A Security Preface to 21st-Century Public Administration

• Author: James A. Stever
• Published date: 01 May 2010
• Date: 01 May 2010
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095399710362721
• Subject Matter: Articles

Administration & Society

42(3) 287 –314

© 2010 SAGE Publications

DOI: 10.1177/0095399710362721

http://aas.sagepub.com

A Security Preface to

21st-Century Public

Administration

James A. Stever1

Abstract

The use of lethal technologies by global terror networks has elevated

domestic security policy to a central concern of 21st-century public

administration. Twentieth-century public administration scholars, influenced

by Progressivism, Pluralism, and Public Choice, led the field to believe that

it could both develop and administer domestic security policy without a

coherent state theory to guide this policy. This scission between security

policy and state theory must be repaired. The relevance of the field to

pressing 21st-century security questions as well as the security of the public

depends on renewing this linkage.

Keywords

security, state, administrative theory

This article argues that a serious disjunction now exists between public

administration and the new 21st-century security environment. The new

internationalized environment of this century has a dark side that poses secu-

rity challenges to 21st-century public administration. Public administration

now has an obvious security mission that it managed to suppress throughout

the 20th century—the protection of the homeland. Public administration

scholars and practitioners are crafting policy to guide the new Department of

1University of Cincinnati, Hamilton, Ohio

Corresponding Author:

James A. Stever, Department of Political Science, University of Cincinnati, 720 Elmwood Road,

Hamilton, OH 45013

Email: James.Stever@uc.edu

288 Administration & Society 42(3)

Homeland Security (DHS) as it struggles to ensure the safety and security of

citizens within U.S. territory.

Presenting and justifying an organizational fix for the DHS is beyond the

scope of this article. Rather, the task of the following pages is prefatory. The

hope is that the arguments and logic presented will serve as a foundation for

those scholars, researchers, and organizational specialists who draft and

implement DHS organizational reforms in ensuing decades.

As opposed to proposing administrative reforms for the DHS, this article

undertakes a prefatory task by advancing four related arguments: The first

argument briefly examines the history of public administration and observes

that the premodern and early modern founders of the field understood and

accepted the linkages between security and the state. The second argument

considers the anomaly of 20th-century public administration. In that century,

two leading bodies of public administration theory, Progressivism and Public

Choice, rejected the founding logic and denied the inherent linkages between

security and the state. As a result, public administration theorists in these

traditions grew indifferent to the importance of state theory for the ongoing

task of public administration. The third argument is that early 21st-century

public administration is indecisive about how to achieve homeland security

because it is attempting to apply 20th-century wisdom about the state to an

unprecedented security situation. Finally, the article compresses the available

choices for fixing these problems into three options, and recommends that

public administration pursue option number three. This option accepts the

inevitable linkage between a viable domestic security policy and a coherent

state theory.

The following section advances the first argument by contending that the

civil administration of early modern states functioned as an essential comple-

ment to state security.1 It goes without saying that had 20th-century public

administration retained some of civil administration’s wisdom, the field’s

adjustment to homeland security would have been more decisive.2 To fully

appreciate the magnitude of public administration’s drift from its security-

oriented roots, it will be necessary to review the origins of public

administration.

The Security Origins of Public Administration

The broader context for and precursor of modern public administration is the

modern state. Although the state theory literature is large and sprawling, there is

general agreement that the modern state developed in discernible stages (Pier-

son, 1996; Poggi, 1990). The modern state replaced feudalism. State theorist