Perpustakaan Pusat LAN RI

Administrasi negara

The Fourth edition of Public ADministration: Understanding, management, politics and Law in the Public Sector was named the fifth most influential book in the field of public administration published from 1990 to 2010 in a study by David O. Kasdan appearing in Administration Society in 2012. This was an amazing achievement for a textbook in competition with books on administrative theory and spesific topics such as organization theory, human resources management, policy making and budget and finance. Kasdan's finding is bolstered by the book's status as a "world text". It is used in English or translaltion as the core text in MPA programs throughout China and to the best of our knowledge, as a core or assigned text in Australia, Canada, Hongkong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Kyrgyztan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nepal, Netherlands, Pakistan, Portugal Republic of Georgia, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, as well, of course, as in the United States.
At first thought, the worldwide use of the book seems odd. After all, its framework is informed by features of the U.S.political system that are central to public administration here, but unusual singularly or in combination in developed and developing nations across the globe. These include the constitutional separation of powers, federaliism based on a particular blend of dual sovereignty, and our legal system. It could be that students abroad want to learn about U.S. administrative practices, believing correctly or incorrectly that they can serve as a model for their own countries. However, on further consideration it is more likely that the book has attained its measure of success because all public administrative systems have managerial, political and legal dimensions and to some extent, these share common characteristics almost everywhere. Management typically values efficiency and cost-effectiveness; in democracies and even some autocracies, political accountability and responsiveness are valued: the legal dimension's concern with human rights and the rele of law is also widespread, though far from universal. In several countries, classes include student presentations analyzing local administrative issues from each of the three perspectives and discusions of strategies for incorporating elements of management, politicsand law into their potential resolution. Our effort in this eighth edition has been to retain the U.S. focus while broadening much of the discussion and themes in ways that enhance their utility elsewhere.
This comports with the original mission of the book to ground students in the fundamentals of public administration while embracing its complexity through what has become known as the "three-perspectives" or "competing -perspectives" model.The eighth edition, like those before it, describes, explains and analyzes public administration through the lenses of three well-established, coherent ways of conceptualizing and understanding public administration : management; politic (primarily with regard to policy implementation and the values of participation, representation, responsiveness and accountability); and law. The perspectives are embedded in the U.S. Constitution and American plitical culture. (Tp)