Public administration in a time of fractured meaning: beyond the legacy of Herbert Simon

Abstract

An intellectual history of the field of public administration is reviewed. It is argued that since the nation's Constitutional origins, public administration has been suffering an identity crisis. The Anti-Federalist - Federalist debate pitted government by dialogue--the need for a community of meaning, on the one hand, against government by distant centralized authority--the objective control of administration, on the other. In the 20th century this same contradiction is manifested in the ethos of the progressive era which emphasized both rationalism (the objective control of administration) and embodied the ideal of public interest (administration as dialogue and the need for a community of meaning).

It is argued that Herbert Simon's Administrative Behavior appropriates the discourse of rationalism manifested in the progressive movement but that Simon's model of administration lacked the original symbol that legitimized the field--the communitarian ideal of public interest. The result was the loss of a key tension in the American governance process: the Anti-Federalist - Federalist debate of community versus centralized control.

An analytical strategy called deconstruction is used to examine Simon's most seminal work, Administrative Behavior. It operates in a different fashion than traditional discourse and traditional academic research and critique. Two aspects of that uniqueness include: (1) the point of reference of the reader is not defined by the author, and (2) the subject matter under scrutiny is seen as a form of narrative rather than an objective representation of reality. The effect of using this strategy is to render uncertain many of the central assumptions and taken for granted aspects of Administrative Behavior. As a consequence, new intellectual space becomes available to other narratives in the field of public administration.