Administrative Theory & Praxis

Editorial Notes

In Remembrance of Petra, Ronald, and Amande

Symposium-Fox and Miller's Postmodern Public Administration Ten Years Later

All Monica All the Time: Crowding Out the Public Discourse

To utter hyperreality is to imply a reality against which it is counterposed. In view this reality would be the life-world or lebenswelt, the flux and flow of everyday life. Hyperreality is a simulacra of reality or a simulation of reality. Other factors, in less broad strokes, contributing to hyperreality follow. First, there is a proliferation of news sources. Another factor that strikes people is the collapsing of hard news coverage with entertainment: info-tainment. A third closely relate...

Postmodern Public Administration: In the Shadow of Postmodernism

Lurking in the shadows of postmodernity are big questions about right and wrong and deep desires to find antidotes to postmodern anomie and relativity. In pre-Enlightenment societies, definitions of right and wrong were provided by a transcendent source or by a monarchy. In modernist society, science was the foundational source and modern life is regulated, not by transcendent moral principles, but by the empirical realities of life, as these are defined by science. There is a deep apparent n...

The Postmodern Condition and the Challenge of Rethinking the Foundations of Public Policy and Administration: A Critical Inquiry

It has been already 10 years since Charles Fox and Hugh Miller published their important and polemic book, Postmodern Public Administration. It is a book that came at a propitious moment when many scholars were looking for a new framework to redirect both public administration and public policy. Fox and Miller's theoretical appropriation of postmodernism -- with all the usual disclaimers -- eventually elapses in a curious, although not surprising, dissociation of power from any pretense conce...

Petra Schreurs April 13th 1964 - May 31st 2005

On May 31 Petra Schreurs passed away. Schreurs was affiliated to the Leiden University Department of Public Administration for a long period: first as a student, then as a PhD student, and finally as a Postdoctoral researcher. Schreurs was a remarkable and outstanding student who graduated with distinction in 1993 in Public Administration in Leiden. Schreurs was a sharp writer and a sharp analyst. Her key research interest concerned the idea of rationality in public administration, and more r...

Redescribing Public Administration

The four themes that have enlivened and cultivated the contestable terrain of Postmodern Public Administration are: 1. energy fields, 2. empiricism, 3. warrants for discourse, and 4. universalism. Public energy fields mean all the activities, practices, and intentions that insinuate themselves into questions of what to do next. Empiricism is a metanarrative that insists it is not a metanarrative, a politics that insists it is apolitical. Warrants for discourse seemed that some norms and pract...

Making It Meaning Full: Postmodern Public Administration and Symbolic Interactionism

Ten years ago Charles Fox and Hugh Miller (1995) published Postmodern Public Administration, which made a strong case for a discourse model of public administration and policy-making. Around the same time other books on discourse appeared, which helped create the sense that a discourse movement was underway within the discipline of public administration. This paper argues that if this movement truly is to effect a "sea change" within the discipline, then it is important to conduct empirical r...

Public Administration Post Fox and Miller: What We Face Now

While Fox and Miller's Postmodern Public Administration failed to create a valid outline for a genuinely postmodern administrative governance, it did make an important contribution by defining the key issue that the field currently faces. Both the book's failure and its success can be understood against a sociology of knowledge backdrop that explains the advantaged position that science occupies in pursuing its agenda of knowledge development and that describes the difficulties that beset soc...

Forum

An Open Letter From Six Members of the Program Committee of the 2005 Annual Conference of the Public Administration Theory Network (Pat-Net)

The 2005 Public Administration Theory Network (PAT-Net) Conference was held on Jun 9 to Jun 11 in Krakow, Poland. The Conference was plagued by controversy over the Keynote speaker, Dr. Richard Rubenstein. The essential nature of the remarks presented by Rubenstein was that the immigration of Muslims into Europe poses a threat to non-Muslims, and that Islam does not support democratic rights for non-Muslims. While Rubenstein did not propose any particular action, he declared that Islam as a r...

Commonsense@Admin

The Moral First, the Technical Second!

Should moral considerations be primary in each individual bureaucrat's action? Should we aim for that kind of revolution in regulative ideals? In view of what some pundits describe as an increased interest in values in American politics, it seems a timely question. The author defines morality no more finely than seeking what ought to be the case or seeking what should be the case. He is writing of moralizing as a creative activity of the self in the face of the other, as contrasted with moral...

Responses To Hugh Miller

Dark Times

Hannah Arendt, in the introduction to her collection of essays Men in Dark Times, characterized dark times as camouflage, created by those in power making unpleasant facts invisible. In the essays, Arendt draws attention to a number of men she believed, through their work, shed light in the darkness. Arendt believed that humans are most free, most fully creative, in their political activities. At the heart of Arendt's ideas are two joys: the joys of political action and the joys of thinking. ...

Rethinking a Postmodern Perspective: A Reply to Miller's Postmodern Turn

The author finds Hugh Miller's response to his particular criticism as puzzling and rather -- given the logic of his arguments -- predictable. Miller wraps himself so much in the lexicon of postmodern thought and the author thinks he is beginning to suffocate himself in a fetishism of anti-foundationalism and perspectivism in that he dismisses, almost completely, the need to theorize macrostructures that exhibit totalizing tendencies such as the market society and the gender or racial oppress...

It's a Matter of Discourse

Murray Edelman long ago persuaded that language matters in politics. Especially persuasive were his arguments that symbolic and linguistic political outcomes are just as important as tangible ones; that politics and policy should be viewed as symbolic action; and that political and policy realities are strategically created in and through language. Curtis Ventriss is critical in his symposium paper of Fox and Miller's framework, because, among other objections, it failed to address such impor...

He Did It Again-a Reply to Hugh Miller

The essays in the symposium, and Hugh Miller's (HM's) essay in response, are so acute and stimulating. The author focuses his remarks primarily on HM's defense of the idea of warrants for discourse. Miller seems thoroughly to apprehend the implications of the post modernist critique of language -- which, after all, is the heart of post modernism. Fox and Miller's original argument and most of HM's subsequent work indeed focused on policy making and other related discourse contexts that would ...

Article

Dialogue and Administrative Theory &Amp; Praxis: Twenty-Five Years of Public Administration Theory

Hugh Miller's Final Reply

Symbolizations

All Monica All the Time is one of those pieces that until now was never sent to a journal for publication. Hopes for strategies such as warrants for discourse were dimming, and the prospects for the deterioration of American culture were rising. Hyperreality remains on the ascendancy in the realm of public policy. The abject treachery of the Bush presidency has, with hard leather boots, ground this point into the concrete. The public conversation leading up to the Iraq war is an example of in...