Editorial Report on Public Administration Review, 2006–2011: A Global Graduate Seminar, a Privilege, and a Challenge
In this final wrap-up, PAR’s editor in chief, Richard Stillman, and managing editor, Jos C. N. Raadschelders, summarize the last six years of the journal’s objectives, contents, and accomplishments. The authors broadly discuss their editorial activities, past and present, and candidly and succinctly outline the ongoing challenges facing PAR in the future as the leading global journal for interdisciplinary public administration.
THE STUDY OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE UNITED STATES
The study of public administration in the United States is large in terms of the number of academic programmes, the range of journal publications, and the number of scholars. Its scholarship attracts attention from all over the globe. At the same time it is a public administration that is clearly embedded in a specific national culture, just as anywhere else. Three of the main challenges include the strong increase of quantitative-statistical methods, the decline of practitioner authors, and substantive specialization to the extent that generalists’ perspectives are losing ground. What you can’t calculate, you believe cannot be true What you can’t weigh, has no weight for you What you can’t cost, has no value for you.
Toward Public Administration as a Humanities Discipline: A Humanistic Manifesto
I would like to begin with an account of personal experience relating to my scholarly activities. From a humanities perspective, bias is not something that one eliminates, or at least attempts to reduce to an imperceptible influence on one’s thinking as in positivistic forms of research, but instead one uses legitimate forms of bias to understand the experiences one has, bringing, in Weber’s terms, a value-orientation theory of social action and method in achieving Verstehen that draws upon ‘an empathic or artistically appreciative quality’. (1968, p. 5) My own early university education was in philosophy, history, and literary studies. In other words, I am a humanities person. It was only later, and somewhat reluctantly, that I began studies in public administration. My father had been a Deputy Minister and Cabinet Secretary, and my impression while growing up was that public administration was one of the most boring technical fields one could study, and its practice fraught with an internal politics I did not find attractive. As I began my graduate programmes in administration I discovered that my initial impression was true. But only in certain respects. Public administration, at least as it exists in North America, is a technical enterprise. This means that it developed as part of the general pragmatic and practical tradition of Anglo-American scholarship and societal ethos. And as a professional discipline – unlike many European traditions of legalistic administration – it is primarily managerial. It was a shock moving from the humanities tradition centred on the individual and creative activity to one largely dominated by social systems, structures, functions, and cost-benefit analysis. These initial impressions were reinforced by eleven years as a management consultant primarily to government, working with a small team of senior consultants who, to put it kindly, were technocrats. Our work involved the redesign of government departments, rationalising and downsizing government, and evaluating organisations regulated by government. I felt at times as we sketched out on oversized sheets of paper the amalgamation or reorganisation of a ministry that we were moving groups of people around as one would on a chessboard. And in projects where we calculated workload standards, a small adjustment in the number representing workload ratios, 60 or more people could lose their jobs. The drafting of legislation bringing new organisations into being meant that even minor changes in wording