SCOPE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

By the scope of Public Administration, we mean the major concerns of Public Administration as an activity and as a discipline.

 Scope of Public Administration as an activity

Broadly speaking, Public Administration embraces all the activities of the government. Hence as an activity the scope of public administration is no less than the scope of state activity. In the modern welfare state people expect many things – a wide variety of services and protection from the government. In this context public administration provides a number of welfare and social security services to the people. Besides, it has to manage government owned industries and regulate private industries. Public administration covers every area and activity within the ambit public policy. Thus, the scope of public administration is very wide in modern state.

Scope of Public Administration as a Discipline

The scope of public administration as a discipline, that is subject of studies, comprises of the following:

The POSDCoRB view

Several writers have defined the scope of public administration in varying terms. Gullick sums up the scope of the subject by the letters of the word POSDCoRB which denote: Planning, Organisation, Staffing, Directing, Co-ordinating reporting the Budgeting.

Planning means the working out in broad outline the things to be done, the methods to be adopted to accomplish the purpose.

Organisation means the establishment of the formal structure of authority through which the work is sub-divided, arranged, defined and coordinated.

Staffing means the recruitment and training of the personnel and their conditions of work.

Directing means making decisions and issuing orders and instructions.

Coordinating means inter-relating the work of various divisions, sections and other parts of the organisation.

Reporting means informing the superiors within the agency to whom the executive is responsible about what is going on.

Budgeting means fiscal planning, control and accounting.

According to Gullick the POSDCoRB activities are common to all organisations. They are the common problems of management which are found in different agencies regardless of the nature of the work they do.

POSDCoRB gives unity, certainty, and definiteness and makes the study more systematic. The critics pointed out that the POSDCoRB activities were neither the whole of administration, nor even the most important part of it. The POSDCoRB view over looks the fact that deferent agencies are faced with different administrative problems, which are peculiar to the nature of the services, they render and the functions they performed. The POSDCoRB view takes into consideration only the common techniques of the administration and ignores the study of the ‘subject matter’ with which the agency is concerned. A major defect is that the POSDCoRB view does not contain any reference to the formulation and implementation of the policy. Therefore, the scope of administration is defined very narrowly, being too inward looking and too conscious of the top management.

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