Bureau Men Settlement Women: Constructing Public Administration in the Progressive Era
Today's field of public administration is shaped largely by the events that transpired during the progressive era, a time when social justice and improving the lives of city dwellers began. This was also the era when rationalizing and regulating societal processes took hold. The field of public administration began as the former and moved into the latter, an attempt to give credit to the new and fledgling field of study. The concept of doing good was overtaken by political satisfaction because gender roles at the time told reformers that it was not manly to worry about societal ills. This resulted in the creation of the Municipal Bureau of Research in New York City in 1907 which was the birth of formal, research based public administration. It also began the exclusion of women reformers from the field, hurting the profession as argued by the author.
“Municipal reformers pushed the idea that city government was business, not politics…”
Camilla Stivers published her book, Bureau Men Settlement Women, in 2000. At that time she argued that this exclusion of women hurt the profession by removing humanity from public administration. It had become solely based on facts, figures, and processes. I might argue, having worked in government on the planning side that this has changed over the past 20 years. More effort has been given to hearing what residents have to say and bringing them into the decision making process, but we have not returned fully to the "back of the yards" engagement which was based on immersing government employees into neighborhoods to get a better understanding of their needs.
“Governments exist precisely for the reason that there is a need to have special persons in society charged with the function of promoting and protecting the public interest.”
I do have to agree with Stivers in her conclusion that public administration would be better off if we were to bring back more ideas of the social reformers and merge the two divergent professions into one. Running government like a business, as the bureau men suggested, does not work to satisfy the role of government. It should be rooted in the goal of "improving the conditions of people's lives" and it "should be done well." If run like a business, where profits are the end goal, government would fail to meet this standard. The bureau men claimed that as long as the right processes were in place, it did not matter who was in the public administration role. This cannot be true however, as even the "most capable business executive in the country might be a dismal failure in government."
Debate of how best to manage government affairs dates back to ancient Greece where they talked of "the nature of the good life, the bases for public decisions, the questions of who should rule, and the appropriate way to organize government." Even the 1992 Reinventing Government movement taken up by Vice President Al Gore was just a revival of the Bureau Men's philosophy on the importance of processes in government. It mattered not what was done, but how it was done.
One old idea that should be revived is that of Robert Archey Woods, a settlement leader who set out the following public service principles in 1906:
Focus on the ends and aims of life, on human needs and how organized effort can address it;
Place emphasis on community, on interests and beliefs that tie people together and on how to facilitate collaborative work;
View government, statesmanship and citizenship as positive forces on society;
Use a pragmatic and practical approach
If Woods' ideas were brought more fully into the field and practice of public administration, the profession would have become "a varied body of systemic knowledge acquired in intimate contact with lived experiences both inside and outside the walls of government institutions." As the author concludes, I do not think it is too late to turn the field in this direction and is actually a great time to do so. Even businesses are responding to the opinions and morals of their consumers, adding sustainable elements to their production and giving back to communities. Why should government then not follow in the footsteps of these businesses as the bureau men advised for so many years?
