Administration refers to the group of individuals or leadership positions who are in charge of creating and enforcing rules and regulations.
Commonsensically speaking, administration involves “dispensing, delivering, issuing, giving, provision, providing, application, applying, discharge, allotment, distribution, apportionment, apportioning, dealing out, handing out, meting out, measuring out, doling out, disbursement, disbursing, bestowal, infliction, inflicting, imposition, imposing, enforcement, enforcing, exacting, execution, exercise and effectuation”.
Administration includes Managing Directors and (Assistant/Deputy) managers in business of all kinds; heads of ministries and head of department, in government ministries, Vice-Chancellors, Registrars and bursars in Universities, Principals in school and training college and managerial staff in hospital.
All these senior administrators need other people to work under them: Personal Secretaries, Typist, computer operators, (filing) Clerks, telephone operator.
What useful work do all these members of administrative staff do?
In a shoe factory, for example, they do not make the shoes. In a hospital, they do not nurse patients. In a ministry of Education, they do not teach, so what do they do?
A hospital needs doctors, nurses, laboratory, technicians, radiologist. But surgeons cannot operate without instruments, anesthetics, blood and saline drips. Ward sisters and nurses need beds, bed-linen, bandages and medicines for their patients. All these things and many more must be ordered and paid for. A hospital’s electricity and water supply and the maintenance of its building must also be organized and paid for. Who does all this? The administrative staff of the hospital does.
So, the doctors and nurses are able to spend their time doing their paper work, caring for their patients. That is what the administrator does in government, business, factories, schools etc.
It enables all the other staff to do their work properly. Of course, administrators need to know about deposit and current accounts, over drafts, loan interest on loans and on overdrafts, cheques, balance sheets etc.
In Universities, colleges and schools, they need to know about timetable, examinations board of governors, parent teacher associations etc. in commercial organization. They need to know about balance sheets, estimates, sales, graph board of directors, meetings, raw material needs, machinery, repairs and spares.
In all organizations, administrators must know how to keep correct minutes of meetings and prepare the agenda for them, with reports for their superiors and deal skillfully with all types of correspondence. So in any organization, the purpose of an administrator’s work is the same as making sure the organization works effectively.
In summary, administration is very wide. Some words connected to Administration are Organization, Account Department, Agenda, Annual budget/Statement, Structure Bureaucracy, Office Equipment, Internal Memo, Minutes, Panel, Photocopier, Report Correspondence etc.