Beyond Efficiency: Value Frameworks for Public Administration

Considering tradition and modernity in public administration encourages us to focus on the field's normative dimensions. Tradition teaches us that efficiency has not always been a dominant or default value for organizing public administration. Although efficiency rose to dominance in the 1930s, as with tradition, today it is contested by a plethora of competing public administrative values. Because there is no agreed upon framework for analyzing and organizing these values, this article offers a format for categorizing them and ordering their relationships to one another based on whether they are intrinsic, ancillary, or extrinsic to agency core missions.