Team Motivation – Tips for Motivating Team
A group heading towards a common objective will perform best when it is motivated as a team. Team motivation is determined by how well the team members’ needs and requirements are met by the team. Some tips for effective team motivation are as follows: The team’s objective should well align and synchronize with the team […]
What are the Challenges in Leadership?
Being a leader is not quite a cakewalk. Infact, to be very honest; managing people is one of the most challenging tasks. You really need to extract the best out of your team members and handhold them even in the worst situations. We all want to lead a team, but have we ever realized what […]
Importance of Data Quality in Risk Management
The overall risk management of a firm is largely based on statistical measures. This is because most of the models used for managing and mitigating risks are based on advanced statistics. These statistical models are based on gathering large volumes of complex data, rigorously processing it via running complex statistical operations, and using the resultant […]
Problems Faced by Less Developed Countries
Population Growth Among all the developing countries, population growth remains one of the reasons for these countries to remain poor. To take specific examples, both India and China have historically been among the poorer countries because of their huge populations. It was only after the economic liberalisation and opening up of their respective economies that […]
Institutional Approach to Public Administration
The instructional approach to the study of public administration concerns itself with the institutions and organizations of the State. The core area of this method lies in detailed study of the structure, the functioning, rules, and regulations of the executives, legislatures and the departments of the Government. The scholars who practice this approach consider administration […]
The structural functional approach to public administration is a term adapted from sociology and anthropology which interprets society as a structure with interrelated parts. This approach was developed by the celebrated anthropologist Malinowski and Radcliff Brown. So, according to them, a society has a structure and functions. These functions are norms, customs, traditions and institutions and can be analogized as organs of a body, as explained by Herbert Spencer. All these functions need to work together to make the body function as a whole.
Having explained the broader meaning of the term; it makes more sense for us to understand it from the perspective of public administration which would guide our further analysis of the topic. During his stint as a Researcher at the Foreign Policy Association in USA, Fred Riggs came across an interesting phenomenon regarding the American Public Administration. He found them to be extremely narcissistic in their approach which believed that the American way of administration was unique without any counterparts elsewhere in the world and that it was capable of answering all the administrative problems emerging in the new developing countries.
To explore the consequences of intermingling of contrasting systems in the developing countries, he looked at the structural functional approach of the social sciences. This approach provides a mechanism to understand social processes. The function is the consequence of patterns of actions while the structure is the resultant institution and the pattern of action itself. It reads complicated but the theory in itself is not that difficult to understand. Social structures can be concrete (like Government department and Bureaus or even specific societies held together by shared beliefs, customs and morals) and also analytic like structure of power or authority.
These structures perform certain functions and in terms of structural functional approach, these functions have an interdependent pattern between structures. So as a public administration student, if one would want to study bureaucracy, the first step would be to view beurocracy as a structure which has administrative system with characteristics like hierarchy, specialization, rules and roles. The behavioral characteristics can be rationality, neutrality, professionalism and rule orientation. Subsequently, one can proceed to analyze the functions of bureaucracy.
Now, we come to an interesting and relevant question pertaining to the above explanation. Do the similar kinds of structures perform the same functions? The structural functionalists say a big Nay to that, which means that a structure can perform multiple functions and vice versa i.e. one function can be performed by multiple structures.
According to Riggs, there are five functional requisites of a society:
While talking about Riggs explanation of the concept and contribution to this approach, we cannot proceed further without mentioning his Prismatic Model. This model uses a common phenomenon as an analogy, when white light passes through a prism it breaks into seven colors of different wavelength. As per Riggs, the white light is the fused structure of traditional society. The rainbow represents the diffracted (or refracted) structures of an industrialized society. Inside the prism the society was in transition.
Riggs challenged the traditional approaches of public administration implying that basic principles of administration have universal application. It also contributed to the comparative study of public administration by providing a more relevant perspective; that not all systems work the same in all places, so one can take what one likes and leave the rest.
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