Abstract
This book calls upon public administration to refocus in part on large fundamentals of governance beyond performance management of policy implementation. It proposes crafting normatively defensive strategies to deal effectively and durably with nation-state challenges of government today and beyond. Thus, elevation to higher levels of governance concerns is sought. While dealing with currently urgent realities of the field, the analysis makes a contribution to last.
By way of contrasting much of today’s public administration with the field’s origins and powerful early development, Alasdair Roberts briefly reviews some well-known engagements of a century ago in vast social, economic, and political change. Early embrace of regulatory responsibilities vastly redefined American government. Then public administration became largely engaged and defined in leadership throughout welfare and warfare challenges from the 1930s through the 1960s. Building from sketches of those early fundamentals, the book chiefly analyzes contrasting public performance management approaches that have nearly dominated practice and scholarship during the last four decades. High usefulness of the performance-centric focus is acknowledged, but it is characterized as a damaging narrowing of the field’s ambitions. While it is shown as greatly enhancing methodological and practice disciplines, especially in dealing with vital implementation practices, the performance management thrust is faulted for concentrating chiefly on middle and lower levels of government and society as the field’s main concerns.
This downward spiral of public administration is explained. Dynamic complexities of social and economic realities fueled accompanying disillusionment with government in America and abroad during the 1970s–1980s. The book analyzes these developments as associated with a law of unintended consequences of challenging paths taken, undermining support for government. Drift into conservative and populist politics occurred among important factions. Partisan politics and politicians claimed popular sanctioning of their being in charge of policies, privatizing many functions and redefining public administration as a field of performance managers charged importantly with contracting out and implementation of minimalized remains. Politically, government was excoriated as a source of societal problems, not as a facilitator of solutions. Many academicians and practitioners in public administration were accepting of the lean leavings. The field became, in important part, one of and about subordinate implementers: expertly disciplined underlings to political and other policy deciders on top.
Many universities rushed to change identities of programs, seeking names considered newly attractive. Renamed Schools of Policy and/or Management became prominent. Identity of public administration with topmost government concerns became obscured. The field had gone through earlier phases in emphasis that mostly sought to elevate aspects of it while strengthening overall impacts. Academic origins in governmental and philosophical studies had strongly supported breadth and depth, akin to Roberts’s recommendations. Some specializations attracted timely and/or lasting influence, connecting policies and their performance. Planning, finance and budgeting, public safety, and security are among examples that emerged early and have expanded in importance. Public personnel, often now termed human resources and labor relations, has enjoyed ups and suffered downs following digitalization, privatization, and contracting out of performance.
Roberts stresses successful international relations and nation-state studies. He proposes that, like specialized institutions, general and broad public administration programs and varied specializations within them need to prepare or at least acquaint students with requirements to craft, implement, and continuously adapt strategies and practices for governing. In short, public administration experts at varied levels require reasonable understanding of governance fundamentals and related theories and dynamics. Drawing on classics, among others he cites John Dewey (1927): “the state must always be rediscovered” (p. 256).
During this 21st century, Roberts notes, distributions of powers within the nation-state system are expected by many observers to shift from the West to such technologically disciplined nations as China and to others that also reject the liberal democratic model. Challenges to the American ways of governing are increasingly opposed powerfully, as they were in the 1930s and 1940s. With perhaps stronger prospects of success by competitors now, Roberts stresses that “Scholars of public administration must prepare for debate about the relative merits of democratic and non-democratic strategies for governing” (p. 133). Since this book on Strategies for Governing was published just before the COVID-19 Pandemic, that global example of Roberts’s sustained theme is absent. It would be a compelling addition for an early second edition.
Questions of the 2019 Grand Challenges project of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) are featured in the book’s conclusions: “WHAT government must do over the next decade and HOW it should do it.” Roberts adds, as a third question deemed important by pioneers of the field of public administration, his repeated theme: Are nation-states that seek adherence to liberal democratic principles capable of dealing with problems of large-scale change? Can they achieve order, security, and prosperity while advancing values and disciplines of constitutional democracy?
Roberts’s book is not encyclopedic. He succinctly makes his case without seeking comprehensive review of the field. That is a merit. However, a few topmost names are especially relevant. Herbert Simon and Dwight Waldo, for example, led public administration through similarly basic struggles for decades, starting in the 1940s. Waldo's (1948) Administrative State dealt with historic developments and such leaders as Luther Gulick and Louis Brownlow, and Roberts cites that study in his extensive bibliography. Simon's (1947) earlier study, Administrative Behavior, searched for rigorous scientific tools and he described Gulick’s “Principles” as little more than untested stories. Dwight Waldo recounted to me that he felt forced into a contest for academic survival before later recognition as an analytical historian of the field. Yet, by their old age, the Waldo Award, presented by the American Society for Public Administration for topmost scholarship, was accepted by Herb Simon in 1994 and presented in 1995 in San Antonio. Further honoring Simon’s empirically grounded work, especially bounded rationality and satisficing concepts, he was a keynote speaker at ASPA’s 1997 Conference in Philadelphia that also highlighted honors to Waldo. During professional lifetimes of disciplined searching far apart, together they had broadened, deepened, and elevated the field as necessarily inclusive.
Another missing, long-past example that is especially relevant to Roberts’s study is the famous book by Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky (1973), Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland. That influential study would provide a useful flip side to Roberts’s explanation of needs at meso- and micro-levels of public administration for understanding of his Strategies for Governing. Explaining findings that what finally gets done is in fact policy, these authors were quickly joined during the 1970s/1980s by other scholars in calling for disciplined empirical studies, helping to trigger vital performance management and policy studies of recent decades. A book reviewed in the American Review of Public Administration is an example: When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, by Bernardo Zacka (2017) and reviewed in 2020 by Jodi Sandfort. Wildavsky persistently supported such broadened and deepened scholarship, not narrowing abandonment of philosophical searching, testing, and analysis of theories of governance and beyond. As an example, it was not “going afield” to include Carl Friedrich’s (1958, 1963) The Philosophy of Law in Historical Perspective and other such scholarly inquiries as fundamental to public administration. That study remains powerfully supportive of Roberts’s theme.
While a few such classic references could strengthen this study for readers who lack broad knowledge of the field, a virtue of this book is Roberts’s sustained focus on the here-and-now and the future of public administration. He succinctly makes a timely case in favor of large concerns about governing, while acknowledging merits of pursuing importantly narrower ones.
Vital to understanding of public administration is that it has been and remains broadly and deeply a dynamic field of fields and disciplines in the humanities, arts, and sciences. It is not a narrow enterprise, although it benefits from inclusion of vast numbers of relatively narrow specialties and expert subspecialists. It benefits from both broad and specialized attachments alongside varied, disciplined methodologies, as in the example of Dwight Waldo and Herb Simon throughout lifetimes of differently productive searching. Roberts’s search requires similar inclusiveness.
By calling for reinvention of the field, hopefully readers may be encouraged to reflect: What defines the field in this Digital 5G Era of COVID-19 Pandemic? As only one category of many examples, look way back and currently for some answers in how some teachers and practitioners find roots today in Henrik Ibsen’s (1882) Enemy of the People; Luigi Pirandello’s (1921) Six Characters in Search of an Author; Carl Sandburg’s (1936) epic book, The People, Yes; and Joy Harjo (2019), Muskoke (Creek) Nation and current Poet Laureate, An American Sunrise. Answers in public administration are often found by going widely afield, as in such searches through arts and humanities as well as sciences and technologies that illustrate the field’s concerns. Across its many subjects and methods of practice and research, a broadly connecting focus of public administration is generally agreed upon: searching for human dignity and reasonableness under constitutional rule of law. Vast ranges of focused, disciplined endeavors are essential in our searching. Roberts’s Strategies for Governing is a timely example.
