Albert Lepawsky Quotes

Brooks Adams advocated that the chief function of administration should be to facilitate social change, or paradoxical as it may seem, to assure social stability by facilitating social change. Great-grandson of President John Adams, grandson of President Quincy Adams, brother of the "educated" Henry Adams, Brooks Adams produced, during the early 1900'S, a series of unorthodox historical essays. Their titles were more radical than their contents: The Law of Civilization and Decay, "The Collapse of Capitalistic Government," and The Theory of Social Revolutions. The last of these is quoted below; the first was regarded by Theodore Roosevelt as a "melancholy" but "powerful" book with "a very ugly element of truth."

One motive for Henri Fayol's vigorous defense of administration as a subject for serious scientific study was the fact that he saw France, in the period between the and World War I, disintegrating for lack of administrative ability and managerial efficiency. Hoping to make sounder administrative practices available to French civil and military agencies, he fostered the "Center of Studies in Administration" in Paris, as a kind of French Public Administration Clearing House. Fayol was one of the principal consultants to the French government during the crisis period of World War I and a leading participant in the International Congress of Administrative Sciences. Despite his conservative views about French politics, he was in complete agreement on questions of governmental organization with the rising French socialist of those days, Leon Blum, who, as Prime Minister, was later to try out some of the administrative ideas they both held in common. This is... but one of several such instances of agreement on administrative matters among political opposites, an instance which helps to establish the view Fayol insisted upon, namely, that administration is a subject of universal importance.

MANAGEMENT involves the concrete practices and the observable techniques of administration. Frequently the term management is used synonymously with administration, and it is invariably assumed that a good manager is a good organizer. All of these usages are justified in the general terminology of administration, but in its more specialized sense management refers to the following specific techniques:

Administration is sometimes referred to by specialized words such as management or organization, by particular terms such as executive work, or by general concepts such as public administration. Regardless of the name or nature of this supposedly new science, it is an art and technique which reaches far back into the experience of civilized man. For this reason, we include in this book ideas about administration presented by many authorities ranging from Aristotle and Socrates to Wilson and Stalin. Also included are the contributions of some three hundred other writers less renowned but no less convincing as to the importance of administration and its related subjects of management and organization.

Charles E. Merriam... attributed a decisive position to the managers of a democratic society. As Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago between the two World Wars, Professor Merriam inspired a generation of students and practitioners of public administration. As a local political leader in Chicago and as a national adviser to liberal American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt, Merriam recognized the practical significance of public management. In his overall treatise on Systematic Politics, Merriam devoted the final but perhaps the most significant section of his chapter on "The Organs of Government" to what he calls "the managerial organ."

Administration, like other fields of knowledge, may be defined in various ways, but there is wide agreement on the following aspects of the subject:

Admitting that business and government are both bureaucratic giants, most authorities take the view that an intrinsic difference separates them. This position was expressed effectively by: (a) Professor Wallace Donham, Dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard University; (b) Sir Josiah Stamp, an English businessman and public servant; and (c) Professor Nathan Isaacs, also of Harvard University.

THE MOST ELEMENTARY ASPECT of administration is organization the structure of social institutions and their constituent parts, the composition of economic enterprises and their various branches, the organization of governmental agencies and their numerous departments. As it is mainly a matter of structure, organization bears the same rudimentary relationship to administration as does the science of anatomy or skeletology to the field of medicine. An administrative organization can be sketched and charted just as the human body can be physically depicted. Apart from its graphic convenience and its "teachable" quality, however, what intrinsic relationship does organization bear to administration?