A New Era and New Concepts in the Study of Race in Public Administration

• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Author: Sanjay K. Pandey,Domonic Bearfield,Jeremy L. Hall
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13481

A New Era and New Concepts in the Study of Race inPublicAdministration 205

As Public Administration Review (PAR) Editors,

we believe that the quest to provide a better

understanding of the concept of race in public

administration has begun in earnest, a quest that we

hope will usher in a new era in the study of race in

public administration. Each one of us—individually

and collectively, in everyday matters and in big

picture decisions, in service and in scholarship—has

supported and continues to support this quest. For

example, in association with Consortium of Race

and Gender Scholars (CORGES), we organized a

panel with an eponymous title (more on this later;

see Hall2022). This editorial—in addition to

introducing contents of this issue—offers reflection

and theoretical provocation intended to invigorate the

public administration scholarly community’s approach

to the concept of race.

The thrust of our theoretical provocation is that

the concept of race in public administration

remains woefully undertheorized, and there is an

urgent need to address this trained incapacity, to

use Merton’s coinage. Looking back over PAR’s

history, we see notable attempts to engage with race

in our scholarship. In 1974, Adam Herbert edited

a PAR symposium on racial minorities in public

administration. Based on articles in the symposium,

Herbert(1974) highlighted, among other things,

racial and cultural biases faced by minority public

administrators and the absence of racial minority

perspectives in public administration scholarship

and teaching. Alas, there have been few sustained

follow-up efforts in PAR and in the broader public

administration literature on engaging race directly and

in an in-depth manner (Alexander1997; Witt2011).

To be sure, the pedigree of public administration

literatures points to some concern about matters of

racial equity as part of other overarching theoretical

concerns (Guy and McCandless2012). Authoritative

accounts (e.g., Bishu and Kennedy2020;

Gooden2015) of these literatures reveal the

dominance of the “race as a variable” approach (see

Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva2008). Despite numerous

and persistent calls to develop and use more complex

structural and historical conceptualizations of

race, there has been limited progress. Thus, public

administration as a discipline finds that it has an

impoverished theoretical vocabulary, one that is

inadequate for capturing nuances of racial formation

and racialization, and for advancing the cause of racial

justice and equity.

To support our goal of invigorating public

administration’s approach to the concept of race,

we offer a framework of history, hierarchy, and

heterodoxy (the 3 Hs) that may be used to look back

to take stock and set the course for a meaningful,

long-lasting study of race in public administration.

The 3-H Framework on the Concept of Race:

History, Hierarchy, and Heterodoxy

With the 3-H framework, comprised of history,

hierarchy, and heterodoxy, we offer three suggestions

for advancing scholarship on race in public

administration. First, we underscore the importance

of recognizing history as a major force. Second, we

point to the relative lack of attention to the idea of

social hierarchy in public administration and how this

may be remedied. Finally, we discuss the importance

of drawing upon heterodox sources for shoring up the

study of race. We discuss each in turn below.

History

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his 1935 classic Black

Reconstruction in America, provided sage advice

for the ages on history, “[Shall] we not best guide

humanity by telling the truth about all this, so

far as the truth is ascertainable?” (Du Bois1998).

Although public administration—in contrast with

many other disciplines—takes its history seriously

with many doctoral programs offering courses on

intellectual history, it is worth asking ourselves if we

are measuring up to Du Bois’s reasonable standard.

Woodrow Wilson, Du Bois’s contemporary, is famous

for his essay on the study of administration, in which

A New Era and New Concepts in the Study of Race

inPublicAdministration

Sanjay K. PandeyDomonic Bearfield

Jeremy L. Hall

George Washington UniversityRutgers University-Newark

University of Central Florida

Editorial

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 82, Iss. 2, pp. 205–209. © 2022 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13481.