Paradigms of Public Administration: From Traditional Public Administration to Good Governance

Since the evolution of Public administration as an academic and scientific discipline, different competitive approaches have come forward in this area. Public administration as a profession, a scientific field and a political process; or, public administration as an area totally distinguished from business management; and legal, political and administrative approaches towards public administration have resulted into accumulation of irrelevant theories and concepts in public administration realm, engulfing this subject into identity crisis. In order to emancipate this field from its present identity crisis various scholars of public administration have attempted to regularize and organizing the concepts and theories of this field. The present work is an investigation in theories and paradigms of public administration; and the writers have tried to study the evolutionary process of public administration from inception to its present situation. In this regard, the concepts and theories of public administration have categorized into three paradigms: Traditional Public Administration paradigm, New Public Management paradigm and finally the new paradigm of Good Governance. To be noted, in this typology, these paradigms have gradually come into being since ninetieth century in a chronicle order and after transformation, new paradigms have replaced the previous ones.