What contradictions did Woodrow Wilson advance in his classic article “The Study of Administration” ? Do you believe that Wilson’s arguments are as important today for public administration as they were more than 120 years ago?

What will be an ideal response?

Basically, Wilson set forth two themes with embedded contradictions and laid out the issues that public administration scholars would debate to this day. The first theme was that administration had to adhere to a particular nation’s political ideology and legal system. The second theme called for discretion for administrators as policy and administration were not as distinct as he argued in other places. The contradictions in these two themes are as follows, though he calls public administration a neutral instrument he also contends it must be custom fit to a country’s political ideology. Though looking for one common set of public administration practices, he acknowledges that different settings bring different challenges. Though he wants administrators to be allowed power and discretion, he argues that it is difficult to even delineate the line that divides administrative from nonadministrative parts of government.