We no longer believe that the truth is true when all its veils have been removed.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1994
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Chapter 25
From Positivism to Postpositivism: An Unfinished Journey
Laurent Dobuzinskis
CONTENTS
Disciplining Administration... 558 The Proper Object of a Positive Science of Administration: Mechanistic and
Organismic Metaphors ... 563 Public Choice: Positivism Revisited? ... 567 Toward Postmodern Government? ... 572 Toward a More Client-Centered Approach... 573 Debureaucratization... 576 From Explanation to Interpretation ... 578 Postpositivist Science and Public Administration ... 580 Conclusion ... 584 Notes ... 585 References ... 586
Today, the legitimacy of public bureaucracies is more and more often challenged by an increasingly individualistic citizenry and by new political
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forces (e.g., the Republican majority in Congress). Public servants in most Western democracies must deal with many new demands and expecta- tions. At the same time, they also face severe financial restrictions. Indeed both the scope and the role of government have become very problematic in the United States and around the world. Original ideas and reform proposals have been advanced in recent years; they reflect a new under- standing of policy analysis and public-sector management more suited to the problems of “postmodern” societies. Much-talked-about reforms have been implemented in the United States and other countries. Does this mean that public administration has been radically transformed, or are these changes merely the outcome of yet another fad? Have we really entered the age of postmodern government?
Before answering that question, a few definitions need to be provided.
To begin with, the phrase “public administration” is less simple than it may appear. Public administration is both an art and a science. It is a practical activity, with its own rules of professional conduct and criteria of excellence, as well as an academic discipline, with its own theories and methodological precepts. (There are even dissenting voices claiming that public administration is neither a discipline nor a profession, or maybe is one, but not the other (1)). The discipline of public administration is itself composed of two camps: one, centered in political science or sociology departments, which does basic r esearch on bureaucracy;
another, centered in professional schools, which is more concerned with problem-oriented research (2). The two sides of public administration do not always match. Thus any generalization about trends in public admin- istration must be examined very critically.
Moreover, the sociocultural context of public administration greatly influences its intellectual content and its tacit values. This chapter is concerned primarily with public administration in a North American con- text (i.e., the United States and Canada). Within this context there are obvious and not always reconcilable differences between national, state, provincial, and municipal governments. Indeed, even within any single level of government there usually are significant variations among depart- ments, commissions, and so on.
The heterogeneity of public administration being granted, there clearly exist some concepts, values, and goals that cross institutional and disci- plinary boundaries. The formative period was marked by a generally positivist understanding of how human organizations function and of the psychology of their members. Now positivism is another vague term that has been rendered almost meaningless by critics who equate it with whatever methodology they reject. But, as a starting point, it can serve as a convenient umbrella for a range of approaches that were (or are still) characterized by (a) their emphasis on objective, as opposed to
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normative, analysis — the assumption being that the observer can achieve a critical distance from the observed and independently constituted real- ities under examination; and (b) the notion that lawlike regularities can be identified for the purpose of explaining and predicting both natural and societal phenomena.
Postpositivist approaches challenge both these assumptions. Postpos- itivism, however, does not constitute a well-integrated, coherent doctrine.
Postmodernism, of which postpositivism is an aspect, is even mor e difficult to pin down. It included various philosophical currents opposed to the rationalist doctrines that form the intellectual legacy of the Enlight- enment. In its most radical expression, postmodernism undermines all hierarchical orderings: there are, according to this view, no foundations upon which either theoretical knowledge or societal structures can be safely grounded. In a less strict sense, postmodernism refers to societal trends that pose a challenge to the set of institutions and cultural patterns we have inherited from industrial society as it existed prior to the emergence of the information revolution (circa 1960). As such, postmod- ernism encompasses many areas of cultural life that bear little or no relationship to the practical concerns of government officials. However, societal changes and cultural trends do have consequences for policy making and public-sector management.
Although it may not be helpful to speak about postmodern politics or government as if these were factual realities, there is little doubt that public administration is in ferment today. The positivist certainties of a few generations ago no longer provide the solid ground upon which the discipline can grow. Not everything that happens in the world of public administration can be interpreted as an aspect of the emergence of postmodern values, but the term “postpositivism” describes rather well some of the new directions in public administration. And yet the shift from positivism to postpositivism in public administration is neither com- plete nor entirely evident. This chapter provides a general perspective on the circumstances and effects of this complex dynamics.
Over the course of the last two decades, we have witnessed the emergence of a critical discourse that challenges the idea that objective, empirical models are appropriate for dealing with political and organiza- tional phenomena. Doubts have also been raised about the degree to which actual scientific practice corresponds to the idealized model pro- posed by positivistic accounts of “the” scientific method. This chapter attempts to show that it would be wrong to describe this evolution as being a simple and unambiguous shift from one paradigm to another.
Whether other disciplines (e.g., political science) that also evolved from a positivistic to a postpositivistic stage is a moot point, the hope is to show that public administration has never been unambiguously positivistic
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nor has it become wholeheartedly postpositivistic. As far as public admin- istration is concerned, the positivistic discourse never became a coherent and all-encompassing “grand narrative,” as Lyotard1 would say (3). Here we encounter an interesting paradox: with its partial narratives, its suc- cession of incompletely formulated, or only superficially applied para- digms, public administration has always been standing “on the brink of the postmodern condition” (4).
The first section traces the origins of public administration back to a political and cultural climate that was very receptive to the idea that science could provide answers to the problems of the time. The second section examines the extent, although limited, to which this outlook meshes with the view that organizations are like machines that can be designed and controlled by experts. The third section raises the question of whether efforts undertaken over the last two or three decades to apply the methodology of public choice to the study of bureaucracies mark a qualified return to positivism. The fourth section examines the circum- stances that have led to a renewed emphasis on citizen involvement in administrative and policy matters, and on the design of flexible, adaptive organizations. One can discern in these developments at least an echo of postmodernism. The final section examines new currents in scientific thinking which suggest that a more adequate science of public adminis- tration can be developed from a postpositivistic perspective.
Disciplining Administration
The 19th century was the age of positivism. Empirical observations and logical deductions came to be seen as the only legitimate sources of knowledge. Science and technology appeared to provide rational grounds for the establishment of a new social, moral, and political order. Auguste Comte, for example, argued that “the development of all sciences followed from mathematics, through astronomy, the physical and biological sci- ences, and reach their apogee in the rise of the social sciences” (5). Even if Comte coined the term “positive philosophy,” he was certainly not the only thinker who contributed to its development. Most of the social philosophers and pioneers of the early social sciences shared the view that social realities can be known objectively, i.e., that separating facts from values is both possible and desirable. This was true of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, to name some of the most important ones, and in a more qualified sense, this was true also of Marx (6).
The practical effects of this new faith were not immediately visible.
However, the political and bureaucratic elites in western Europe undertook
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to reform their administrative systems early in the second half of the century. For example, in Great Britain the Trevelyan-Northcote report of 1857 marked the fist step toward the creation of a professional civil service;
by 1870 a politically neutral Civil Service Commission was in charge of recruiting the members of the British professional administrative elite, and a rudimentary system of classification was in place. When Max Weber wrote his classical analysis of bureaucracy, the institutions he was describ- ing existed in most countries of continental Europe. Administrative reforms in North America took a little longer to produce noticeable effects. In both the United States and Canada, the British example inspired many active reformers; books and articles were published on this topic (7). But the practice of political patronage was so well entrenched — indeed, Jacksonian democracy had made a virtue out of political patronage — that it became necessary for the reformers to mobilize political support.
While administrative reforms in Britain and in other European countries came about as a result of a top-down process, it was a bottom-up process in the United States as various groups, notably the National Civil Service Reform League, took up that cause. Their campaign for a professional civil service had very practical objectives. Their discourse, however, revealed an underlying commitment to “science” defined less as a specific activity than as a mythical force. In an age when there was still no reason to doubt that science and technology might bring anything other than
“progress,” one could believe that technological rationality ought to guide social and political matters.
The momentum toward administrative reforms gathered up speed during the Progressive Era (1896–1920). However, movement in that direction had begun even earlier. In the 1870s and 1880s political pressures and theoretical reflections converged; at both the practical and the theo- retical levels, the ideal of a professional public service took shape. It became evidently clear to a variety of interests that the requirement of a modern industrial society in a phase of rapid expansion could be met only by a professional public service dedicated to rational principles of efficiency and nonpartisanship. It was “getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one” (8), as Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1887; Wilson, in fact, was involved in the reform movement. Thus Congress passed the Civil Service Act (Pendleton Act) in 1883, which marked a decisive step toward the implementation of the merit principle in the U.S. government.2 Throughout the following decades, the scope of the merit system contin- ued to expand at the federal level as well as in many states. Also, the budgetary process was rationalized by the introduction of line-item bud- geting. At the municipal level, many cities adopted the city-manager system; indeed, some reformers tried to push the idea of a state manager as a counterweight to the governor (9).
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In this context, public administration emerged as a discipline. Of course, the study of government and the search for scientific principles of administration can be traced back to much earlier times. The ter m
“bureaucracy” itself dates back to 18th-century France when it was first used in its modern sense by Vincent de Gournay (10); he could have had in mind the “Physiocrats” (e.g., Turgot, Quesnay) who had posed some of the very first maxims of rational governance. Classical political economy, as originally conceived by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, further advanced the idea that managing the affairs of the state is something that should be guided by demonstrable principles instead of being left to the caprice of the sovereign. However, public administration as we know it today in North America originated in the last decade of the 19th century and in the first two or three decades of the 20th century.
Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 seminal essay “The Study of Public Adminis- tration” is ritualistically cited as the historical foundation of the discipline.
According to Paul van Riper, who looked at the citations in the public- administration literature between the 1890s and the First World War, Wilson’s paper actually had little impact at the time it was published (11, 12). Regardless of its practical influence, Wilson’s article eloquently con- veys the values that inspired the pioneers of the discipline; they defended and promoted these values in a number of classical texts (e.g., Frank J.
Goodnow’s Politics and Administration, 1900, or W. F. Willoughby’s Principles of Public Administration, 1927). What Wilson did was to provide an application to public administration of the positivist dogma that facts must be separated from values by proclaiming that politics and adminis- tration belong to different spheres. From that perspective, the task of public bureaucracies is purely instrumental; it is strictly concerned with the efficient implementation of policies and programs.
The instrumental quality of bureaucracies was also an essential element of Max Weber’s analysis (13). Although references to his writings on the subject now appear in most textbooks, North American scholars were not familiar with them until the mid-1940s. However, despite this chronological discrepancy, Weber’s ideal bureaucracy deserves to be at least briefly mentioned in the context of this discussion of the positivist nature of the foundations of public administration.
The politics-administration dichotomy has long ceased to be embraced as an empirical reality. Middle- and upper-level bureaucrats have become accepted as policy makers in their own right since the 1940s. With the considerable extension of the responsibilities of the state that began in America during the New Deal, elected officials have been unable to compete with the expertise and know-how of their bureau- cratic officials. The same holds true for Canada; indeed, in the 1950s it was common to say in Canada that the top-ranking bureaucrats of that
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era — the so-called mandarins — were running the country.3 In both countries, the policy-making role of senior bureaucrats has been curtailed in more recent years by political leaders determined to reduce public expenditures and to ensure stricter accountability. But even the achieve- ment of these goals is conditional, in part at least, on the cooperation of senior bureaucrats.
The positivist separation of facts and values resurfaced under a new form with the triumph of strategic planning in the early 1960s. Policy analysis in the age of Planning Programming Budgeting System (PPBS)4 was trumpeted as a rigorous, scientifically based exercise in fact finding and program evaluation, while politics was described as irrational and disruptive. This more modern version of the politics-administration dichotomy itself collapsed under the weight of evidence showing that strategic planning has failed in both the private and the public sectors (14–16). As Henry Mintzberg explains (17), the idea that large organi- zations should pursue strategic goals is not pr oblematic; rather the problem lies in the professional planners’ conviction that strategy for- mation should be the product of a controlled process of analysis and reporting, a “system” that functions independently of the contingencies of the market or of politics.
Thus supposedly revolutionary concepts and methods often turn out to be recycled ideas. To put it in less polemical terms, a historical perspective is too often lacking in public administration, as Guy Adams notes (19). We need to follow an historically informed and perceptive approach in order to evaluate Harold Lasswell’s contribution to the dis- cipline, and to appreciate the tradition he represented. On the one hand, his efforts to create new interdisciplinary “policy sciences” (20, 21) often seem to run parallel to the reformulation of the old politics-administration dichotomy into a technocratic politics-policy distinction. The epistemology of the proposed policy sciences shares with the behaviorist social sciences of the 1950s and 1960s a commitment to linear causal modeling using statistical methods. On the other hand, Lasswell insisted that the policy sciences are not simply applied social sciences (22). The positivism inher- ent in his methodological prescription was balanced by a contextual orientation that took values as an integral part of the analytical process.
The policy sciences he envisioned were to be “the policy sciences of democracy.” Democracy needs both enlightened leadership and the free- dom to engage in critical debates. The Lasswellian scheme achieved a synthesis of both aspects. The policy advisor or public-sector manager who would wish to be guided by it would have to be both priest and jester, to borrow a metaphor from Douglas Torgerson. The priestly function is that of the professional analyst carefully collecting data according to the best methodological rules. Lest he or she confuse these data with the
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“real” world (or the many worlds constructed by other actors in the political system), the policy analysis must also take care to answer the jester’s irreverent questions, like “is this perhaps not too neat?” (23).
We can detect here the influence of John Dewey. His thoughts had a profound impact on the generation of progressive social scientists who laid the foundations of public administration. Dewey defended the idea that the scientific methods should be used to solve social problems (24).
But Dewey was not a dogmatist positivist (25); he did not agree that facts and values belong to completely different spheres. On the contrary, he maintained that experience can help us sort out values, that the empirical world is where values can be tested. Democratic procedures are precisely the means to that end. Lasswell had been a student of Charles Merriam, and Merriam had been influenced by Dewey, who had been his colleague at the University of Chicago (Dewey in philosophy, Merriam in political science). As Gerald Caiden explains,
[Merriam] encouraged his staff to engage in public controversy and reform advocacy. It was from his department that L. D.
White produced the first undergraduate textbook, Introduction to Public Administration (…1926), which evidenced less enthu- siasm for basic principles and scientific management [than authors like Willoughby] and endeavored to take into account the political environment of public administration (26).5
To recap, the first steps toward the creation of a new discipline concerned with the study of public administration were taken at the turn of the century by academics who believed strongly that science and technology could improve the efficiency of state institutions. Moreover, they thought a scientific approach to matters of administration would place limits on the irrationality of the political process. However, they were not dogmatic positivists; they did not subscribe to all the tenets of logical positivism as it was then taking shape in philosophy departments (25).
Dewey’s philosophy is of central importance here. This is because of its significant influence on the thoughts of his contemporaries in academe and beyond, but also insofar as it is symptomatic of the ambiguities — or complexities — of pragmatism and the Progressive movement. Science and technology were promoted by the reformers in part because of what they represent in terms of analytical rigor and objectivity. Science was valued by many reformers because they also hoped that by making the political process more rational and less subject to partisan influences, the cause of authentic democracy could be further advanced. In other words, the facts-values, politics-administration dichotomy was itself harnessed to a higher end.
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