Editorial
| Author | Mahendra Prasad Singh |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0019556117689848 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Editorial
From its issue of January–March 2017, the Indian Journal of Public Administration,
which has an unbroken publication track record since 1954, is joining the family
of SAGE journals. A legacy of the hope and optimism of the Nehru era, the first
Prime Minister was indeed the founding chairman of the Indian Institute of Public
Administration, an autonomous organisaton, founded on the recommendation of
Paul H. Appleby, an American expert of Public Administration, who was commis-
sioned to study and report on the Indian Administration, the journal endeavours to
offer the thoughts and theoretically informed and empirically grounded research
works and analyses in the field of public administration/management, public
policies and governance, socially and environmentally sustainable development,
participatory democracy, rule of law and constitutionalism.
Public Administration today is at the crossroads. A discipline, which began
in the modern times as a new branch of statecraft with Max Weber (1864–1920)
in Europe and Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) in the USA, has come a long
way. In post-feudal Germany, Weber was primarily intrigued by the problem
of rationalising authority by freeing it from the patrimonialism in the service of
the rising modern democratic state and capitalist economy. In the USA, in the
New World lacking a feudal past, the puzzle of Wilson was how to address the
administrative problems of the pioneering democracy of the modern times with
the first written Constitution based on the theory of separation of powers, federal
division of powers, Bill of Rights and the resultant divided authority embedded in
a complex web of institutional checks and balances, coupled with fascination for
direct majoritarian democracy, especially in some state Constitutions. Both Weber
and Wilson saw in a meritocratic bureaucracy and its expertise and political
neutrality a factor of stability and an escape from patrimonialism and spoils system
of bureaucratic recruitment. Both pleaded for an autonomous, neutral and law-
bound bureaucracy as an indispensable institution of the modern democratic state.
Weber looked upon bureaucracy as a core institutional expression of rational–legal
authority as distinguished from traditional authority and charismatic authority.
Wilson put forward the tenet of politics–bureaucracy dichotomy.
Administrative theory from these early beginnings up until the period between
the World War I and World War II was primarily concerned with debating conten-
tious issues of the nature of the phenomenon of administrative state, the executive
and administration, the discipline of Public Administration, rational and human
elements in administration, art or science of administration, social relevance
of administration, national self-determination in the wake of the breakup of the
Indian Journal of Public
Administration
63(1) vii–xiii
© 2017 IIPA
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0019556117689848
http://ipa.sagepub.com
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