Handbook of Public Administration, 3rd Edition

Part 1

Governing for Collective Action

In The Study of Public Administration, Dwight Waldo (1955) argued that public administration was integral to collective action across societies. Public administration is indeed a large-scale social activity. One of Waldo's contemporaries, Vincent Ostrom (1973), was also inclined to view public administration as collective action, sometimes in the absence of governmental institutions. This theme of how public administration is conceived continues today as governance and governing are the larger enterprises in which public administration is embedded. Part 1 looks at public administration in the context of the larger developments that shape it today.

Although public administrators and public administration ...