Bureau Men Settlement Women - Constructing Public Administration in the Progressive Era Flashcards
Chapter 1: Finding a Usable Past
Progressive Era (1890-1920). Political and social reform movement. Effort to eliminate public/political corruption (Wilson). Industrial economy saw the rise of corporations of scale. Railroads and telegraph wove a national web. Populations in urban cities swelled due to a massive influx of immigrants. A new middle class developed, and this led to increased membership in trade associations and professional organizations. Here among the middling sort, as the century turned, sprouted the admiration for planning, management, efficiency, science, and stability that made up the characteristic Progressive. The Progressive Era spawned two impulses: one in the direction of social justice and improving the lives of the unfortunate, and the other toward rationalizing and regulating organizational, institutional, and societal processes. Women played a distinctive and significant part in the development of ideas about the proper role of government and the place of administration in it. Women who were increasingly restricted from partisan political work turned to activities directed at improving municipal services, ameliorating poverty, and calling for social and regulatory policies. Men in PA, women in social work. Gender, and tensions between masculinity and femininity, played in role in how PA was shaped.
Chapter 1 (cont’d)
BUREAU MEN: city as business, structural reforms, new methods, focus on system, science as objective/efficient, expert persona, citizenship as oversight, favorite administrative recommendations: systematize (budgeting), centralize (executive control), neutralize (politics-administration dichotomy). BUREAU WOMEN: city as home, new programs, focus on caring, science as connected/experimental, neighbor persona, citizenship as involvement, favorite administrative recommendations: humanize processes, link agencies to people, use discretionary judgment (politics-administration dichotomy). Reform women, active in clubs and settlement houses, developed their own notions of how to understand urban problems, improve municipal governments, get rid of or temper the effects of bossism, manage public agencies, conduct relationships with citizens, and professionalize their practice.
Chapter 2: New York Bureau of Municipal Research
Beginning in 1905, the bureau movement was one expression of the municipal reform preference for nonpartisan approaches and of the particular political, economic, and social context in which reform unfolded. In 1907, the New York Bureau of Municipal Research was founded and eventually served as the birthplace of public administration as a field of study. The bureau’s purpose was to promote efficient and economical municipal government; promote the adoption of scientific methods of accounting and of reporting the details of municipal business, with a view to facilitating the work of public officials; to secure constructive publicity in matters pertaining to municipal problems; and, to collect, to classify, to analyze, to correlate, to interpret, and to publish facts as to the administration of municipal government. During the first 10 years of the bureau, its focus shifted from using gov’t to better people’s lives to a more purely masculine agenda restricted to scientific and business efficiency.
Chapter 3: The Other Side of Reform
Women’s citizenship was indirect: their wifely and motherly duties supported the societal framework and values that stabilized the social order and made men’s more active citizenship viable. Social benevolence. The campaigned for better sanitation, improved garbage collection, medical inspection of children, tuberculin testing of cattle, playgrounds and recreational facilities, investigation of the treatment of juvenile offenders, child labor regulations, and better factory conditions. Clubwomen expanded to the study of tax assessments, city planning, charter revision, and other municipal reform efforts in which men were already involved. Black women took upon institution building in their segregated neighborhoods that met the needs in their communities.
Chapter 6: Constructing Public Administration
Stivers’ argument is that at least part of the reason for public administration’s preference for scientific administration over the values that animated municipal housekeeping - for efficiency over caring - was the threat to municipal reformers posed by the gender accusations of party politicians: specifically, the risk to their masculinity that lay in associating themselves with women’s benevolent activities. Both social work and public administration found in science irresistible support for their claims to professionalism. Over time, both down played the concern for improving the lives of immigrants and other poor people in favor of applying purportedly objective techniques to relatively circumscribed questions. But the profession of social work emerged from a battle between caseworkers and social policy advocates for the soul of the discipline, a struggle in which impersonal analysis eventually defeated social change. In PA, there was no such protracted contest. The choice of science over caring was made in practice by bureau men before the question of professional identity began to be posed. In addition, since virtually all early public administrationists were men, they had an easier time convincing the world that they could operate in an objective, unsentimental way than did social workers, most of whom were women. But for both, the struggle to professionalize was a struggle to case off femininity by claiming the status of science.
Chapter 6 (cont’d): Constructing Public Administration
The most fundamental and long-lasting idea public administration inherited from the bureau men is the possibility and desirability of a science of administration. Following WWII, the so called behavioral revolution, sought to impose natural science methodologies on the study of social phenomena. PA is still plagued by the paradox of the ongoing contradiction between science and managerial practice, between rigor and relevance. We need to accept the inseparability of politics and administration, facts and values, policies and procedures, theory and practice, instead of struggling fruitlessly toward a nonexistent conceptual or methodological holy grail that will finally make it possible for us to reach ultimate truth. As Hannah Arendt argued, if truth becomes the grounding for politics, public action is turned into a instrument for implementing the correct decisions made by powerful experts who are the only ones with access to real knowledge. Truth wipes out politics, because there is no point in having a debate about something that is unarguable.
