Making People Matter: Moving Toward a Humanity-Based Public Administration

• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00953997211030213
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211030213

Administration & Society

2022, Vol. 54(3) 522 –539

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997211030213

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Perspectives

Making People Matter:

Moving Toward a

Humanity-Based Public

Administration

Michael R. Ford1

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate how a humanity-driven approach to Public

Administration (PA) can be used to resolve macro-level value conflicts.

I define a humanity-driven approach to PA as one that prioritizes human

emotion, lived-experience, perceptions, and acceptance at all stages of

governing. I then present three value conflicts in PA, and apply a humanity-

driven approach to reclassify conflicts into value hierarchies that provide a

roadmap for conducting future research and theory development. The work

builds on existing research prioritizing social equity, lived experience, and

the resident-state interaction in the application of the administrative state.

Keywords

social equity, humanity driven PA, administrative theory

Christopher Pollitt (2016) argues that external shocks to governing systems

shape the dominant issues in the Public Administration (PA) field. Some

shocks are predictable, like changes in political leadership and adaptation to

new technology. Some shocks are long-term, like climate change and public

1University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, USA

Corresponding Author:

Michael R. Ford, Associate Professor, Public Administration, University of Wisconsin

Oshkosh, 800 Algoma Blvd., Oshkosh, WI 54901, USA.

Email: fordm@uwosh.edu

1030213AAS0010.1177/00953997211030213Administration & SocietyFord

research-article2021

Ford 523

sector financial stress (Pollitt, 2016). But rare is the shock that is unpredict-

able, immediate, and universal. However, the world is currently experiencing

such a shock in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic (Roberts, 2020b). The

Covid-19 pandemic is striking during a time of eroding trust in government

institutions (see Kettl, 2017), democratic backsliding in countries such as

Turkey, the Philippines, and the United States, and the move away toward

European unity via Brexit. Prominent indictments of the ability of the PA

field to handle the major crises of our time, though offered prior to the Covid-

19 pandemic, nonetheless force questioning of the current state of PA research

(Fukuyama, 2018).

In his seminal essay, Woodrow Wilson (1887) wrote that “wherever public

opinion exists it must rule (p. 209). Wilson’s assertion highlights that a demo-

cratic society built around the values of a public civic life must be governed

in a manner consistent with the political expressions emanating from that

civic life. Objective facts may not always be consistent with the will of the

people, but successful government action is impossible if inconsistent with

that will. Of course, Wilson’s (1887) proclamation must be viewed in the

context of his personal discriminatory beliefs regarding who is allowed to

hold a valid public opinion (Lehr, 2015). Wilson’s belief in eugenics calls

into question whose lived experiences, in Wilson’s mind, were worthy of

shaping public opinion, and ultimately governing. Wilson’s problematic

belief system is not the focus of this article, but does serve as an example of

the inconsistency of a governing system built on public acceptance with the

dismissal of the lived experience of some, or all, of those overseen by the

governing system.

The United States’ middling response to the Covid-19 crisis contains

examples of leaders dismissing the diverse lived experiences around Covid-

19. While some government leaders called for widespread shutdowns as an

evidence-based approach to slowing the virus’ spread, business leaders point

to the economic catastrophe caused by widespread shutdowns. When promi-

nent leaders such as former Vice-President Pence dismissed state responses

as overreaching because Covid-19 is only a problem for the elderly and peo-

ple with preexisting conditions (see: Pence, 2020), he was de-facto arguing

that the experiences of some Americans matter less than others. To put it

another away, the argument is that government action in response to a pan-

demic should pick winners and losers based on evidence of who is most at

risk. While a strategy like this is grounded in some logic, it also violates the

core tenet of social equity.

While the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic is an extreme case, it is a

revealing one. In the United States, it is the rare crisis that has a truly univer-

sal impact. As such, it is revealing some of the limitations in our governing