Crossing the Relational-Rubicon

• Author: Thomas J. Catlaw
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399710375402
• Published date: 01 July 2010
• Date: 01 July 2010

AAS375402AAS
Disputatio Sine Fine
Administration & Society
42(4) 466 –473
Crossing the
© 2010 SAGE Publications
DOI: 10.1177/0095399710375402
http://aas.sagepub.com
Relational-Rubicon:
A Reply to Stivers
Thomas J. Catlaw1
I am glad for the opportunity to comment on Camilla Stivers’s (2010a) pro-
vocative essay on public administration, democracy, and science. In one
sense, this comment is superfluous because I am substantively in agreement
with much of Stivers’s overarching diagnosis that practices of governance
may imply practices of knowing and generating knowledge, and that demo-
cratic governance may entail democratic processes for creating and using
knowledge (though I admit that I cannot yet say for myself how “democratic”
modifies knowledge). I view this as a critical gesture of “putting the world
back together again” in the face of theories, policies, and practices that seem
committed to marking as “off limits” large expanses of our lives from critical
reflection and change, dividing us from one another, and, more generally, just
making sure that our right hand doesn’t know what the left one is up to.
I also concur with Stivers’s assessment that all this has important implica-
tions for how we consider educating for a professional public service—ranging
from the cultivation of a far more pluralistic attitude toward research to the
ways in which we structure our classrooms and the kinds of abilities we help
our students to develop there.
The issues I would like to raise, then, lay not with the impulse of Stivers’s
critique nor the political trajectory hinted therein. Rather my view is that her
essay may not go far enough in surfacing what is entailed in making anything
like a “process in which each contribution is taken seriously by everyone”
(Stivers, 2010a) viable and widespread. Thus, in this brief space, I would like
to start at the edges of Stivers’s essay and work outward to outline several of
the major political and intellectual knots that I think need to be untied in
order to make possible a collaborative democratic practice.
1Arizona State University, Phoenix
Corresponding Author:
Thomas J. Catlaw, 411 North Central Avenue, Mail Code 3720, Suite 450, Phoenix, AZ 85004
Email: Thomas.Catlaw@asu.edu

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Catlaw
467
The New Terrain for the Political
One impulse I think expressed in Stivers’s essay is to break from an approach
toward public administration and governance narrowly rooted in institutions
or organizational forms (including networks) to one more or less concerned
with interactions (Al-Yayha, Campbell-Rawlings, Catlaw, Guo, & Hu, 2008;
Bryer et al., n.d.) and the “texture” or form of human relationships (Catlaw,
2006, 2007; see also Kooiman, 2003). Drawing from process philosophy,
feminist theory, (post-)structuralism, and participatory and discursive demo-
cratic theory, among others, this interactional, relational approach to govern-
ing emphasizes (or emphasizes anew for current times) the continuity of
experience across temporally and spatially discontinuous realms of our lives.
It assumes the everyday intuition that, to put it in simple terms, what happens
to us in one part of our experience meaningfully shapes and informs how we
experience and interact in other areas. We would do well, then, to be reflexive
in considering the patterns of relationship and discourse that we live in since
these are the ways in which we literally make ourselves up.
Four points might follow. First, such a view expands the terrain of “the
political” dramatically. Political activity can longer be quarantined to the
state/political sphere in that tripartite model of society (state–market–civil
sphere) delegates to it. To be sure, the burgeoning literature on “governance”
and its assertion of “boundary blurring” makes a modest step in acknowledg-
ing an expanded political realm, but by and large, the internal life of organi-
zations, the economy, schools, household relations, and so on have remained
off limits as “private” spheres. In doing so, the field essentially concedes...