Bureaucracy In Public Administration

Register to read the introduction… Bureaucracy is the other side of the coin, defined as : “a system for controlling or managing a country, company, or organization that is operated by a large number of officials employed to follow rules carefully”(“Bureaucracy Definition,” 2015), this means that those who support a Public Administration system that is fully bureaucratic want those who are most qualified appointed by those in power to care for the country(Crew, 1992). This push and pull of systems has plagued Public administration since the start and never seems to fully get answered(Burke & Cleary, 1989). There are scholars who believe that the greatest system is a combination of both and these three systems are what we will be examining in this literature review. Democracy is the system that most commonly the public thinks of when they think of Public Administration and public service. There are many authors who agree that democracy is the best system to run public administration under. Levitan states that, having public administrators that are elected can help them retain their neutrality when dealing with the public. Also, he states that having our public officials elected can help with engaging the public in voting and other citizenry such as labor unions(1942). A few …show more content…
According to Gawthrop “One reason for confusion and delusion is that the engines of democracy and bureaucracy run on different tracks, leaving from different stations and heading for different destinations…When they do converge, the inevitable result is as Waldo politely suggest a dialectical “happening”, by which I assume he means a hell of a train wreck”(1997, p. 205), this is a wonderful analogy that to me speaks to the problem of combining the two systems while understanding their similarities. Stivers also speaks about the similarities and differences but with a more positive outlook, how a bureaucrat that learns some of the skill from elected officials who have developed interpersonal skills that help form relationships with citizens can help citizens that deal with bureaucrats feel like people rather than a case. This has to do with responsiveness of bureaucrats versus their responsibility to the public, “…most locate the primary roots of responsibility in the expertise and morality of the individual bureaucrat”(1994, p. 365). Knowing that most of the time those in public office must try and keep their personal morals out of their job it is hard for bureaucrats to walk that fine line without the guidance of democracy. One thing that Stivers touches on that none of the other authors did was how a public administrator in either system cannot just listen to the loud voices but to