Public Administration in Perspective

Theory and Practice Through Multiple Lenses

David John Farmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317461890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Öffentliche Finanzen

Throughout its history, public administration has used a number of different perspectives for analyzing the discipline's theory and practice, and both mainstream and alternative lenses have produced valuable insights and prescriptions. At the same time, an individual way of looking at PA can be misleading. Alone, a solitary lens can miss critical aspects and often gives only part of the picture. Public Administration in Perspective has been specifically crafted to give new life to public administration theory and practice by helping readers view the discipline through a variety of perspectives. Designed for the capstone course in public administration programs, as well as a fresh approach for courses in PA theory and organizational theory, this unique book provides a culminating experience--bringing together what has been learned in previous MPA courses without simply rehashing old content. It offers a comprehensive guide to eleven major approaches to PA, and synthesizes them to deepen our understanding of the discipline. Each chapter in Part I describes the key features of the selected perspective--history, content, and proponents--and discusses the strengths and weaknesses related to PA theory and practice. Part II synthesizes the various perpectives, with specific implications for PA management and practice. Part III concludes with a complete overview, identifying ways in which readers can think more creatively and productively about PA, putting the perspectives themselves into perspective.

1
Introduction: Public Administration in Perspective

Administrative thought must establish a working relationship with every major province in the realm of human learning.

—Dwight Waldo

Let’s begin a journey to put public administration in perspective. Dwight Waldo, just quoted, is making an important claim. There are multiple lenses and working relationships for looking at the administrative. It bears repeating that mainstream and other perspectives have produced valuable results. Yet single perspectives, or too few of them, can be misleading. They can offer understandings that lack needed perspective.

We can start with ten questions, and with three reflection exercises. Five of these questions are about the book’s method—the nature and relative advantages of using multiple lenses:

1. What is an example of multiple lenses (of epistemic pluralism) in action?
2. What are some aims of epistemic pluralism?
3. Isn’t epistemic pluralism just another name for relativism?
4. Which kind of epistemic pluralism is the best?
5. Does epistemic pluralism really have antecedents in public administration?

This book analyzes and synthesizes the implications, for public administration theory and practice, of a variety of perspectives. The remaining questions provide preliminary sketches of five elements of public administration that are vehicles, as it were, in this book for examining these implications.

• 6. What does “planning” mean? And are there different kinds?
• 7. What does “management” mean? And are there alternatives?
• 8. What does “underlying public administration” mean?
• 9. What does “scope of the public administration field” mean? And are there options?
• 10. What is “imaginative creativity”? And what is special about it in administration?

The book is divided into three parts. Part I discusses eleven perspectives or lenses, one perspective (usually a discipline) per chapter. Each chapter (2–12) provides a description of the selected perspective and indicates that perspective’s implications for public administration theory and practice. Part II summarizes and synthesizes the implications for public administration theory and practice in terms of the five “representative” public administration elements. One public administration element is treated per chapter (13–17). Part III (chapter 18) describes approaches for contemplating these syntheses as a whole.

Multiple Lenses: Epistemic Pluralism

Looking at both public administration theory and practice through multiple lenses is what can be called epistemic pluralism. Epistemic refers to knowing; pluralism refers to a strategy of more than one way. So theory and practice are examined from a variety of perspectives.

What Is an Example of Multiple Lenses (or Epistemic Pluralism) in Action?

Consider planning or managing a program—basic public administration functions. Consider such planning in the field of, say, homeland security or (if you prefer) policing, both public administration areas of practical concern and contemporary relevance. Feel free to substitute another public administration example.

Start with a former insider on practice and add an academic. First, the insider. Imagine that Richard Clarke (2008, p. 2), former national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, is right in his observation that since 9/11 the national government “has ceased to work well, not just in the well-known failures but almost across the board, in national security.” On homeland security, for example, Clarke writes about the problem of “bloat.” He observes that most administrators have not resisted bloat. His account of the problem struck me because it is clearly relevant not only to planning and managing homeland security but also to other program areas (e.g., any program area with a budget-maximizing bureaucrat). Clarke (2008, p. 322) claims that every “imaginable agency has asked for and received funds” for the Global War on Terror, and all the agencies have large centers, large staffs, and even more staff through outsourcing. Clarke explains that bloating is a problem not only of money but also effectiveness. “The terrorism bureaucracy has become so enormous that it is filled with many inexperienced staff who must spend large amounts of time dealing with one another” (Clarke 2008, p. 323). He adds that it will take an unusually courageous bureaucrat to “suggest that this new behemoth be pared, because who will want to be blamed after the next attack that his down-sizing proposal cost lives?”

For an academic, turn to Donald Kettl (2004) and his earlier case study of a “system under stress.” Let’s emphasize only one of his observations. This is the catch-22 problem of administrators leveling (telling the truth) about program possibilities (in this case, about the possibility of providing total protection against terrorism)—the administratively fatal difficulty for administrators in telling it like it is. It struck me because it relates not only to planning and managing in homeland security but also to planning and managing in other administrative areas, such as police administration (where serial murder and organized crime do not seem to “require” complete protection—or do they? and why not? and why do some think that homeland security is fundamentally “different?”). Kettl (2004, pp. 36–40) comments, among many other things, on the drive for bureaucratic autonomy, mission conflicts, and different cultural norms in agencies lumped together in the then-new Department of Homeland Security. He includes valuable administrative comments like that indicating the asymmetry between traditional bureaucratic hierarchy and the distinctly nonbureaucratic operating fashion of terrorists—structured organizations versus networked threats (Kettl 2004, pp. 43–44). (By the way, is this the same for police administration, or not?) Kettl’s comments on the problem of coordination include references to some famous old-time public administration thinkers like Gulick and Simon (Kettl 2004, pp. 66–69). And his comments on the political costs of managing risks include the catch-22 situations that administrators face. Among these is the observation mentioned above—that while no official “could long survive the furor” of reducing risks as much as possible, no “official wants to suggest publicly that full protection is impossible …” (Kettl 2004, p. 76).

There is a significant literature encouraging reflection about homeland security planning and managing. In reflecting, it will be hard for readers (even if they want to do so) to exclude their own administrative sense, probably based on functional areas other than homeland security. It will be hard to exclude thinking about shoes, nail clippers, duct tape, and color-coded alarms (see Kettl 2004, pp. 83–89).

Do you think that homeland security planning and managing (or planning and managing for any other program) can benefit from mainstream or traditional public administration? I myself do. But here is a different question: Do you think that mainstream or traditional public administration has the final answer, the complete answer? I myself do not.

Regardless of your estimate of the utility of traditional public administration (or public administration plus politics), couldn’t a feminist perspective add additional insights? Dialogue with ideas from this discipline—an outlier discipline in the sense that it lies outside traditional public administration. Let’s pick up on one writer and assume (for the purpose of this example) that Susan Faludi (2007) is right. Faludi claims that, in our post-9/11 political culture and media, there was a shift toward attitudes characterized as John Wayne manhood and Doris Day womanhood—a Rocky/Rambo comeback. Why a return to what is described as “traditional” manhood, marriage, and maternity? Faludi’s answer is a historical analysis that claims that the nation has retreated into myth. What she characterizes as “our central (historical) drama” is our inability to repel invasions of non-Christian, nonwhite “barbarians” from the homestead door. Against this, she describes a counter myth of cowboy swagger and feminine frailty, along the lines of the movie The Searcher: “Rumstud”-like public policy; NYFD firemen in the media as hot, hot, hot. Does this contribute insight about the underlying features of the bureaucratic aversions to recommending de-bloating or to telling-it-like-it-is? Does it add insight about societal unconsciousness and the way that, without countervailing arrangements, this unconsciousness can shape administrative and other things? Does it add support for programmatic adjustments?

Doesn’t a business perspective add additional insights for homeland security planning and managing? Think about supply chain management, mentioned in the Preface. This has clear relevance to public agencies, like homeland security and the military. Supply chain management (to which we will return in chapter 3) is described as the “combination of art and science that goes into improving the way your company finds the raw components it needs to make a product or service, manufactures that product or service and delivers it to customers” (Koch 2005, p. 1). Supply chain management is taught in business schools and in departments of supply chain management—including the Sam H. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. Indeed, Wal-Mart is prominent in supply chain management.

Don’t other outlying perspectives—like the economic, post-structural, and New Rhetoric—each deepen our observations, our insights, and our imaginative creativity about homeland security planning and managing? Consider the economic. Reflect on the implications for planning and management in homeland security of the logic of the claim that economic interests are shaping government policies, warping the administration of policies, buying contracts, and even buying government jobs. The amount of money spent is large and growing.

Consider the post-structural or postmodern. Including the idea that some events and images are “more real than merely real,” the concept of hyperreality is illustrated by the current hyper-emphasis on homeland security. To what extent do television or think tank or Internet chat, or forgetfulness or dullness, shape what counts as the really real thing? Consider New Rhetoric. What is the symbolism, amid the vicissitudes of our globalizing world, of “homeland” in homeland security? Kettl (2004, p. 7) describes the surface basis for the choice of the term “homeland.” He quotes William Safire, for instance, and he refers to the use of the term by military planners in 1997. But New Rhetoric would seek to deepen the description, delving into what might lie beneath the surface. And think about other words (despite recent attempts to switch to a term like Overseas Contingency Operation and to move away from the “war” metaphor) like War on Terrorism—as in War on Crime, or War on Poverty, or War on Cancer. What is being suggested is not conspiracy; rather, what is suggested is adding a consciousness in public administration about the power of symbolism, about the grip of language.

Add another outlying perspective. Can’t neuroscience add understanding about the way the societal unconsciousness constrains and shapes administrative and other things? Doesn’t it add explanations about how what underlies can be adjusted? Think about the neurobiology of fear. Neuroscience recognizes the workings of a neuroscientific unconscious in shaping feelings and actions. Faced with fear situations, for instance, the amygdala in the brain is involved in immediate feelings and action below the level of consciousness—until modified by later signals from the cerebral cortex. François Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti (2007) describe, for instance, how traces (physical modifications in the brain) that result from experience have a homeostatic function. There is what is called the somatic marker hypothesis. To repeat, decisions have a strong bodily component. To the extent that planning and managing homeland security are done by people, for people, and in response to people, the neurobiology of people can add insights.

And add another perspective.

What Are Some Aims of Epistemic Pluralism?

The aims of epistemic pluralism center on putting public administration in perspective, along the lines indicated in the opening paragraph and in the Preface. They include enriching public administration theory and practice with fresh and better ideas—with ideas that are not partial and misleading. Others would go further and say that public administration in perspective is an attempt to answer, for one thing, a complaint written (rightly or not) by Herbert Simon: “But my actual research career started in an academic backwater: public administration” (1991, p. 114).

Another aim of epistemic pluralism is to give new life to public administration theory and practice. In the days of the orthodox period from Woodrow Wilson until World War II and perhaps later, traditional public administration did have a belief that it was on the cutting edge and that its contribution to the life of the country was vital. The claim here is not that the belief was justified, but that it existed. It is the kind of confidence—again, justified or not—that currently emanates from many business schools. The aim is to provide the intellectual basis for a justified rebirth of public administration confidence.

Isn’t Epistemic Pluralism Just Another Name for Relativism?

No. It is unclear why pluralism should mean relativism, just as it is unclear why it should imply that each and any perspective is equally significant—or why it should imply abandoning either science or hermeneutics. Epistemic pluralism is not ontological pluralism. The fact that there are (if there were) two roads to New York doesn’t imply that there are two New Yorks.

Relativism is an especially empty worry for public administration when it comes to matters of discovery (including developing insights, generating deeper meanings, etc.), as contrasted with justification. The distinction between the logic of discovery and the logic of justification is a commonplace in philosophy of science. (Archimedes is an example. He sits in the bath and, “eureka,” he discovers the universal truth about a body displacing an equal volume of water. Justifying his discovery has its own logic.) This distinction can be used to explain Milton Friedman’s famous comment that the truth or falsity of a model’s premise is irrelevant. As he wrote, the “only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience” (Friedman 1953, p. 15). Friedman holds that what counts is whether the conclusion is true. The point is that a thinker can use a perspective she considers to be false in order to stimulate insights, and I would call that a kind of play of the imagination. For the purpose of discovery, it is not true that one has to be an X in order to take X seriously or to believe that X is true. For example, it is not true that one has to be feminist (or a womanist, or a critical theorist, or a critical legal theorist, or a Freudian, or a post-structuralist, or a post-traditionalist) in order to learn from and to celebrate feminism (or womanism, or critical theory, or critical legal theory, or Freudianism, or post-structuralism or post-traditionalism). But I don’t suppose that a false premise—or a totally false perspective—will be useful as a component of justification.

The relativism worry for public administration is also empty when it is recalled that public administration also deals in making judgments where definite knowledge is unavailable. The ability to make good decisions without definite knowledge (or scientific knowledge) was called euboulia by the ancient Greeks. Paul Woodruff notes that, as no one knows the future, “any government is government by ignorance.” As he explains, euboulia is not the same as folk wisdom—or common sense. Such good judgment, such euboulia, involves evaluating “shaky arguments when shaky argument is all we have, being open to adversary debate, and...