Administrative Practice and Rational Inquiry in Postmodern Public Administration Theory

• Author: Frank de Zwart
• DOI: 10.1177/009539902237272
• Published date: 01 November 2002
• Date: 01 November 2002
• Subject Matter: Articles

ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / November 2002de Zwart / PRACTICE AND INQUIRY

This article explores postmodern reasoning in academic public administration. It argues

that the antiscience and proliberationarguments that abound in postmodern writing in pub-

lic administration areinformed by a fallacy: conflating administrative practice and the sci-

entific study of that practice. In effect, postmodernists confuse wrongsof bureaucracy with

argumentsagainst modern science and then propagate relativism to clear up the muddle they

created. This article opposes that package deal. It argues that the main objection

postmodern authors have against science and administration—neglectof the variety of sub-

jects’ points of view—hasnothing to do with positivism or modern science and cannot be

cured with relativism.

ADMINISTRATIVE PRACTICE AND

RATIONAL INQUIRY IN POSTMODERN

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION THEORY

FRANK DE ZWART

Leiden University

Postmodern theorists in public administration (PA) champion the case

of marginalized social categories. “A central aim of postmodernism,”

David John Farmer (1999) wrote, “is to demarginalize . . . groups such as

women, minorities, the economically disadvantaged, those with policed

sexualities, the colonized, and others” (p. 313). What has postmodern PA

to offer this marginalized majority? The idea is that the government

marginalizes minorities and others because it privileges scientific dis-

course over other discourses. To demarginalize, therefore, modern sci-

ence needs to be deprivileged.

Postmodernists argue that science, with its respect for facts and its

attempts to find truth, is just one among other equally deserving discourses.

Science deals with facts, but facts, the argument goes, are social

482

AUTHOR’SNOTE: I thank Bas van Gool, Paul ‘t Hart, Richard Stillman II, Odile Verhaar,

andJan Wuisman for their stimulating interest and their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

ADMINISTRATION& SOCIETY, Vol.34 No. 5, November 2002 482-498

DOI: 10.1177/009539902237272

© 2002 Sage Publications

constructions made and maintained by discourse. Postmodernism denies

an objectivereality about which one can be right or wrong. “The reality we

experience as ‘real,’” McSwite (1997) claimed, “is actually a kind of virtual

reality” (p. 248). Postmodern authors stress that we have various dis-

courses that construct various realities—different butequal. They celebrate

multiplicity—of culture, discourse, and knowledge. The latter, multiplic-

ity of knowledge (some authors, indeed, prefer “knowledges”) introduces

cognitive relativism, and cognitive relativism1deprivileges science.

Why do postmodernists believe that embracing relativism would help

marginalized social categories? Government in the modern era, they say,

relied on the facts and truth claims of science to develop and legitimateits

policies. But because facts are social constructions—not givens—science

cannot be neutral. Government’s support for scientific knowledge privi-

leges one particular social construction to the exclusion or marginali-

zation of others. Illustrations of this basic idea in various postmodern writ-

ings range from simple claims, such as “the patriarchal or masculine

nature that has been described for modernist public administration think-

ing [excludes or marginalizes] the nonpatriarchal perspective” (Farmer,

1999, p. 313), to sophisticated studies arguing that official categoriza-

tions—based on facts produced by the social sciences—fixate the people

who are subjected to them in the marginal or oppressed identities that are

part and parcel of colonial constructions of the social world.2

This article examines the postmodern claim that modern government

neglects, excludes, or marginalizesweaker social sections because it priv-

ileges science over other discourses, and it argues that this claim is the

mistaken result of confusing social engineering and social science. It also

disputes the related claim, common in postmodern studies, that interpreta-

tive social science is going to help return to the “silenced voices” (a syn-

onym for marginalized social groups) the voice that positive or modern

science denied them for so long. This claim rests on the false idea that

modern science has no room for “the native’s point of view” because it

acknowledges only “facts.” The final section of this article argues that

interpretative social science and rational inquiry (a synonym for modern

science, which use I shall shortly explain) are not at all mutually exclusive.

Herbert Simon’s heritage makes PA theory particularly well suited to

show that we do not need relativism to reckon with the native’s point of

view.

de Zwart / PRACTICE AND INQUIRY 483