Proverbs and the Evolution of Public Administration.

In "The Proverbs of Administration" Herbert Simon lodged two criticisms of existing scholarship in public administration - the theories of administration are inconsistent and often contradictory and our body of empirical knowledge is completely lacking. Simon then proposes a preliminary roadmap to a solution with four parts: creating clear concepts, establishing efficiency as the guiding principle for public administration research, focusing on decisionmaking as the essential element of public administration, and weighting how various criteria might lead to efficiency. His essay is more in the tone of nailing 95 theses to the door of a church rather than a systematic empirical critique of the literature; it is as much an invitation to debate as it is the final word on the status of public administration at that time. This essay revisits the Simon criticism in light of the evolution of public administration. It asks what progress we have made in terms of the Simon roadmap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]