Beyond social equity: Talking social justice in public administration

• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Author: Camilla Stivers,Sanjay K. Pandey,Leisha DeHart‐Davis,Jeremy L. Hall,Kathryn Newcomer,Shannon Portillo,Meghna Sabharwal,Eiko Strader,James Wright
• Date: 01 March 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13620

EDITORIAL

Beyond social equity: Talking social justice

in public administration

Camilla Stivers

1

| Sanjay K. Pandey

2

| Leisha DeHart-Davis

3

| Jeremy L. Hall

4

|

Kathryn Newcomer

2

| Shannon Portillo

5

| Meghna Sabharwal

6

| Eiko Strader

2

|

James Wright II

7

1

Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

2

Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

3

School of Government, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

4

School of Public Administration, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA

5

School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

6

Public and Nonprofit Management Program, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USA

7

Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

Correspondence

Jeremy L. Hall, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA.

Email: jeremy.hall@ucf.edu

*Editor-in-Chief’s Note: PAR Editorials seek to raise the salience of important public administration themes. Social justice is one of the defining themes of our times and in

this editorial statement, we clarify some basic issues and offer a vision for future scholarship and practice. This statement is co-authored with notable public administration

scholars, many affiliated with the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES). I am especially grateful to Cam Stivers, Sanjay Pandey, and Leisha DeHart-Davis for

their leadership in crafting this editorial statement.

Social equity scholarship has had a prominent place in

public administration and in the pages of Public Adminis-

tration Review (PAR) since 1974 when George Frederick-

son edited a PAR symposium on social equity. More

recently, PAR has published landmark articles on social

equity (e.g., Frederickson, 1990; Gooden, 2015; Guy &

McCandless, 2012; Pandey, Newcomer, et al., 2022;

Wright & Merritt, 2020), as well as editorials calling for

richer and more inclusive conceptualizations of the con-

cept. For example, PAR editorials have identified the need

to better theorize race, gender, class, and geography, and

examine disciplinary blind spots (Battaglio & Hall, 2018;

Hall, 2022,2022b; Pandey, Bearfield, & Hall, 2022; Pandey,

Cheng, & Hall, 2022).

This editorial, featuring eminent public administration

scholars in collaboration with PAR editors, builds on the

PAR social equity legacy to argue for more intellectual dis-

course on social justice.

1

We collectively contend that

social justice is an important focus for a scholarship as

well as a guidepost of practical administrative ethics. As

such, we need more intellectual discourse and empirical

research on the topic. In other words, we need to talk

more about social justice in public administration theory

and research. Not talking about social justice in public

administration diminishes the discipline’s relevance and

misses the opportunity to better understand historical

and contemporary social wrongs. And such understand-

ing is necessary for righting those wrongs.

Both social equity and social justice are concerned

with promoting fairness and equality within a society, but

they do so in different ways. Social equity focuses on

ensuring that everyone has the same opportunity to suc-

ceed, while social justice addresses the underlying sys-

tems and structures of oppression that contribute to

inequality and injustice. We begin by tracing the evolu-

tion of social equity and social justice concepts in

academic public administration. We then borrow a frame-

work from social psychology to illustrate how public

administration has already incorporated research relevant

to social justice into its intellectual endeavors and how

the discipline can continue to do so more explicitly. The

editorial concludes with a discussion of the potential for

social justice to enrich public administration theory and

practice and make it more relevant for addressing com-

plex social problems.

SOCIAL EQUITY IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

In public administration, the term social equity made its

debut at the first Minnowbrook meeting in 1968, widely

seen as the dawn of the “New Public Administration”

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13620

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