Understanding Public Administration: Contemporary Approaches

Several fields in social sciences such as Public Administration are characterised by the diversity of approaches to study the phenomena critical to their disciplinary foci. Understanding the complexity of the subject of public administration and political process in real terms is not an easy task. For that, it needs to be studied from all possible methodological and analytical frameworks to get proper insight of its problems in order to bring suitable solutions. Accordingly, with a perspective to study the multiplicity of dimensions of a subject critically and realistically, the diversity of methods along with techniques and approaches (traditional, modern and contemporary) were evolved over a period of time. These differing approaches, over the years, also reflect the changing priorities, value systems and conceptual innovations that go into the constant reinvention of the discipline. As such, approaches are the methods of investigation and critical examination of the evolution, themes, foci and overall structure of a subject. That way, the major approaches to the study of public administration are classified into three main categories of traditional, modern and contemporary approaches. Initially, the first two approaches were quite helpful in the study of the subject when it was in the stage of infancy and there was not much of complexity and inter-disciplinarity in it. However, as and as the fields of enquiries started becoming wide-ranging, complex and interdisciplinary in nature, the traditional and modern approaches were faced with their inherent limitations, giving way to the contemporary approaches. Accordingly, in this paper a detailed account of the contemporary theoretical explorations in the emerging trends in Public Administration is provided. Amongst the contemporary theoretical explorations in the emerging trends in Public Administration, development management and new public service stand out prominently as conceptual categories. This paper covers two significant theoretical constructs of Development Management and NPS which represent important landmarks in the post-New Public Management phase of the theoretical progression of Public Administration as a discipline. However, the ideological locale as well as the functional objective of the two stand in sharp contrast to each other. Indeed, development management and NPS have been able to set new trends in understanding the institutional machinery as well as functional dynamism of public administration in current times.