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COURSEWORK MPA 9, MODULE I


QUESTION:

Discuss the contributions to the academic field of public administration made by the following individuals:
Woodrow Wilson and Luther Gulick.

Abstract:

This paper looks at the contribution of two important personalities in the development of the study of Public
Administration in the United States, namely Dr. Luther H. Gulick and President Woodrow Wilson. Both
men were academics who contributed immensely in terms of defining what being a public administrator
entails. Dr. Luther Gulick’s main contribution was defining the functions of a manager, known colloquially
as POSDCORB. This refers to Planning, Organising, Staffing, Directing, Co-ordinating, Reporting and
Budgeting. President Woodrow Wilson, while still an academic, questioned the role of public
administrators. He penned a paper in which he discussed the need for public administrators to be
independent, non-partisan, specifically trained and empowered to do carry out their tasks. His main
contribution was the idea that public administration should be separated from politics to better enable
managers to go about their daily business exacting the agreed upon policies of the sitting government
without the hindrance or influence of politicians. He justifies his views and goes further to advocate for
comparative studies as a means of determining the principles of public administration.

Dr. Luther H. Gulick (1892 – 1993):

Dr. Luther Gulick was born Luther Halsey Gulick on January 17th, 1892 in Japan. He was an American
social scientist. He became the President of Columbia University’s Institute of Public Administration from
1921 to 1962. He was appointed as a member of the Committee on Administrative Management (the
Brownlow Committee) in 1937 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The main aim of the committee was to
reorganize the executive operations of the federal government of the United States of America. Luther
Gulick became one of the first scholars of the role of the executive in government. He served as the City
Administrator of New York City from 1954 to 1956 appointed by Mayor Robert F. Wagner, did several
major studies of the New York City government and advised a second New York City Mayor namely, Mayor
William O’Dwyer. He became the President of the American Political Association from 1951 to 1952.
(Columbia University Press, 2000)

Luther Gulick authored several books, wrote and edited articles including Papers on the Science of
Administration (1937) together with Lyndall Urwick and Administrative Reflections from World War II
(1948). In the Papers on the Science of Administration he authored two articles namely, Notes on the Theory
of Organization and Science, Values and Public Administration.

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He died on January 10th, 1993 at the age of 100 years.

Contributions to Public Administration:

“Work division is the foundation of organization, indeed the reason for organization.”
(Gulick, 1937a).

Dr. Luther Gulick wrote a memorandum, in 1937, to the President of the United States. He was a member
of the Committee on Administrative Management tasked with reorganising the executive branch of the
federal government by President Franklin. D. Roosevelt. The memorandum later became a paper that was
published in a collection called Papers on the Science of Administration (1937). The memorandum was
entitled Notes on the Theory of Organization (1937). In his paper, Gulick concerns himself first with how
work is divided and the advantages of work division. He explains how work division leads to specialisation
and how this increases the efficiency of each worker as opposed to him/her doing an entire job or making an
entire product by him/herself. As a result of work division, there develops a need for co-ordination of all
workers to ensure that their individual tasks make up a whole. He then delves into what he calls the “central
concern of the Theory of Organization”. In his view, the main concern is how managers can co-ordinate and
control workers and their output through effective communication. He defined steps of how authority is
structured as well as the workload broken up into tasks with each work group being autonomous in their
efforts. However, applying work division in any given setting will require overall supervision. This work
is done by managers and/or directors.

The Functions of an Executive

Gulick’s biggest contribution became what he defined as the seven functions of a manager/director who he
calls the Chief Executive. The work of a Chief Executive is to manage his/her organization by doing the
following tasks, POSDCORB, as defined below:

Ø P- Planning: Working out a broad outline of the things that need to be done and the methods for
doing them in order to accomplish the overall goal of the enterprise.
Ø O- Organising: The establishment of a formal structure of authority through which work sub-
divisions are arranged, defined and co-ordinated to accomplish the overall goal.
Ø S- Staffing: This is the personnel function that entails bringing in and training staff, as well as
maintaining favourable working conditions.
Ø D – Directing: The continuous task of making decisions and manifesting them in general and
specific orders and instructions.

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Ø C- Co-ordinating: The all important duty of linking the various parts of the work so that they make
up a whole.
Ø R- Reporting: This involves keeping one’s superiors, in the case of a Chief Executive the Board,
informed about what is going on, as well as constantly informing his/her subordinates through
records, research and inspection reports.
Ø B- Budgeting: This entails fiscal planning, accounting and expense control.

While Luther Gulick invented POSDCORB, he was not the pioneer in describing the functions of a manager
and adopted his definitions from the functional analysis done by Henry Fayol in his book entitled Industrial
and General Administration (1930). POSDCORB may further be sub-divided into more tasks where a Chief
Executive is unable to do all the work required. This is usually done by deputizing officers and delegating
certain managerial tasks to them. These officers in turn report back to the Chief Executive who consolidates
their output into a whole.

Gulick gives the example of the Chief Executive of the United States, the President, who has agencies acting
as managerial arms such as Budgeting, Planning and Staffing (Gulick, 1937). In Uganda, the same happens
where planning is done by the National Planning Authority and staffing is done by the Public Service
Commission. The budgeting function has been left directly under the President of Uganda in the office of
the Minister of Finance.

Luther Gulick warns that there are limitations to co-ordination. In other words, there is a point at which
trying to exert control can lead to complications. In particular, governments must find a balance between
co-ordination and control on the one hand, and allowing for autonomy of its citizens and economy on the
other. Authoritarian governments are prone to “over-co-ordination” where they get involved in the
production and distribution of goods and services, institute production programs and quotas, limit the powers
of representative government by removing local governments and putting all the decision-making power in
the hands of a single executive or small group of people. The main limitation, he argues, lies in the
uncertainty of the future with regards to human behavior of individuals as well as groups. Another issue
arises from the simple fact that political leaders lack the knowledge, experience, and administrative and
technical skills to effectively manage everything. He mentions two realities that make over-coordination a
problem: 1) “Span of Control” (Gulick, 1937) where a human being is limited in how many people he/she
can control directly, and 2) the fact that work division exists primarily because a single human being cannot
master all the knowledge and skills necessary to complete all tasks. (Gulick, 1937)

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The Case for Public Administration as a Science

“The fundamental objective of the science of administration is the accomplishment of


the work in hand with the least expenditure of manpower and materials.” (Gulick,
1937b)

Gulick argued that there is a false belief that social sciences deal with values and ends and that unlike exact
or pure sciences, they do make use of facts or have reproducible experiments that can be verified. In his
view, the primary pillar of administration is efficiency. He explained that there are certain limitations of
social sciences including the inability to always correctly predict human behavior in terms of the rational
and the emotional. Furthermore, controlled experiments that would have been reproducible are unfeasible
because the test subjects would be human beings with a changing nature.

That being said, Gulick believed that there is a need to analyse phenomena in the science of administration
in the same manner that the exact sciences do. Additionally, public administrators would need to develop
documentation for use in the setting of concrete principles.

Lesson for Uganda

Gulick’s description of, and explanation for, work division still applies today and is used in both the private
and public sectors. In the civil service, communication between different levels of authority is imperative
in order for all the workers to know what they are working to achieve, and to ensure that their individual
output when put together results in the achievement of the overall goal. In addition, the functions of the
Chief Executive remain the same today as they were in 1937. While Gulick could not have known how
administration work would be eased by technology, especially in cases such as the completion and
submission of standards forms which are now done online, the collection of administrative fees that can be
paid using electronic means and the phasing out of postal services due to the introduction of electronic
messaging services, he still foresaw that technology would keep changing the nature of how work is divided
and the kind of specialization that would be required.

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Woodrow Wilson ((1856 – 1924)

Born Thomas Woodrow Wilson on December 28th, 1856 in Staunton, Virginia, he became the 28th President
of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Before that, Wilson served as the President of Princeton University
for eight years from 1902 and Governor of the state of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913. His legacy includes
the founding of the League of Nations in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference although America itself did not
become a member state. This was due to the insistence of other member states that Germany accept full
blame for the second world war and pay restitution which position he disagree with. For his role as the
prime architect of the League of Nations, he won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize. (Nobel Media, 2018)

Wilson was a lawyer by profession, an academic, a historian, a political scientist and a Progressive democrat.
He wrote an essay entitled The Study of Public Administration in 1937 that led to him being named the Father
of Public Administration in the United States.

He died in Washington, DC on February 3rd, 1924.

Contributions to Public Administration:

The Case for the Study of Administration as a Scholarly Discipline

In 1887, Wilson’s paper The Study of Administration, was published in the Political Science Quarterly,
Volume II. In this paper, he makes a case for making public administration a full discipline in universities
separated from political science that, up to that point, was the field of study in which it was only a department
or specialty. He believed that the study of public administration was very important and required the use
and implementation of specific methods. Woodrow Wilson identified two objectives of such a study as i)
understanding what a government can do “properly and successfully” (Wilson, 1887); and ii) how it can
perform all its tasks with maximum efficiency and at minimum cost.

“Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in


action.” (Wilson, 1887)

This is to say that once a government is in place, the most obvious and visible manifestation of it is its
administration. He explains how historically politics and the law, constitutionalism to be precise, was the
main concentration of scholars of the science of government.
“Amidst this high warfare of principles, administration could command no pause
for its own consideration. The question was always; Who shall make law, and
what shall that law be? The other question how law should be administered with

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enlightenment, with equity, with speed and without friction, was put aside as
“practical detail” which clerks could arrange after doctors had agreed upon
principles.” (Wilson, 1887)

In a brief history of the administration, Wilson explains how the formal study of this science began in Europe,
done by professors in France and Germany. He identifies three periods through which governments naturally
develop an administrative system.
i) Period I: When absolute rulers have an administrative system that works only for their benefit.
ii) Period II: Where constitutions are created that remove absolute rulers and replace them with
elected rulers, and
iii) Period III: Where constitutional governments begin to form administrative systems aimed at
achieving the promises made during elections. In other words, the administrative systems are
geared towards the benefit of the voting population.

In order to achieve the promises made by an elected government, it must have an administration that works
to achieve those objectives it outlined as reasons for voting it into power. As such, Wilson felt that the study
of administration should be detached from the study of politics. The logic behind his argument was that in
performing administrative tasks, civil servants must be non-partisan and become business-like in terms of
efficiency.

“Most important to be observed is the truth already so much and so fortunately


insisted upon by our civil-service reformers; namely, that administration lies
outside the proper sphere of politics. Administration questions are not political
questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be
suffered to manipulate its offices”. (Wilson, 1887)

The idea to separate administration from politics was not an idea originated by Wilson. He quotes a German
writer Johann Kasper Bluntschli (1808 – 1881) who advocated for the same saying that politics s for
statesmen while administration is for technocrats or technical officials. Wilson felt that another clear
difference between politics and administration is the action required to implement the law.

“Public administration is detailed and systematic execution of public law. Every


particular application of general law is an act of administration. The assessment
and raising of taxes, for instance, the hanging of a criminal, the transportation
and delivery of mails, the equipment and recruiting of the army and navy, etc.,
are all obviously acts of administration. The broad plans of governmental action
are not administrative; the detailed execution of such plans is administrative.”
(Wilson, 1887)

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The Argument for A Strong Administration

Wilson persuasively argues that giving administrators in government the responsibility of the outcome of
their jobs is beneficial and ensures attention to detail – what he calls “vigilance”. Giving administrators real
authority and assigning them blame and/or praise for their work gives them “unhampered discretion”
(Wilson, 1887), which in turn ensures that they take responsibility for their work.

Wilson’s view was that the United States needed to have a “strong” administration that could perform its
duties outside of the influence of politics. A weak administration is one that is more worried about pleasing
the sitting government or ruling party in the case of a democracy, or the sovereign in the case of a monarchy.

Public Opinion as the Authority

Wilson identified a fundamental problem. How does the voice of the people (public opinion) affect the way
administration is handled or its conduct?

“The right answer seems to be, that public opinion shall play the part of
authoritative critic.” (Wilson, 1887)

This answer, however, raises more questions such as how the public is to become an effective critic, what
methods to use (voting or otherwise) and which issues the public should have a say in. Therein lie the
limitations of having the citizens as the authority when it comes to how the administration operates. He
opines that perhaps the American citizenry is too involved in decision-making when they are not qualified
to do so. He postulated that it is very difficult to balance the need for the masses to have a great say in public
affairs while ensuring that they do not interfere too much so as to hamper progress towards the goals of
existing policy.

A great example in Uganda today is the issue of the new tax reforms that came into effect in July 2018. It
is clear that the Government of Uganda needs to collect more revenues to support its annual budget. With
this goal in mind, two particular taxes that were newly introduced caused consternation in the Ugandan
population and many citizen groups appealed for their removal. The first was the Over-The-Top (OTT) tax,
also known as the Social Media tax. The second was the Mobile Money tax which aimed to collect fees
from every monetary transaction performed on mobile phones. The citizenry objected to the latter tax
arguing that it is an expensive burden that eats into their disposable incomes. That, in fact, it amounted to
double-, and even triple taxation. As a result, the Government of Uganda has sought ways to alleviate the
Mobile Money tax by exempting some transactions and there is a proposal to reduce the tax itself by a half.
In the case of the Social Media tax, the Uganda Government remained adamant refusing to scrap it but is

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considering how to allow educational use of social media to be tax free. It became very clear early on that
the need for Government and its administrators to achieve the goal of increasing tax revenues was clashing
directly with the needs of the citizenry. Government had to find a balance and did so by reducing some of
the Mobile Money taxes and keeping the Social Media taxes. Public opinion in this case could not be allowed
to dictate what administrators would do since the citizenry made demands without properly understanding
that new tax revenues would have to come from somewhere.

To solve this problem – the public opinion versus the government’s goals problem, Wilson advises that
public opinion is safe to encourage, beneficial and indispensable when allowed to oversee and steer (or what
he called to superintend) the larger issues of policy, rather than detailed actions. Put differently, governments
ought to heed the voice of the people apropos policy changes, formations and implementation, while at the
same time making sure that they meet their goals.

The Case for Comparative Studies as a Method

In relation to how to go about studying public administration, Woodrow Wilson advocated for the use of the
comparative method. He believed that lessons could learned from other countries – good administrative
practices, and that Americans should have no fear that by doing so they would lose their democratic values.
He called for an examination of the French and German systems of administration with the goal of adopting
the procedures that work and using American principles of democracy.

Woodrow Wilson’s contribution to the study of administration in America was unequaled at the time. This
was because he was one of the key contributors to the Politics-Administration Dichotomy where the idea of
the separation of administration from politics reigned supreme between 1887 and 1926. (Basheka, B.C.,
Year Unknown). In this period, scholars like Frank J. Goodnow (1859 – 1939) supported Wilson’s position
and published works on the functions of government contributing to the development of public
administration as a distinct discipline.

The much lauded “separation” would fail to materialise, notwithstanding the effort many great men made.
Eventually in the 1950s, other scholars would argue that it was impossible to separate the administration
from politics since administrators were not only executing policy but were involved in its formulation.
Nevertheless, scholars of public administration would continue to study ways to improve the efficiency of
managers and workers in the public sector. To date, public administration remains a branch of knowledge,
a specialty, in the study of Political Science. Woodrow Wilson’s contribution to the rise of the importance
of the study of public administration in the United States cannot be overstated.

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Lessons for Uganda

When analyzing Woodrow Wilson, it is not hard to see that although he was named the father of public
administration, Wilson was in fact primarily a political scientist. He would go on to write about the historical
evolution of governments in his books The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (1918) and
constitutionalism in Constitutional Government in the United States (1908); and would eventually be known
as one of the proponents of the administrative state. The administrative state is one in which there is a classic
hierarchical structure, where recruitment is based on merit and decisions are made rationally. In such a state
meticulous records are kept and all procedures are in written form. Most importantly, ethical standards are
strictly enforced. The goal of such a state is to be efficient – work to achieve objectives in the shortest
timeframe using the least material.

Uganda has over the decades had a hierarchical administration made up of civil servants who were seemingly
qualified for their positions; which has set procedures and keeps records, as well as makes decisions
rationally. However, it can be said that our civil service is in dire need of reform to achieve what Wilson
wanted – an efficient administration. There is a great need for training in public administration, an urgent
requirement to streamline procedures and reduce the number of civil servants, enforce ethical standards and
most of all, ensure non-partisanship in our civil service.

It is my view that Wilson was right about the politics-administration dichotomy since all the concerns he
raised remain valid to date. In Uganda today, the study of public administration is becoming popular, if not
essential, for those that work in the government, employees of civil society, as well as private sector
individuals for whom the Government of Uganda is their biggest client.

Conclusion

The two scholars belonged to different schools of thought (paradigms). Woodrow Wilson together with
Frank Goodnow belonged to the era of the Politics – Administration Dichotomy (1887 – 1926); while Luther
Gulick belonged to the subsequent period in which the focus was on scientific management, the Principles
of Public Administration Era (Basheka, Year Unknown). Regardless of the fact that both scholars did not
agree on whether or not the study of public administration should remain a sub-discipline in the School of
Political Science, they both contributed in making Public Administration a mainstream, established and
independently viable subject at the under- and post graduate levels of study. They remain, today, key figures
when learning the foundational principles of the subject.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Basheka, B. C., Publication Date Unknown. The Paradigms of Public Administration Re-examined: A Reflection. Kampala,
Uganda. Uganda Management Institute.

Columbia University Press, 2000. Gulick, Luther Halsey (1892–1992, American public administrator and educator)." The
Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. , Columbia University Press. Retrieved September 6, 2018 from Encyclopedia.com:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gulick-luther-halsey-1892-1992-
american-public-administrator-and-educator

Gulick, L. and Urwick, L.(eds), 1937a. Notes on the Theory of Organization. In Papers on the Science of Administration. New
York, USA. Institute of Public Administration.

Gulick, L, 1937b. Science, Values and Public Administration. In Papers on the Science of Administration. New York, USA.
Institute of Public Administration.

Nobel Media, 2018. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Father of the League of Nations. The Norwegian Nobel Institute. Retrieved
September 6, 2018 from Nobelprize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1919/wilson/facts/

Wilson, Woodrow, 1887. The Study of Administration. In Political Science Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 2. New York, USA.
The Academy of Political Science.

Wilson, Woodrow, 1908. Constitutional Government in the United States. New York, USA. The Columbia University Press.

Wilson Woodrow, 1908. The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. Boston, MA. D.C. Heath

Steinberg, Jacques, 1993. Dr. Luther H. Gulick, 100, Dies, Advisor to the Roosevelt and Mayors. Retrieved on September 13,
2018 from NYtimes.com: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/11/nyregion/dr-luther-h-gulick-100-dies-adviser-to-roosevelt-
and-mayors.html

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