Luther Gulick (social scientist)

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Luther Halsey Gulick, III (January 17, 1892 in Osaka – January 10, 1993 in New York) was an expert on public administration. He was the son of physician and Camp Fire Girls founder Luther Gulick (1865-1918).

Luther Gulick III graduated from Oberlin College in 1914 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1920. He became a staff member of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research (later the Institute of Public Administration). He taught at Columbia from 1931-1942, and then returned to the Institute of Public Administration as its director from 1942 until his retirement in 1961.

Among many other accomplishments in the field of public administration, Gulick is perhaps best known for the functions of the executive represented in the acronym POSDCORB. Each letter stands for Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting and Budgeting.

In a time where the prevalent theme was the separation of politics and administration, Gulick advocated that it was impossible to separate the two.

[edit] Bibliography

• Evolution of the Budget in Massachusetts (1920)
• Administrative Reflections from World War II (1948)
• American Forest Policy (1951)
• The Metropolitan Problem and American Ideas (1962).

[edit] External links

• Biography
• Columbia Encyclopedia entry