TY - JOUR
AU - Bozeman, Barry
AB - Abstract This response to George Frederickson’s retirement speech on the meaning of “public” in public administration highlights Frederickson’s intellectual influence, both on this author and, especially, the entire field of public administration theory. The current paper argues that both the empirical and normative meanings of public are vital and that the interaction of the two helps frame not only public administration theory but also the practice of public administration. By treating “public” as little more than a sector label, a stereotype, it is easy to march in lockstep with those who misguidedly marginalize public administration as little more than a means of addressing market failure. After reading of George Frederickson’s retirement lecture on the meaning and implications of “public” in public administration, my first thought, one that does me no credit, was self-congratulation. The teenager still in possession of some portion of my brain exclaimed, “Your ideas have influenced no less a personage than George Frederickson. Well done!” Then the more mature part of my brain issued a sharp comeback: “So, Bozeman, where do you think you got these ideas?!?” After just a bit of reflection, I quickly remembered that had it not been for George’s pioneering efforts my own work would perhaps not have been possible. He is the one who made me fully understand that “public” is not just an empirical concept but an inescapably normative one. Perhaps I can be indulged a brief account of personal history to show how and why George Frederickson’s ideas proved instrumental in reorienting my scholarly work, the same work that George graciously credits in his paper (Frederickson, 1991). I met George more than 40 years ago when we both arrived at University of Missouri Columbia, he as the Dean of a newly formed College of Community Development and myself a 27-year-old assistant professor, a member of two departments, political science and public administration, neither involved much with the College where George served as Dean for a brief period before moving to Eastern Washington State University as its 21st President. Over the course of our careers, we would have much in common intellectually, though that was not soon evident. Our shared perspectives occurred chiefly because I changed my views, ultimately embracing Fredericksonian public administration. While one might ascribe many different, valid meanings to Fredericksonian public administration, the core of my meaning is a healthy respect for both normative and empirical public administration scholarship and an assumption of the beneficial interrelationship between the two. I think George understood this from the outset of his career, but I did not. George was trained in public administration at the University of Southern California and when I met him in Columbia, Missouri in 1976 he had just come from a stint at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, then the center of the universe for public administration thought, featuring such intellectual luminaries as Charles Levine (whose faculty position I would take a few years later), Jesse Burkhead, Jim Carroll and, most notably, Dwight Waldo. I knew none of the people at the time and, with the exception of Waldo’s pathbreaking ideas, I was only vaguely aware of their work. My early academic path accounts for this ignorance of much of the best-known work in public administration. When I came to University of Missouri for my short stint before moving to the Maxwell School for 15 years, I was a relatively recent graduate of the political science department at Ohio State University. I chose the OSU program because in the 1970’s it was one of the few political science departments with a reputation for rigorous training in quantitative methods, a department taking the science in political science quite literally. I was one of the few students in our large program who had any interest in public administration. The faculty in the OSU Department of Political Science viewed public administration as an atheoretical stepchild of political science. This was the conventional perspective in many leading political science departments at the time and one of several reasons why public administration scholars were beating a hasty retreat and forming multidisciplinary public administration programs, such as the new School of Public Administration at OSU, a program housed in the College of Business. The OSU political science faculty were so unimpressed with the public administration “subfield” that they had even changed the name of their specialty from public administration to policy process implementation. No one even taught a course labeled public administration and my faculty advisor strongly encouraged me to refrain from taking courses at the newly established OSU School of Public Administration. This brief history accounts in part for the fact that when I arrived at the University of Missouri, George Frederickson and I were not yet on intersecting intellectual paths. I was hired to teach public administration and was certainly looking forward it. It had taken me very little time to shake off any tendencies toward being a well-oiled political science automaton. I had already tired of pondering the dimensionality of roll call votes and the specification of budget constraints in public expenditure models. However, despite my newfound delight in becoming what my mentors would view as a political science fugitive, I had not fully embraced public administration scholarship. To me, still in my public administration chrysalis stage, it seemed to me that the intellectual firmament of public administration was not so firm. Despite the fact that I respected George Frederickson, liked him immediately, and greatly enjoyed our all too infrequent, cross-campus meetings and discussions, I initially viewed his scholarly work with some suspicion, in part because it did not conform to the particular ideal of science that newly minted political scientists of that era had been taught to embrace. More damming, I knew that George was a devotee of the “New Public Administration” (Marini, 1971), a major intellectual movement actively seeking to reformulate public administration around normative ideas. To my young and ill-informed view of public administration scholarship, most of what was discussed at Minnowbrook and packaged in the Marini book was not really serious scholarship but rather advocacy and retreaded moral philosophy. The more I read about “self-actualizing public administrators” the more I became opposed to it. At the time, I thought that “neutral competence” was not such a bad thing in a public administrator. I reasoned: “public administrator- who voted for you and what are your auspices for imposing your will?” Another pillar of the New Public Administration, one which Frederickson was to feature throughout his career, was social equity. I was all for social equity, no problem there, but who defined it? Why public administrators? Should not elected officials and voters enact social equity? While the Marini volume was required reading in public administration seminars for at least a decade, I was at the time more impressed with Victor Thompson’s view of the organization world, especially his book Modern Organization (1961), which I then viewed (and still do) as one of the most trenchant analyses of pathological bureaucratic problems. I subsequently used and referred to the book in most things I wrote on the topic of red tape. Thus, it should be no surprise that when I first heard that Thompson had written a review of Toward a New Public Administration and published the review in American Political Science Review, I sought it out. Since this is the same Victor Thompson who would go on to write the book Without Sympathy or Enthusiasm (1975), the most formidable of repudiations against the New Public Administration, the review of the Marini volume is turned out to be just as scathing as one would expect. The papers in the volume are, in Thompson’s view (1972, p. 620) “a predictable syndrome of ideas, assertions, criticisms and emotions.” After dismissing the majority of papers as ones that “could have been presented comfortably to a Conference of Old Public Administrationists,” Thompson concludes “perhaps more interesting, if no more enlightening (than the papers themselves) is the mixture of notions and emotions which constitute the “Perspective.”” Here and elsewhere, Thompson makes clear that he is unimpressed with notions and emotions. While at first reading, I concluded that Thompson’s dismissive view of the New Public Administration was quite correct, I came to believe that he had unwittingly provided an excellent justification for reformulation of public administration theory along the lines endorsed in the New Public Administration. Yes, the New Public Administration was, especially in its initial formulation a ragged set of poorly matched ideas, but this it got right: public administration theory, must be emotive and must be diverse and plentiful in its notions. One of the reasons I came to accept the “notions and emotions” view of public administration theory was that I carefully read George Frederickson’s work, including his version of New Public Administration (1990), still the best available scholarship on the perspective. His book gives heft to the loose threads of ideas one finds from the Minnowbrook conference and Marini book. Frederickson makes a convincing case that public administration should not be limited to clear-eyed, cold-hearted analysis; without some serious reflection on normative issues the “science” of public administration is little more than a minor tributary of administrative sciences. Frederickson (1980, p. 9) characterizes “classic” public administration, the perspective that he is trying to overturn, as seeking “to answer either of these questions: (1) How can we offer more or better services with available resources (efficiency)? or (2) How can we maintain our level of services while spending less money (economy)?” He goes on (pp. 10–11) to suggest that “the public administration focus…has tended to drift from the problem to the institution” and tells us that the New Public Administration is “less concerned with the Defense Department than with defense…less with building institutions and more with designing alternate means of solving public problems.” This view is entirely consistent with the case advanced in George’s retirement lecture on the meaning of public in public administration, a perspective that cares little about the boxes and lines of organizations and sectors and, instead, begins with the problem at hand. It took me a while to embrace George’s view that both the normative and empirical are absolutely integral in public administration, but I did come around and have spent a good deal of energy on the vexing problem of how to integrate empirical and normative publicness (e.g., Bozeman and Moulton 2011; Bozeman, 2020; Bozeman and Crow, In Press). After working for many years on dimensional publicness theory (Bozeman 1987), which in short form may be viewed as organizational behavior framed by the confluence of market and political authority rather by sector or legal ownership, it became clear to me that even empirical questions required normative answers. Let us take a simple but viable example—if we aim to create the most effective combination of political and market forces in our institutions and our organization designs, how do we know if we have succeeded unless we begin with a clear understanding of “effective?” If we do not a relevant, substantive meaning for “effective,” then we can always find those ready to give us this prosaic answer: effectiveness is efficiency and, especially the success of markets, that we have surely succeeded when we have best optimized, highly functioning of markets, ones that have achieved technical efficiency in the allocation of goods and services. Without even any intentional action on our part, we can expect the Panglossian (or is it Adam Smithian) invisible had to ensure the best aggregate outcomes, defined in terms of wealth creation and economic growth. We have analytical tools such as cost-benefit analysis and input-output analysis that help us know when we have succeeded. We have a set of theories to help us gauge effectiveness- market failure, public choice, and, indeed, large swaths of neoliberal economic theory. Of course, none of these provide a satisfactory assessment of effectiveness for public or collective action because, ultimately, what most of us want in effectiveness “that which is what is good and enabling” not merely “that which is efficient in producing wealth” (Booth, 1994; Scott, 2020). No better evidence of the limitations of economic productivity and efficiency as success and effectiveness indicators can be found that from Jean Tirole (2014), the 2014 awardee of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. According to Tirole, “making this world a better world is the economist’s first mission.” But as one reads the article recounting the ways in which the world is made a better place by the interaction of government and the private sector, the “better place” is achieved by enforcing intellectual property, taking needed anti-trust action and upholding patents and trademark rights. This’s it. No social equity concerns, no strengthening of democracy or the public sphere, no sustainability, no improvement in human sustenance. Tirole’s view is certainly not atypical and, indeed, in many respects it is more friendly to public values than many. If one needs further evidence of reducing “public” to mean little more than preservation of sector boundaries and responding to market failures, there are plenty of other places to look (see Johnson 2015 for a historical overview). Indeed, some scholars contend that market failure criteria are much too generous in according a role to government and non-market actors (e.g., Aktan 2015; Jaworski, 2012; Tullock et al. 2002). How does this relate to the meaning of public in public administration? My answer is similar to the one George Frederickson provided in the paper published here and in many places during much of his career. Whereas I tend to focus on public values, the rights and obligations of all citizens, a sort of social compact as to what is good and valued (Bozeman, 2007), George focuses on many of the same issues but also specific public values such as social equity, justice, citizen participation as not only as actions but as act but virtues. Without such normative investment in public values, public administrators and public administration practice risk becoming the caricatures that so many of our fellow citizens believe them to be. Worse, if public administration stands for little more than efficiency, and often delivers inefficiency, it plays into the false narratives of our most dangerous and self-serving politicians, the ones who vilify the “deep state” while, at the same time, suborning and even participating in mob attack on the physical embodiment of American democracy. Consider what George Frederickson had to say, not on January 6, 2021, but in 1982 (p. 501): Something is wrong. Virtually all of our institutions seem to be in trouble. We are balkanized into racial, economic, ethnic and demographic and sexual divisions. Privatism, greed, self-interest, and self-indulgence challenge the notion of community(.) While we continue to enjoy great political freedom, the lack of support for and confidence in our institutions results in despair and, in some cases, fear. Here and in other instances, George’s prescription involved building a sense of community, but also developing public administrators who “return to an emphasis on the “public” aspects of the field and to the basic issues of democratic theory’ (Frederickson, 1982: p. 503) and “freeing the imagination and creative abilities of public managers and freeing them from their preoccupation with organizational maintenance” (p. 506.). Re-thinking “public” is central to a public administration that takes on the vision and, indeed, the courage, that Frederickson advocates. One of the most important steps is to resist strongly the concept of public one finds in much of neoliberal, efficiency-dominated economics and political economy theory. When public administrators embrace the notion that the role for government (or public) is limited to intervening when markets have failed, then the opportunity to have effective, creative, solutions-oriented public service evaporates. When one makes no qualitative distinction between soldiers and mercenaries, public and private prisons, when being a good contract administrator is about all there is to being a good public administrator, when the US Patent and Trademark Office is not just a reputable and effective small government agency, but public administration’s highest calling, then the chance for a public values-focused governance slips away. As Frederickson contends, government is not and should not be the same as public; public must be broader than government. But it is the terms and conditions and the purposes of privatization, contracting out and hybridization that make all the difference. When the public purposes are clear and are driven by sound management considerations rather than ideological blinders, many different institutional mechanisms can be useful in delivering public values to citizens. In such cases, a public values-focused manager need not be a government official but may be from the private sector or from a voluntary or nonprofit organization or a member of an organization with so many cross-cutting types of authority as to not even be identifiable by commonplace nomenclature. The issue is not the institutional arrangement or efficiency, rather the starting point must be the public values to be achieved for citizens (not customers, but citizens). Only after identifying and legitimizing public values should we focus attention on the institutional arrangements required for their achievement. When we begin with the idea that government should be in the background, to be called upon grudgingly, only if markets fail, then it is nearly inevitable that one of the most fundamental institutional guarantors of a society will fall into decay. Normative publicness and empirical publicness depend on one another to traverse impractical lines between public and private, lines that pose limits on the ability to achieve public values. In his lecture, George Frederickson tells us that “governments float in a vast public sea” that “public is understood to include the many ways people act together or act collectively.” The “notions and emotions” we find in public administration, far from being a weakness, are imperative for both scholars and for public interested practitioners of all stripes and in all sectors. George Frederickson challenges those of us who agree that collective action begins with public values to provide empirical support for this view. Similarly, those of us who study public service motivation and, perhaps more important, observe it in our students, cannot afford to stand idly by as this invaluable resource is squandered. George Frederickson knew that we need to be reminded about the deeper meanings of public, ones not reflected in simple stereotypes or in reflexive castigation of public service. Public administration should not confine itself to interference when markets have failed or to idealogues’ views about the transcendent importance of pricing efficiencies in unfettered markets. If we have learned anything from the past few years of social and economic turmoil it is that markets can create great wealth while at the same time creating great inequality and misery (Atkinson, 2015; Stiglitz, 2012; Stiglitz, et al., 2020). Without a governance balance wheel attending to the public values aspirations shared by all citizens, everyone loses. With his concept of the public in public administration, George Frederickson does us the great service of reminding us that we are all, inescapably, prisoners to concepts. However, he also makes clear that we prisoners hold the keys. 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TI - Response to: H. George Frederickson’s Giving the Public in Public Administration its Due
JF - Perspectives on Public Management and Governance
DO - 10.1093/ppmgov/gvab008
DA - 2021-04-16
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/response-to-h-george-frederickson-s-giving-the-public-in-public-vaqahbBxjZ
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -