Public administrators are responsible for managing a group of people and offer them services that are consistent with the laws of a given jurisdiction. Their role is considered as challenging because they have to deal with varied cases some of which may not be provided for in the laid down rules. According to Max Weber, the public administrators should stick to the laid down rules without exercising any form of discretion. Although this may be beneficial for officials with limited knowledge of auxiliary laws and practices, it can lead to an unsatisfactory determination of cases for emerging issues that may not have been foreseen by those who wrote down the regulations.
Public administrators should be given latitude to apply discretion when solving problems in any particular group of people. This has several benefits in emergent cases. As Yeboah-Assiamah et al. (2016), in any society, the changes taking place come with various legal and social implications that may not have been projected by those who conceived laws. Public administrators can make avalid determination by making different inferences from both the traditional and contemporary trends. For instance, Islamophobia is a new trend in the United States. Public administrators may be faced with cases that may be more of social and legal nature and requiring arbitration rather than litigation. Since the existing laws do not provide for the case in any absolute way, exercising discretion can be instrumental for the administrators to determine such cases to the satisfaction of the parties in question(Lynn, 2011). However, allowing such discretion would require the leaders to have a broad knowledge base on both the conventional and emerging issues.
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Public administrators should also have some form of discretion while discharging their duties since the components that make the society cannot be likened to the parts of a machine that have a predictable performance. In the 20 th century when Max Weber proposed his ideology public administration was thought to be effective if run like a bureaucratic organization. The possible reason forthis is that a significant number of the public administrators had limited knowledge beyond the defined laws(Du Gay, 2000). Today, civil servants are drawn from different professions, and they are well informed. This, however, has a disadvantagein that the level of knowledge among the administrators is varied. Therefore, the discretion should be limited.
A school of thought that supports Weber believes that it is perilous to allow a choice among administrators due to lack of uniformity in addressing and this may lead to conflicts. For instance, due to the varied levels of education, knowledge, and exposure, administrators are likely to address an issue using different approaches, particularly for cases that are not provided for in the law. Therefore, as Du Gay (2000) observes, restricting the administrators to the defined laws would provide a uniform approach to social issues. Although this is beneficial in preventing conflicts in any given jurisdiction, it limits the powers of the administrators, especially those who are well informed. It can also frustrate the efforts of the officials due to the lack of a reference point when determining the conclusion of different cases.
Conclusively, administrators should not be limited to the laws set to govern people since the society has become less bureaucratic due to the intensity of emergent issues. When addressing cases among the people issues, they should be allowed to exploit their knowledge, make informed inferences, and give satisfactory conclusions. However, due to the varied nature of their experience levels, the discretion should be limited. Rampant issues that present a significant problem in the society should be addressed through policy and regulation changes to avoid creating conflicts.
References
Du Gay, P. (2000). In praise of bureaucracy: Weber-organization-ethics . New York N.Y.: Sage.
Lynn Jr, L. E. (2011). The myth of the bureaucratic paradigm: What traditional public administration stood for. Public Administration Review , 61 (2), 144-160.
Yeboah-Assiamah, E., Asamoah, K., & Kyeremeh, T. A. (2016). Therefore, Is Bureaucracy Dead? Making a Case for Complementarity of Paradigms in Public Administrative Thinking and Discourse. International Journal of Public Administration , 39 (5), 382-394.
