Questões de Concurso

    The quest for universal administrative standards to promote the effective application of public laws and policies gave birth to the field of public administration. Woodrow Wilson argued for a distinction between politics and administration, arguing that the former was more concerned with democracy, justice, and equality, while the latter was more concerned with efficiency, as he postulated that “administration lies beyond the proper domain of politics; administrative questions are not political questions” (Wilson, 1887). 

    According to Waldo (1948), the means and measurements of efficiency were the same for all administrations: democracy, if it were to survive, could not afford to ignore the lessons of centralization, hierarchy and discipline. Bureaucracy as an organisational type has seen its heyday in the field of public administration, owing to Woodrow Wilson’s Transfer of Administrative Principles.

    That notwithstanding, the field has gone through paradigmatic evolution over time by a quest for management paradigm derived from the discipline of business administration. The management approach is said to hold the promise of future public sector reform, replacing the administrative approach traditionally provided by public administration. A new concept arises when the management perspective is combined with an emphasis on the public sector: public management. 

    Courses and programmes, as well as whole academic institutions and colleges, are adapting by switching from the term “public administration” to “public management”. Considering the growing demands for efficiency in the public sector, the transition from a public administration to a public management framework seems to be the right step.

M.O. Obimpeh and J.A. Dankwa. Public administration – public management interface: how different is the “management” from the “administration”? Internet: (adapted)

Read the excerpt of the chapter “Decolonization” from the book Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts below to answer QUESTION.

“Decolonization is the process of revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its forms. This includes dismantling the hidden aspects of those institutional and cultural forces that had maintained the colonialist power and that remain even after political independence is achieved. Initially, in many places in the colonized world, the process of resistance was conducted in terms or institutions appropriated from the colonizing culture itself. This was only to be expected, since early nationalists had been educated to perceive themselves as potential heirs to European political systems and models of culture. This occurred not only in settler colonies where the white colonial élite was a direct product of the system, but even in colonies of occupation. Macaulay’s infamous 1835 Minute on Indian Education had proposed the deliberate creation in India of just such a class of ‘brown white men’, educated to value European culture above their own. This is the locus classicus of this hegemonic process of control, but there are numerous other examples in the practices of other colonies. […]

As well as direct and indirect economic control, the continuing influence of Eurocentric cultural models privileged the imported over the indigenous: colonial languages over local languages; writing over orality and linguistic culture over inscriptive cultures of other kinds (dance, graphic arts, which had often been designated ‘folk culture’). Against all these occlusions and overwritings of pre-colonial cultural practices, a number of programmes of decolonization have been attempted. Notable among these have been those that seek to revive and revalue local languages. The pressure of the global economy means that élite communication is dominated by the use of the ex-colonial languages, notably the new ‘world language’ of English, whose power derives from its historical use across the largest of the modern empires and from its use by the United States.” (ASHCROFT, et al., 2007, p. 56-57)

Instruction: answer question based on the following text. The highlights throughout the text are cited in the questions.

*expat: informal for expatriate, someone who does not live in their own country.