Post-Traditional Public Administration Theory

For Better Governmental Praxis

David Farmer, David John Farmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367683061
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000367690
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book describes what is argued to be the most effective way of doing public administration thinking. Its aim is to encourage governments to govern fundamentally better in terms of policy and administration.

A better understanding of context and identities, imaginization, epistemic pluralism, anti-administration, and the context of economics are examples of what is critical for high effectiveness. The pieces included in this book have been handpicked from the vast academic collection that David Farmer has authored over the last thirty years and which were published in the Journal of Administrative Theory and Praxis and the Journal of Public Administration Education. Collectively, these chapters are intended to help governments use post-traditional public administration theory in order to achieve better praxis.

Contemplating Bureaucracies: A Tale of Identities – Essay 4

David John Farmer

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness” (Dickens, 1859/1940, p. 1), it was the age of wave-particle duality, the age of the uncertainty principle (Ford, 2011, p. 2), it was the epoch of the post-traditional, it was the epoch of the business entrepreneur as hero. This fourth essay aims for the creation of an ever-upgrading post-traditional consciousness that can revitalize governance and bureaucracy. To the reader, it recommends prefacing contemplating bureaucracies by contemplating the post-traditional. This essay discusses, in turn, the traditional and the post-traditional in terms of my identity as a professor, and offers suggestions for the reader to contemplate the post-traditional. It follows Essay 3, which contemplated traditional American and traditional foreign kinds of bureaucratic practice. Contemplating Cops (in Essays 1 and 2) preceded this continued contemplation of bureaucracies.

I have participated in traditional public administration as a user and in post-traditional public administration as a contributor. These terms, “user” and “contributor,” overlap somewhat. The using has to include interpreting the traditional for others, including bureaucracies, and contributing has to utilize the giant steps that others have made. I have done so when my identity as a professor has shifted to some extent. For instance, the university adjusted my title post-1991 to “public administration” and post-2011 to “philosophy and public affairs.” Also, there have been other shifts in many universities, where there now seem to be many more well-paid administrators eager to gain ever more customer-students.

Readers may wish to consider how useful—or not—post-traditional public administration is for contemplating the usual public bureaucracies. Those who are professors may wish to evaluate their own work identities within their university bureaucracies. For instance, to what extent is your perspective facilitated or diminished by the heavy reliance on disciplinary specialization—running against the idea, for instance, of epistemic pluralism. Especially before attaining tenure, work identity at universities is frequently unfortunately restrictive in terms of disciplinary boundaries. An academic paper outside of the boundary may not even be counted, and the old saying (I don’t know if it is true) is that “a dean can count but s/he cannot read.” (After the long wait for the final promotion, there may be even less eagerness to step outside the well-trodden zone.) However, and as noted in Essay 2, I usually taught one course per semester out of my title area, e.g., political theory (usually ancient and medieval) and economics. And I recall the way that one of my deans, who was an economist, would speak to me in a friendly way about “our science.” Yes, a university identity is freeing; but could it be even more free? Maybe readers might wish to examine the impact of their contexts on their university identities.

This essay is divided into three sections: “Traditional,” “Post-Traditional,” and “Contemplating the Post-Traditional.”

Traditional

Traditional or modern(ist) or mainstream public administration achieved, in my view, both good (and bad) results. The impetus to public administration practice has also been sometimes positive but also constricted. As I wrote of modernist public administration in The Language of Public Administration

Modernist Public Administration is valuable, yet limiting. The public administration literature grows larger and stronger, but it is limited as an explanatory and catalytic force in resolving the problems of bureaucracy …. As a matter of history, public administration has gone from an early optimism about reform and about establishing a science to (or perhaps through) a period of concern about an identity crisis, a crisis about the nature of public administration. (Farmer, 1995, p. 34)

Variations are indeed available in traditional public administration, no less than in post-traditional, views. For one example of the traditional, a loose liaison can be, and has been, made in many academic programs between public administration and public policy and/or political science. But such marriages are not always straightforward. The situation is yet more complex in two respects. First, compelling arguments exist denying that public administration (or political science or public policy) is a science: a student would have to understand epistemology to know why. Second, some “disciplines” are even narrower than public administration. In terms of subject, some limit the subjects to particular program areas, e.g., police policy and administration. Public administration has no such “one-policy-program” limitation: yet it is constricted by limits (noticed at the beginning of Essay 3) like that of the signature dichotomy and constricted macro practicality (noticed later).

The history of traditional American public administration can be described in terms of a profusion on the surface of pre-paradigms (pre-paradigms because they are not scientific paradigms), and these can be (and have been) ordered—to give, at a minimum, the impression of orderly progress. Relying on Stillman (1991) and others, I (2010, pp. 20–23) have described examples of such orderings in terms of periods:

1. Before World War II
2. Human relations
3. Post–World War II challenge to POSDCORB (planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, budgeting)
4. Heterodoxy
5. Oppositional emphasis in 1960s and 1970s
6. New Public Management
7. Pluralist or disconnect

Other “prettified” versions of ordering are also noted (e.g., McCurdy, 1972):

1. Administrative reform movement (1870–1926)
2. Orthodox period: administrative science movement (1906–1952)
3. Politics period (1935–1967)
4. Human relations and behavioral science (1933–present)
5. Program effectiveness (1964–present)

“Ideas about public administration that jelled into an identifiable field of study have, by and large, reflected the particular contours of state developments in the United States,” claims Stillman (1991, p. 105).

I was a user of traditional public administration when I worked for the Saskatchewan (1960–1961) and the Ontario governments (1962–1965), for Public Administration Service (1965–1970), for The Jacobs Company (1970–1971), for the New York City Police Department (1971–1974), for the National Institute of Justice (1974–1980), and for Virginia Commonwealth University (1980–1991). See the descriptions in the earlier essays. Clearly, my identity—during all these periods—embraced traditional public administration. But eventually there came a recognition of limitations.

Let me explain. Later study (referenced in Essay 2) at the University of Virginia (UVA) for my Ph.D. in philosophy took place when I was chair of the Department of Administration of Justice and Public Safety at Virginia Commonwealth University (1983–1991), adding to my Ph.D. in economics from the University of London. This study of philosophy awakened me—with a jolt—to the inadequacy of traditional public administration. The jolt was accidental in the sense that it arose as a side-effect in my mind: and I am not suggesting that any of the philosophy professors had any interest or knowledge of public administration. The chief joys experienced at UVA’s Corcoran Department of Philosophy included studying the ancient Greeks and writing a master’s thesis on “Aristotle: Persistence of Matter.” Chief joys also included studying modern philosophers (the “usual suspects”) and writing a dissertation and a book on Time and McTaggart’s Paradox. The jolt came when, for one of my last classes, I enrolled for an evening seminar with Richard Rorty, a distinguished philosopher located from 1982 to 1988 in the English Department at UVA. Incidentally, I read his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. But what staggered me about this class on the later Freud was focusing on the works of the French postmodernists—like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. So began that direction in my reading. And, when I shifted to VCU’s Graduate Department of Public Administration on an affiliate basis in 1986 and on a full-time basis in 1991, I began to write my 1995 book titled The Language of Public Administration: Bureaucracy, Modernity, and Postmodernity. It analyzes the public administration dialect of modernity—discussing the limits of particularism, of scientism, of technologism, of enterprise, and of hermeneutics. Then it analyzes the dialect of postmodernity—of imagination, of deconstruction, of deterritorialization, and of alterity. The book’s epilogue comments that the aim in studying “the postmodern and modern frameworks [was] to struggle away from a unidimensional and distorted understanding of public bureaucracy and public administration” (Farmer, 1995, p. 146).

Post-Traditional

Post-traditional public administration theory seeks imaginization, and it includes not only the postmodern but also other elements like epistemic pluralism, critical theory, ethics, philosophy, neuroscience, and economics – transforming the traditional, the mainstream. This section notes my activity as a contributor. The post-traditional (like the traditional) does underscore that it is important to recognize that our identity and context shape what we know and what “knowing” means. It is no less important to appreciate what they shape us not to know.

Imaginization

Post-traditional public administration theory aims for contemplation/imaginization of bureaucracies and all that constitutes the identity and context of governance bureaucracies. This requires radical and challenging changes. Don’t worry that this sounds impractical; the 9/11 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States recommended that “it is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination” (9/11 Commission, 2004, p. 344). As explained in To Kill the King, “Imagine imagination pervading all of governance for all major aims, as much as for government outwitting terrorism. Imagine that an adequate sense of imagination is more than merely connecting dots. What would be required for such a reign of imagination? I suggest that this rule of imagination requires post-traditional governance and bureaucracy” (Farmer, 2005, p. xi). It also quotes another claim by the 9/11 National Commission (2004, p. 344): that “imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies.”

I explain post-traditional imaginization as including thinking as play, justice as seeking, and practice as art (Farmer, 2005) – and six chapters are devoted to discussing each. Such activities are intended to refer both to bureaucracy and also to the context of bureaucracy and the identity of bureaucrats and others. For instance, part of the context of governance is not only the state of the public sector but also of the private sector, and shortly we will again comment on the aggressive or warlike character of what I and others would call the religion of the free market that is part of the private sector context. This religion of free enterprise is what is added, as an extension of the Dickensian quote in the first sentence, as “the epoch of the business entrepreneur as hero.” The first aim of these three elements of imaginization, as is explained in the book’s preface, is a new consciousness. The second is that the subjects transcend current disciplinary constraints.

I have advocated this major aim o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Introduction
• 1 Contemplating Bureaucracies: A Tale of Identities – Essay 4
• 2 In the Pink?
• 3 Contemplating Cops: A Tale of Identities – Essay 1
• 4 Contemplating Cops: A Tale of Identities – Essay 2
• 5 Contemplating Bureaucracies: A Tale of Identities – Essay 3
• 6 Imagine! Preface to the Post-Traditional
• 7 Theorizing in Perspective: Epistemic Pluralism
• 8 The Allure of Rhetoric and the Truancy of Poetry
• 9 Because My Master Bathes Me
• 10 Mapping Anti-Administration: Introduction to the Symposium
• 11 Dogs of War: Fighting Back
• 12 Public Administration in a World of Economics
• 13 Coping With The Super-Abstract: Teaching About the Implications of Postmodernism for Public Administration
• 14 A Conversation Between Song Jinzhou and David John Farmer
• 15 The Ladder of Organization-Think: Beyond Flatland
• 16 Red Queen
• 17 Power Speaking v. Speaking to Power: A Discourse War?
• 18 Fractured Governmentality: A Night in the Emergency Room (E.R.)
• 19 Froglets or Fairy Tales?
• 20 Tonto and the Lone Ranger: Concepts Reveal, Concepts Mask
• 21 Expanding the Ethical Sphere
• 22 Medusa: Helene Cixous and the Writing of Laughter
• 23 Somatic Writing: Attending to Our Bodies
• 24 Silence
• 25 Power of Refusal: Introduction to the Symposium
• 26 Anti-Admin: With Help from Herbert Marcuse
• 27 Love and Un-Engineering
• 28 The Devil’s Rope
• 29 Frigginomics Begins in Kindergarten: The Social Construction of “Normal” Citizens and Their Dreams
• 30 Wal-Mart®: Neo-Feudal (K)Night?
• 31 Change the Course, Neurons!
• 32 The Spirit of Our Age: PA-think as Uncovering
• 33 A Dancing Star: Arguments From Imagination
• Index