Perpustakaan Pusat LAN RI

Administrasi Negara

Since public administration is thought to be an instrumental field tasked with implementing policy, not making it, one might assume that the appropriate role of practiitioners and academicians is to deal with the consequences of sociaetal conditions, not to change them. Yet, consider : Many public service employees exercise considerable jughment in their daily work and many frequently work with the public and participaate in policy processes. Moreover, they provide information and also their own interpretations of the public interest to citizens and to elected officials and political appointees who shape public sector actions. Furthermore, public administration scholars have taught many or these public professionals, as well as future academicians who will pass along to succeeding generations of practitioners and scholars their ideas about purposes and values. Thus, the field of public administration holds scocnsiderable potential to have a long-term effect on social change and the classrooms and publishes work of scholars can be socially significant rather than trivial.
It is this context of serious cocietal problems and the desire of practitioners and academicians to make a difference that prompted me to think in a systematic way about the values evident in society and what people in public administration might do to counter current trends. Much of the writing on government is about controlling bureaucracies and the people who work in them. Maximizing efficiency, monitoring performance, and endlessly "reforming" what is portrayed as a permanently dysfunctional public sector occupies the attention of both academicians and practioners. This should surprise no one, because organizing and operating thousands of public sector agencies and programs in an urban-industrial society is incredibly complex and especially in the United States, dislike of government is something of a national pastime.
This book is not an argument against "bureaucrat bashing" or for public recognition of the fine work done every day by people in public service, though these are important arguments that have been made before in the literatuur of American public administration. Neither iss the book primarily a work of political theory about concepts such as democracy, governance, and citizenship, though they are an important part of this discussion and can give us descriptive insightinto current trends. Arguments in defense of government or theories recoceptualizing the political system, along with writing about controlling or reforming bureaucracies and bureaucrats, can be thought of as "outside" perspectives, in which the work of delivering public services is an object of study. Instead, here we adopt an "inside" perspective from the subjective positions of individual public service practitioners and cademicians as they think about their roles in society. This perspective includes description of the political/economic environment, which is essential for understanding the possibilities for action, but it is focused on the opportunities open to people in public administration to play a part in progressive social change.