Administration is a process of rational adaptation of means to ends. You can call it rational decision making, with the decision as the basic unit of analysis.

In a segmented flow of piecemal decisions, bureaucracy makes for a stabler and more efficient administrative environment. Bureaucracy is a particular form of administration, characterized by size, division of labor, formal rules, full-time staff, hierarchical relations. A process which tends to be combined with a more or less high degree of administrative centralism, according to the sector or "arena" of state activity and in response to the quest for autonomy and self-government by private groups.

The URQ concerns public administration, «the procedure by which laws are enforced and public policy is carried out» (PLN). This is largely the function of the executive. The idea of public administration as a neutral executive arm largely accounts for its extraordinary expansion. Yet, it also contributes to bureaucratizing administration as a self perpetuating and self centered process. Causing a reaction in three main directions. One is a quest for efficiency, calling for the introduction of market standards into administrative recruitment and behavior (LRQ) and leading to the recent exponential growth of outsourcing as a system for carrying on public administrative tasks directly through private companies. Another alternative to bureaucratic stalemate is represented by political authority substituting for legal formalism, with party management becoming a functional equivalent for public administration (ULQ). Group administration as an activity carried on directly by citizens on private grounds is also a substitute for an excess of state bureaucratic intervention (LLQ), with the emergence of the so-called third sector, a vast area of social-minded cooperative enterprises at the crossroads between traditional state/market boundaries.