The influence of culture upon administrative practice in Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines with particular reference to performance appraisal and performance auditing

This is an exploratory study concerned with the influence of culture upon public administration. Culture has proved a difficult subject for scholars of public administration since the 1950s when the Comparative Administration Group was established in the United States. Since that time, surprisingly little attention has been paid to culture despite warnings by Robert Dahl, Dwight Waldo, Fred Riggs, Ferrel Heady and others that until we understand the social and cultural context of public administration, our ability to compare administrative systems will be limited. This thesis attempts to define culture, for the purposes of public administration, and to propose a framework by which it may be possible to draw some preliminary comparisons between administrative cultures in different national settings. From that framework, a number of values which distinguish the peoples of Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines are distilled in order to better understand some of the key features of administrative culture in the three countries