Making a Difference: Progressive Values in Public Administration

Progressive Values in Public Administration

Richard C Box

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781317465706
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

This inspirational work encourages Public Administration professionals to participate in progressive social change by advocating progressive values to counter the regressive values currently dominant in American society. The book begins with an analysis of regressive and progressive societal values, and then discusses specific actions PA practitioners, scholars, and teachers can take to build awareness and use of progressive values. The author presents regressive and progressive values in five matched pairs, each representing a continuum of thought and action: aggressiveness and cooperation; belief and knowledge; economics as end, and economics as means; great inequality and limited inequality; and Earth as resource, and Earth as home.

1

The Case for Progressive Values

As I see it, the Marxists were right about at least one thing: the central political questions are those about the relations between rich and poor.

—Richard Rorty

Philosophy and Social Hope

(1999, p. 232)

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

—Karl Marx, 1845

Thesis XI

(In Tucker, 1972, p. 145)

Public administration is an applied professional field of study and practice; hence, much of the content of academic coursework in the field is about technical matters. Even so, it is a common experience for those who teach public administration to encounter students—both experienced professionals and people yet to begin their careers—who care deeply about the people and places they serve and have a broad sense of public service in society. These are people who want to “make a difference,” and they may be aware of tension between their desire for constructive change and political and economic conditions that make change difficult.

That tension can be thought of as a contradiction between views of what society might be and what it is today. Since the late 1800s, American government and public administration have been through successive waves of “reform,” which have generated normative concepts of budgeting, employee motivation, goal setting, quality control, organizational structure, economic efficiency, citizen involvement, bureaucratic malfunction, bureaucratic legitimacy, administrative discretion, and more. Despite all this activity, dissatisfaction with government remains, as does the perceived tension between desire for change and conditions in society that resist change.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, societal conditions in the United States have moved in directions that worry many people interested in public affairs. Warfare, terror, and militarism have become dominating preoccupations; exposure to violence in the media and in the culture generally is far greater than it was a few decades ago; governmental responses to problems in the physical environment are either inadequate or harmful; many citizens accept losses in civil liberties; and economic inequality has grown to levels not experienced since early in the twentieth century. Of course, serious problems are not unique to our era; at various times in American history there have been challenges at least as disturbing as the present ones. Nevertheless, for some people the severity of current circumstances suggests a need to take action.

Making a Difference

Since public administration is thought to be an instrumental field tasked with implementing policy, not making it, one might assume that the appropriate role of practitioners and academicians is to deal with the consequences of societal conditions, not to change them. Yet, consider: Many public service employees exercise considerable judgment in their daily work and many frequently work with the public and participate in policy processes. Moreover, they provide information and also their own interpretations of the public interest to citizens, and to elected officials and political appointees who shape public sector actions. Furthermore, public administration scholars have taught many of these public professionals, as well as future academicians who will pass along to succeeding generations of practitioners and scholars their ideas about purposes and values. Thus, the field of public administration holds considerable potential to have a long-term effect on social change, and the classrooms and published work of scholars can be socially significant rather than trivial.

It is this context of serious societal problems and the desire of practitioners and academicians to make a difference that prompted me to think in a systematic way about the values evident in society and what people in public administration might do to counter current trends. Much of the writing on government is about controlling bureaucracies and the people who work in them. Maximizing efficiency, monitoring performance, and endlessly “reforming” what is portrayed as a permanently dysfunctional public sector occupies the attention of both academicians and practitioners. This should surprise no one, because organizing and operating thousands of public sector agencies and programs in an urban-industrial society is incredibly complex and, especially in the United States, dislike of government is something of a national pastime.

This book is not an argument against “bureaucrat bashing” or for public recognition of the fine work done every day by people in public service, though these are important arguments that have been made before in the literature of American public administration. Neither is the book primarily a work of political theory about concepts such as democracy, governance, and citizenship, though they are an important part of this discussion and can give us descriptive insight into current trends. Arguments in defense of government or theories reconceptualizing the political system, along with writing about controlling or reforming bureaucracies and bureaucrats, can be thought of as “outside” perspectives, in which the work of delivering public services is an object of study. Instead, here we adopt an “inside” perspective from the subjective positions of individual public service practitioners and academicians as they think about their roles in society. This perspective includes description of the political/economic environment, which is essential for understanding the possibilities for action, but it is focused on the opportunities open to people in public administration to play a part in progressive social change.

There are a number of books that discuss social change and public administration. James Stever (1990) notes that debate about the role of public administrators in social change can be traced back at least to the Progressive Era. Like most academic writing, mine borrows from and builds on the work of other authors. For example, Cheryl Simrell King and Lisa Zanetti (2005) tell the stories of several practitioners who exemplify “transformational public service” and they use a critical theory framework. The stories found in King and Zanetti illustrate a passion for change also found at the center of the normative discussion in this book. Many practitioners and academicians are already doing the things discussed here, so the book’s narrative does not invent something new, but contributes to current practices with a focus on “regressive” and “progressive” values.

This work can be viewed as an extension of Critical Social Theory in Public Administration (Box, 2005), which outlines an approach to administrative action based on critical social theory. It borrows from Critical Social Theory a process of working from recognition of contradiction between desires and current conditions toward self-determination, but it has a different theme. It is a reflective response to observations about American society and government during the first decade of the twenty-first century and it advocates change in the direction of progressive values.

Often, those who propose normative concepts in public administration think of them as universally applicable across the public sector. No such claim is made for the ideas described here; instead, it is assumed they will be useful for a limited number of people in the field—people who believe that the current political and economic system contradicts values important to them, want to be part of a process of change, and have opportunities to take action.

Generalizing about public administration is difficult. In the United States in 2002 there were 87,576 units of government (U.S. Census, 2004b). In 2002 (U.S. Census, 2004a), the national government employed 2.69 million civilian employees (12.8 percent of all public employees), state governments employed 5.07 million people (24.1 percent of the total), and local governments, including school districts, employed 13.28 million people (63.1 percent). Taken together, that is more than 21 million people working in the public sector, and the number of occupations included in this number is impressive. Imagine it: social workers, federal housing program managers, police officers, elementary and high school teachers, wildlife biologists, health inspectors, university professors, and so on—hundreds of occupations, each with its own history, body of knowledge about practices, and expectations for how practitioners perform their roles and relate to citizens and elected leaders.

The scholarly study of public administration is also complex, including, as it does, people from many disciplinary backgrounds (political science, economics, public administration, sociology, criminal justice, and so on), all of whom work in a variety of institutional settings (departments and schools of government, political science, public administration, public affairs, and others). Hence, neither the practice nor the scholarly study of public administration lends itself easily to normative concepts that apply to everyone.

In addition, there are two more reasons to avoid claiming generalized applicability for the ideas described here. One is that the central concept—change using “progressive” values as a guide—is not of interest to many people. This concept is based on a critical description of society that challenges the status quo, and it finds many things in need of improvement, advocating a particular sort of values as a guide to change. Challenging the status quo is uncomfortable for many people and the values discussed here will not be agreeable to everyone.

The second additional reason to avoid claiming generalizability is that only some public employees occupy positions in which they have opportunities to influence public policy, whether in routine interaction with the public, through interpretation of legislative enactments, or by assisting decision makers. Moreover, the focus of this discussion will be on the agencies and public professionals that carry out (and often shape) the will of those who decide on public policy.

This is not to deny that nonprofit organizations, interest groups, neighborhood associations, and other organizations, communities of interest, and people who influence the public policy process are all important to practitioners and scholars in public administration. There has been much written about the fragmentation and decentering of supposedly “traditional” structures and processes in the public sector, so that attention in the study of “governance” is shifting from the ways that elected legislators, citizens, and public administrators create and implement policy, to the operations of distributed networks of decision-making nodes that blur sectoral boundaries.

Indeed, it is certainly reasonable to question the extent to which on-the-ground public policy making and administration has shifted from government-centered to multi-nodal structures, or whether elements of fragmentation and decentralization have always been present. At the local level, public decision making and administration has always been a collaborative enterprise involving the broader community. Sometimes private, benefit-seeking interests exert a level of influence on public policy that many people think inappropriate—for example, machine politicians or landowners and developers. There are trends in the governance environment that warrant updating existing models, but this does not necessarily justify claims about wholesale change in the public sector. To evaluate this presumed shift at the state and national levels, one would need to first thoroughly describe the pre-existing situation before generalizing about it by creating a caricature of the past against which to compare the present.

Theorizing and commentary about public bodies seems to go through waves or cycles depending on events. Until recently, the common wisdom seemed to be that nation-states were on their way toward obsolescence; but with this era of international interventions, intense trade competition, and increasing difficulties with immigration, the idea of a fading nationstate needs significant revision. At the national and sub-national levels in the United States, a network environment in which many public service practitioners work with a variety of interest-based groups, individuals, and nonprofit and private organizations, is hardly new. For example, the idea that a city could be largely a contract-management body with services provided by other organizations, public and private, is at least as old as the “Lakewood Plan” in the Los Angeles area, dating back to 1954. As another example, the citizen involvement and neighborhood movements over the past four decades show shared responsibility for governance and boundary-spanning roles for public employees. There is no question things are changing and the governance environment is increasingly complex, but the current situation may be better described as developing from the past rather than as a clear break (McGuire, 2006, pp. 34–35). B. Guy Peters and John Pierre (1998, p. 240) note that the “new” thinking about governance may be a case of academia catching up with practice. Also, it may not have as much impact in the United States as in Europe, because government is somewhat delegitimated in the United States by negative public opinion about the public sector—plus, local government already uses intersectoral cooperation in daily operations (pp. 239–240).

On the other hand, while scholars speculate about the decentering of government and the decline of the representative, “overhead” model of democracy (in which citizens elect leaders to represent them and the elected leaders supervise public employees), public employees, elected officials, and citizens deal daily with the reality of constitutions, charters, laws, and court decisions based exactly on representation and institutional policy making. A department head or city manager who announces during the Tuesday night council meeting that she or he has decided to rely upon a network of people in the community for direction instead of the elected council members would want to have other employment arranged in advance.

Systems and structures such as representative democracy that seem malleable from an outside viewpoint suddenly become solid and demanding when considered from an inside perspective, loaded with legal constraints, duties and responsibilities, and daily requirements for performance. To speak of social change, of “making a difference,” from this perspective carries meanings not readily apparent at the macro level of political theory. The focus shifts to the work of career public sector employees within existing systems and structures—this may include working to change those systems and structures, but the point of beginning is the perceived, experienced reality of today. The trend toward fragmentation of decision making across sectors, to the extent it exists, may contribute to constructive change if it increases democratic access, or may hinder it if decision making is parceled out to people who have little or no (public) responsibility to act fairly, equitably, and transparently.

One way or another, the responsibility for creating and implementing public programs using public funds falls ultimately to elected officials, political appointees, and the career public service. With that responsibility as a point of beginning, “governance,” while including the full range of boundary-spanning, intersectoral phenomena, can be used to mean “public governance,” creation and implementation of laws, systems, and programs that are funded by taxation and other sources of public revenue and apply collectively to everyone in a given geographic area. Therefore, it is the role of career public service practitioners in public governance that we want to examine here.

My intent is to link a passion for change to an analysis of “regressive” values evident in current conditions, a description of alternative, “progressive” values inherent in American history and culture, and discussion of action alternatives available to public-service practitioners and academicians who want to effect change. To write of “passion” may seem inappropriate in a technical-professional field such as public administration, but an emotional desire to make a difference precedes rational thought about action alternatives. Inspiration and passion are the grounds for a process of change; they provide the motivation for critical thought that examines what is, and imagines what could be.

We can be inspired to work for change in public life by events (such as war, depression, natural catastrophe, or a social movement), conditions (such as poverty, environmental degradation, or violence), and people (for example, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, or John F. Kennedy—for me, one such person is former Oregon Governor Tom McCall). Translating inspiration and a resulting passion for change into action is one thing for a citizen activist or a politician and quite another for a career public professional. For people working inside “the system,” the potential for making a difference can be substantial, but doing so within the boundaries of a professional role requires skill, persistence, and often a willingness to take risks.

Inspiration and passion for change do not require foundational grounding in timeless principles. Theorists who think that social structures make efforts at change futile and those who think that postmodernism makes grand narratives about human action impossible may be right, in some abstract way that is divorced from daily human experience. However, we can be grateful that any number of people did not hear that it would be pointless to clean up sanitary conditions and corruption, help the poor, and so on; Jane Addams of the settlement house movement is a fine example. Meanwhile, we can “keep on spinning edifying first-order narratives” (Rorty, 1991, p. 212) about making things better, from within our own history and cultural values. With this goal in mind, the sections below describe the idea of regressive and progressive values and discuss a conceptual framework that supports progressive values in public administration.

This discussion, and the book, are oriented toward public administration in the United States. This is not only for the obvious advantage of writing about what I know, but because many of the conditions that prompted the work are especially evide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Case for Progressive Values
• 2. Describing the Value Pairs
• 3. Practice and Change
• 4. Normative Teaching and Scholarship
• 5. Toward a Progressive Public Administration
• References
• Index
• About the Author