Classical and Modern Approaches to Public Administration

Public administration has a long history which has been going in parallel with the very notion of government. The classical approach to public administration, derived from Weber, Wilson and Taylor, largely dominated most of the 20th century. In fact, Weber’s theory of bureaucracy is the most important theoretical principle of the traditional model of public administration. This model started to change in the mid 1980s to a flexible, market-based form of public management because the traditional public administration was discredited theoretically and practically. All this led not simply to a minor change in management style, but to a change in the role of government in society and the relation between government and citizenry. The introduction of modern managerial approach and the adoption of new forms of public management mean the emergence of a new paradigm in the public sector. The wave of reforms started from the Anglo-American countries as they were the first to attach bigger importance to the role of private sector forms and techniques in the process of modernizing government, though not all countries adopted the whole new public management package. There is another distinctive model of reform, which is followed by many European countries and requires selective and limited use of its elements and instruments.