“Public administration is a process or a theory, not merely an accumulation of detailed facts. It is Verwaltungslehre.”

— Marshall E. Dimock

The object of administrative study should be to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost both of money and of energy.
Source: "The Study of Administration." 1937, p. 29

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Marshall E. Dimock 15

American writer 1903–1991

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

Source: "The Study of Administration." 1937, p. 29

“[ Public administration is merely] a special case of the larger category, administration, a process which is common to all organized human effort and which is highly developed in modern corporate business, in the church, in the Red Cross, in education, and in international bodies, public and private.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. 3-4 (1939 edition); as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 8

“Public administration is the use of managerial, political, and legal theories and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial governmental mandates for the provision of regulatory and service functions for the society as a whole or for some segments of it.”

David H. Rosenbloom (1943) American academic

David H. Rosenbloom Public Administration, 2nd Edition, p. 6

“One important idea is that science is a means whereby learning is achieved, not by mere theoretical speculation on the one hand, nor by the undirected accumulation of practical facts on the other, but rather by a motivated iteration between theory and practice.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Source: Science and Statistics (1976), p. 791

“This is a study of the public administration movement from the viewpoint of political theory and the history of ideas. It seeks to review and analyze the theoretical element in administrative writings and to present the development of the public administration movement as a chapter in the history of American political thought.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Preview; lead paragraph
The Administrative State, 1948

“Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: 1980s–1990s, A Conflict of Visions (1987), Ch. 1 : The Role of Vision

“The first task of administrative theory is to develop a set of concepts that will permit the description, in terms relevant to the theory, of administrative situations. These concepts, to be scientifically useful, must be operational; that is, their meanings must correspond to empirically observable facts or situations.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 43.

“The permanent secretary is a fundamental tool in the country's public administration system, as he bears the mission to coordinate and manage, at technical and operational levels, the financial and administrative processes, human resources and assets of the ministry.”

Carlos Agostinho do Rosário (1954) Prime Minister of Mozambique (2015-present)

Source: Carlos Agostinho do Rosário (2021) cited in: " Mozambique: PM Swears Into Office New Permanent Secretaries https://allafrica.com/stories/202105050741.html" in All Africa, 5 May 2021.

“We sometimes speak of stubborn facts. Nonsense! A fact is a mere babe when compared with a stubborn theory.”

Samuel McChord Crothers (1857–1927) American minister

Source: The Gentle Reader (1903), p. 277

“The process of theory construction in organizational studies is portrayed as imagination disciplined by evolutionary processes analogous to artificial selection. The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy and detail present in the problem statement that triggers theory building, the number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve the problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the conjectures.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination," 1989, p. 516

“Public administration is a process or a theory, not merely an accumulation of detailed facts. It is Verwaltungslehre.”

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