Introduction to Public Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The statement that is not a feature of position classification is that it prevails in England, India, Western Europe.

Position classification groups jobs according to the duties and responsibilities of each post, not the personal rank of the official. Because each post requires particular qualifications, it suits a specialist civil service, and it makes transfers between posts difficult, which hampers mobility. These three statements are its features.

Position classification is characteristic of the United States and Canada. England, India and most of Western Europe follow rank classification, in which the official carries a personal rank and can be moved between posts, which suits a generalist service.

Answer: C

The technique is linear programming.

Linear programming is an operations-research method for finding the best (optimal) allocation of limited resources among competing activities: an objective, such as maximum output or minimum cost, is expressed as a linear function and optimised subject to linear constraints such as available money, staff or time.

The Delphi technique gathers and refines expert forecasts through rounds of anonymous questionnaires. The linking pin is Rensis Likert's idea of a manager who connects overlapping work groups. Simulation models a system to test what would happen under different conditions, without itself computing an optimum.

Answer: B

The correct matching is a-2, b-3, c-4, d-1.

• Participation of several members in reaching a choice makes a group decision (a-2).
• Novel and unstructured problems, for which no rule exists, call for non-programmed decisions (b-3), in Herbert Simon's terms.
• The routine, repetitive decisions of everyday organisational functioning are programmed decisions (c-4), handled by standing rules and procedures.
• A decision that expresses a preference about ends is a value decision (d-1), as against a factual one.

Option A reverses the programmed and non-programmed pairings, and options C and D place participation elsewhere.

Answer: D

The key gives Structural-functional Theory as the odd one out.

Human relations theory, the socio-economic (humanistic) view of the worker and humanistic theory belong to one family in the study of administration: they treat the organisation as a set of people with social and psychological needs, and they grew from the Hawthorne studies and later work on motivation. Structural-functional theory is different in origin. It comes from sociology (Talcott Parsons and others) and explains institutions by the functions their structures perform for the whole system.

The question does not say what the grouping is. I could not find a source that lists these four theories together, so the key is kept by that reading, not by a quoted classification.

Answer: C

College education is an example of pre-service training.

Pre-service (pre-entry) training is the general and professional education a person receives before joining the service. University and college education builds the knowledge and abilities on which later job-specific training rests, so in the classification of training it is pre-service.

In-service training is given to those already employed, mid-career training to officials partway through their careers, and foundational training is the common orientation given to new recruits after selection, for example at a national academy. College education comes before any of these.

Answer: A

The writer who confined administration to the administrative branch is Willoughby.

W. F. Willoughby distinguished two senses of the word. In its broadest sense administration covers the work of all three branches of government; in its narrowest sense, the one he used for the study, it means only the operations of the administrative (executive) branch.

L. D. White and Marshall Dimock took the wider, integral view of administration as all the operations directed at carrying out public policy, and Luther Gulick is known for POSDCORB and the managerial view rather than for this restriction.

Answer: C

The Cameralists were German and Austrian professors and administrators studying civil service.

Cameralism (from Kammer, the royal treasury chamber) flourished in the German states and Austria from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Its scholars and officials studied the systematic management of the state's finances and administration and the training of civil servants, and chairs of cameral science were set up in German universities.

It was a European movement, so the options naming Chinese administrators, Indian priests and Egyptian bureaucrats are wrong.

Answer: C

A department is the largest and highest unit below the chief executive.

In the hierarchy of a government's administrative organisation, the department is the primary unit directly under the chief executive, headed by a minister or secretary and responsible for a major function. Below it come bureaus, divisions, branches and sections.

The smallest unit is the section, not the department; territorial subdivisions are field units such as districts; and academic divisions of a university are a different, non-governmental use of the word.

Answer: B

The claim belongs to Stage II, the Principles of Administration (roughly 1927 to 1937).

This phase opened with W. F. Willoughby's Principles of Public Administration (1927), which argued that administration has principles that can be discovered and applied as in any science. Gulick and Urwick's Papers on the Science of Administration (1937) and the POSDCORB formula mark its peak.

Stage I (Wilson, Goodnow) was about separating administration from politics, not about science. Stage III, the era of challenge, is when Simon and Dahl attacked those principles as mere proverbs and questioned the claim to be a science. Stage IV, the crisis of identity, is the period when the discipline was unsure whether it belonged to political science or management.

Answer: B

To the common man an administrator is someone in a high position exercising control.

In everyday usage the word means the person at the top who directs others, takes decisions and holds authority over an office: the 'boss' rather than the clerk. Textbooks start from this popular notion before giving the technical meaning of administration as the co-operative effort of everyone in an organisation.

Technical skills or technical knowledge describe a specialist or technician, not the popular image of an administrator. Performing operational activities describes the operative staff who carry out the work, which is the opposite of the control the common man associates with an administrator.