open. She says, "We can't hope to work together if we don't know what our differences are." So, what's needed is to find, name, and understand the real problems at the heart of a conflict. The second step is to break up the whole, which means to look at what both sides of a conflict want and break it down into its parts. This means looking at symbols, which are always used in organisational work. This, in turn, requires a careful look at the words to see what they really mean.

8. What is Barnard’s contribution on Decision Making? 06

Ans) Barnard made a big difference to the theory of making decisions. He focused more on how organisations make decisions than on how people make decisions. Barnard says that when an organisation makes a decision, it does so after careful consideration, evaluation, and thought, while when a person makes a decision, it is based on unconscious, reactive, and emotional factors. Organizations are more likely to make decisions that make sense than individuals. Organizational decisions are not based on people, but on the goals of the organisation. Organizational goals are written down, while personal decisions don't have to be. Most of the time, an organization's goals are reached through a lot of logical thinking. This isn't always the case with personal goals, which are more likely to be reached through unconscious processes.

9. What do you mean by bounded rationality? 06

Ans) The way people act is neither completely logical nor completely illogical. Simon also says that behaviour or knowledge is limited by cognitive limits. This is how he came up with the term "bounded rationality" to describe this idea. It works based on the facts that are known and the choices that people make. The way people act is neither completely logical nor completely illogical. The role of behaviour and choice in making decisions and the fact that decisions are based on facts and values have changed the way people talk about making decisions, which led to the creation of the rational choice theory and the bounded rationality theory. His work on decision-making approaches, such as the concept of "bounded rationality," "satisficing decisions," and the "administrative man" model, has helped a lot of people understand not only how an individual makes a decision, but also how the decision-making process affects how an organisation works.

10. Write a short on Immaturity-Maturity Theory. 06

Ans) Chris Argyris came up with this theory and wrote about it in his book Personality and Organization. It is one of the many theories that try to explain how human nature and behaviour relate to the structure of an organisation. In this, Chris Argyris compared the bureaucratic/pyramidal values that still rule many organisations (the organisational equivalent of Theory X's assumptions about people) with a more humanistic/democratic value system (the organisational equivalent of Theory Y's assumptions about people). This theory says that a person grows and changes along a continuum from being immature to being mature. Argyris says that the old ways of running organisations still treat people as "immature" and as if they are lazy, uninterested, and apathetic.