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- Title
Why Public Administration?
- Authors
Simon, Herbert A.
- Abstract
This article comments on the criticisms against governmental organizations in the U.S. as of January 1998. Economists, and others, argue that human behavior in organizations, like all other human behavior, is driven by self-interest, and hence appropriate mechanisms are required to link that self-interest, expressed in the profit motive, to broader social goals and needs. The only effective mechanisms for achieving this linkage are economic markets. For this reason, it is said, the activities of society aimed at satisfying its economic needs, as well as its needs for public order and for various kinds of public goods and services, should be satisfied, to the maximum degree possible, through privately owned business firms operating in competitive markets. Privatization is the target to be aimed at. The author finds this argument badly flawed. First, its major motivational premise is simply false. Human beings make most of their decisions, not in terms of individual self-interest, but in terms of the perceived interests of the groups, families, organizations, ethnic groups, and national states with which they identify and to whom they are loyal.
- Subjects
UNITED States; HUMAN behavior; ORGANIZATION; ORGANIZATIONAL sociology; ECONOMIC policy; PRIVATIZATION
- Publication
Public Administration Review, 1998, Vol 58, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0033-3352
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/976881