This analytical paper explores how efficiency becomes
a key concept in a business organization, and its later migration into the public
administration as a crucial element for professionalizing public administration.
The attempt to professionalize public administration was intended to insulate it
from the manipulative spheres of politics; however, as administration geared toward
efficiency, differences in values and preferences that are characteristic of the
complex human society become discounted. Moreover, the romance of administration
with an econometric concept such as efficiency complicated its integration into
democracy. It is thus argued in this analytical paper that if administration should
be infused into democracy it must incline less to the values of efficiency, but
establish structures that would enable a faction to counteract faction; it is through
such arrangements that the varieties of organized political, economic, and social
interests and values that are characteristic of the public could be represented
in the administrative processes.
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