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This widely acclaimed work provides a lively counterbalance to the standard assessment-measurement-accountability prescriptions that have made showing you did your job more important than actually doing it. Now extensively revised, it articulates a postmodern theory of public administration that challenges the field to redirect its attention away from narrow, technique-oriented scientism, and toward democratic openness and ethics. The authors incorporate insights from thinkers like Rorty, Giddens, Derrida, and Foucault to recast public administration as an arena of decentered practices. In their framework, ideographic collisions and everyday impasses bring about political events that challenge the status quo, creating possibilities for social change. "Postmodern Public Administration" is an outstanding intellectual achievement that has rewritten the political theory of public administration. This new edition will encourage everyone who reads it to think quite differently about democratic governance.
The Public Administration Theory Primer explores how the science and art of public administration is definable, describable, replicable, and cumulative. The authors survey a broad range of theories and analytical approaches—from public institutional theory to theories of governance—and consider which are the most promising, influential, and important for the field. This book paints a full picture of how these theories contribute to, and explain, what we know about public administration today. The third edition is fully revised and updated to reflect the latest developments and research in the field including more coverage of governments and governance, feminist theory, emotional labor theory, and grounded research methodology. Expanded chapter conclusions, additional real-world application examples throughout, and a brand-new online supplement with sample comprehensive exam questions and summary tables make this an even more valuable resource for all public administration students.
" ... With its 200 plates representing nearly 4000 specimens of costumes the book embraces the whole subject of the history of costume. It presents a survey of the most important garments of all times and all peoples from Antiquity to the end of the 19th century ..."--Preface
In this critical examination of public administration's pervasive vision of a powerful state, Spicer thoughtfully reconsiders the relationship between activities of governance and concepts of the state. Woodrow Wilson argued for a state led by a powerful government, guided by science and enlightened experts, for the accomplishment of a set of collective purposes—in other words, a purposive state. Michael Spicer contends that though Wilson and those who followed him have not typically explored questions of political and constitutional theory in their writing, a clear and strong vision of the state has emerged in their work nonetheless. Building upon the work of Dwight Waldo and others who have sought to explore and reveal the political theory behind the seemingly neutral language of administration, Spicer explores the roots—both historical and philosophical—of the purposive state. He considers the administrative experience of 18th-century Prussia and its relationship to the vision of the purposive state, and examines the ways this idea has been expressed in the 20th century. He then looks at the practical problems such a vision creates for public policy in a fragmented postmodern political culture. Finally, Spicer explores an alternative view of public administration—one based on a civil association model appropriate to our constitutional traditions and contemporary culture.
This widely acclaimed work provides a lively counterbalance to the standard assessment-measurement-accountability prescriptions that have made showing you did your job more important than actually doing it. Now extensively revised, it articulates a postmodern theory of public administration that challenges the field to redirect its attention away from narrow, technique-oriented scientism, and toward democratic openness and ethics.The authors incorporate insights from thinkers like Rorty, Giddens, Derrida, and Foucault to recast public administration as an arena of decentered practices. In their framework, ideographic collisions and everyday impasses bring about political events that challenge the status quo, creating possibilities for social change. "Postmodern Public Administration" is an outstanding intellectual achievement that has rewritten the political theory of public administration. This new edition will encourage everyone who reads it to think quite differently about democratic governance.
Develops a naturalistic postmodern perspective to make constructive proposals about a wide range of topics now in public discussion.
In this "postmodern, end-of-the-century" moment, the question of what role public administration can legitimately play in a democratic society has deepened and taken on increased urgency. At the same time the movement toward global marketization has gained enormous momentum, traditional prejudices and racial and ethnic violence have appeared with a renewed virulence, presenting unprecedented challenges to democratic governments. Legitimacy in Public Administration reveals how the issue of administrative legitimacy is directly implicated, indeed central, to this broader issue. It argues that legitimacy hinges at the generic level on the question of alterityùhow to regard and relate to "different others." This book reviews the history of the legitimacy issue in the literature of American public administration with the purpose of demonstrating that this discourse has been distorted by an underlying and undisclosed commitment to an elitist "Man of Reason" model of the public administratorÆs role. Current attempts to reformulate administration to meet the challenge of new conditions will fail, the author argues, because they have not escaped the grip of this implicit distortion. Legitimacy in Public Administration includes a challenging concluding chapter that uses insights from gender theory and demonstrates the connection between the legitimacy question and the critical problem of alterity. The author also offers a new way to fundamentally reframe the legitimacy question, so as not only to help the field of public administration resolve it, but to show how this resolution can create a new understanding of the problem of racial and ethnic prejudice.
The contributors to this volume contend that the North American political system is undergoing a serious governmental crisis - political leaders know only how to campaign, not how to gain consensus on goals or direct a course that is to the good of the nation. Public administration is therefore forced to compensate for the growing inadequacy of the 'leaders', and with a normative-based body of theorizing, perform its key role of governance within a democratic system of polycentric power. The book offers a revisualization of the relationship between public servants and the citizens they serve, and a continuing discourse on how public administration can constructively balance forces of change and stability in order for democracy to evolve and mature.
The essential premise of critical social theory is that contemporary society is neither democratic nor free, but that modern global capitalism creates a citizenry satiated with consumer goods, unaware of alternative ways of living. In the public sector, critical theory suggests that governing systems are influenced, if not controlled, by the wealthy and powerful, leaving public professionals to decide whether to serve those interests or the interests of a broader public. This book provides a framework for the application of critical social theory in public administration. Its goal is to encourage awareness among public administration scholars and practitioners of social conditions that tend to shape and constrain scholarship, practice, teaching, and social change. At a time when concern for public interest and a civil society have largely been displaced by the goals of economic efficiency and the "New Public Management," Critical Social Theory in Public Administration presents a viable alternative that incorporates the latest views of postmodern thinking with the central elements of critical social theory.
Offers counterbalance to the standard assessment-measurement-accountability prescriptions that have made showing you did your job more important than actually doing it. This title articulates a postmodern theory of public administration that challenges the field to redirect its attention toward democratic openness and ethics.