Strategic Planning Process in Public Administration Essay

Strategic Planning Process in Public Administration - Essay Example Public administration encompasses reconciliation of in-built conflicts between democratic governance and administrative bureaucracy. Bureaucracies stay identical with managerial approaches established on uniform procedures, hierarchical structures and formalization that remain anonymously carried out. Management based bureaucratic strategies include planning, coordinating, controlling, directing and organizing. Public administration also involves behavior based democratic practices embraced from various fields such as sociology and remains utilized within the framework of accountability in democracy. Most notably, the field has considerably changed since the 1930s to incorporate social equity as an integral part of the government’s mission. In overall, public administration entails the formation and implementation of government or public policies. Public administration faces various complications, issues or barriers to the realization of efficient strategic planning process. A unifying set of principles remain absent in guiding practitioners while past practices remain insufficient in meeting the 21st century challenges. Hence, the intellectual framework needed to drive forward contemporary public administration as a discipline remains a necessity. It would be difficult to change laws and their cumulative effects also generate perverse outcomes. It becomes complicated to avoid rigidities accumulated over time in relation to rules, norms and laws while conserving the merit of law regimes in strategic public administration planning. Similarly, the field of public administration lags behind changes occurring in today’s practice. The internal systems of public organizations have low tolerance for risks thus making them to resist change or adapt slowly. Hence, many reforms have not brought about change leaving traditional approaches to restate themselves over time (Bourgon, 2011). The growth of non-governmental service delivery approaches such as loans , transfers, grants, tax credit and insurance comprise today’s bulk government spending. However, these approaches create a gap between service delivery and decisions on funding in the traditional accountability framework since public resources become allocated to organizations and individuals thought as could produce anticipated results. In this regard, this situation should be mitigated through the establishment of new accountability measures capable of producing desired results. The government lags behind in acting as the principal instrument in providing tangible and direct public services. As a result, complex public results cannot be achieved since public services in the present day remain increasingly intermediate, intangible and indirect. A high level of interdependence and wide dispersion of power remain increasingly uncertain in the presence of networked societies and global economy thereby adding onto the government’s responsibilities of addressing public is sues (Holmberg & Rothstein, 2012). Research activities on public administration add significance to the field’s theoretical base and literature regardless of methodologies used. This follows the fact that public administration as an applied discipline supports various research traditions. However, difference of opinions and conflict continues to exist between practitioners and scholars over the applicability and relevancy of the varying epistemic or research approaches in strategic planning. This raises questions as to whether public administration exists as a political, gendered or social construct or if reality could be an objective occurrence when undertaking strategic planning process (Riccucci, 2010). Open and

Market Structures Analyses Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Market Structures Analyses - Essay Example The producers can't afford the labor without selling their crops. Their debts build up and their crops are left to ruin. In a perfectly competitive market, there are many buyers and sellers and therefore no individual player can influence the market as a whole. Hence the firms become "price takers" by accepting the price determined by the intersection of the demand and supply curves. Therefore the firm's demand curve is perfectly elastic and price equals marginal revenue as shown in the graph. Individual firms cannot increase prices due to the competitiveness of the market and the highly elastic demand curve. Hence there are normal profits to be gained for the producers. The products are homogenous and therefore the buyers are indifferent as to which firm they purchase from. There are no barriers to entry or exit; hence firms can enter and leave the industry with no cost liabilities. In such a competitive environment, there is maximum efficiency and competent allocation of resources with minimum wastage. A trace of monopolistic competition is found in chapter 13 of the book where the Joads stop to fill gas at a gas station. The owner of the station is characterized as a crushed man, one who is afraid of the change that the world around him has embraced. He talks about how he sees cars move west all day and the only ones that stop in his station are the ones that have no money. They exchange beds, baby buggies, pots, pans, dolls, even shoes for the gas. The rich cars, however, stop only at company stations in town. He refers to these stations as the yellow painted ones in town. We also notice how the owner tries to imitate the company stations with the yellow paint but fails because of the loose hangings and the old cracks in his beaten old station. Monopolistic competition or imperfect competition is relatively similar to that of perfect competition except that the products are not homogenous. There are large number of players in the market, but due to differentiation of products, each individual firm has a small market share and a limited ability to influence prices. In this market, the barriers to entry are very small and there is sufficient product knowledge among the consumers. Product differentiation, which is the characteristic of monopolistic competition, creates a difference between products by deeming them similar but not identical. The product of one producer can be differentiated from that of another. A competitive producer uses non price competitive methods such as advertising, packaging, brand names, design to differentiate his products. There are substitutes in the market but they are not perfect substitutes. Firms have some control over prices, but the demand curve remains downward sloping and elastic. The producer aims at maximizing his profits by charging as much as he can over and above the output where his marginal revenue and costs equal, without compromising his sales. In the long run, however, new entries will shift the demand curve and the cost curve, thereby squeezing the profits. Oligopoly Chapter 19 narrates the