Madison's Managers: Public Administration and the
Constitution. By Anthony M. Bertelli and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 240p. $60.00 cloth,
$25.00 paper.
The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under
Pressure. By Arjen Boin, Paul 't Hart, Eric Stern, and Bengt
Sundelius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 182p. $70.00 cloth,
$27.99 paper.
No undergraduate public administration course would be complete
without at least a perfunctory attempt to summarize the never-ending
debate about what public administration is. From Woodrow Wilson to
“scientific management” to the Brownlow Committee to the
Willowbrook Conference and beyond, the position papers and studies pile
up; yet the debate (which often seems more like a monologue) continues.
Students find this debate unsatisfying, and it is easy to see why. For a
craft that prides itself above all on its relevance to practical affairs
(as Woodrow Wilson put it, administration is “government in
action”), the arguments that students are most often exposed to have
the arid scholasticism of medieval disputes about angels dancing on pins.
If public administration is so practical, students must be thinking, why
cannot its theorists just cut to the chase and tell us how to do it? Or
even what it is?