Abstract
For many years, public administration has suffered from an identity crisis. This article argues that public administration's identity actually exists in the form of abandoned and often neglected fragments of well-established knowledge. We advocate reassembling these fragments and arranging them using a logic that will crystallize an identity for public administration. Our approach is based on viewing public administration as a social science of results, not a profession relying on a generic viewpoint. We maintain that there is a trialectic system of relationships among three pillars of public administration: the political, the legal and the managerial. The interrelationships between these pillars generate configurations, temporary arrangements geared toward certain issues. At any given time, one pillar may be emphasized over the other two. Such variations should not be viewed as a crisis of identity. Rather, this article suggests a research agenda for examining the identity of the field through longitudinal historical studies in which configurations may be identified in order to determine the conditions and circumstances that led to the variations in emphasis among the pillars. The more knowledge that is accumulated, the better we will be able to develop a reasonable approach for public administration and free it from oft-repeated cries of identity crisis.
Points for practitioners
Practitioners should be aware of the logic presented in this article. A logic that views the identity of public administration not in generic terms, but rather as a field of inquiry that is influential and consequential. It should be regarded as a social science of results that politicians use to solve citizens' problems. Hence, in democracies, the three pillars, the legal, the managerial and the political, interact constantly, constituting a range of public administration configurations. Configurative cyclicality should be regarded as public administration's normal, natural state of being. Normality means that a temporary configuration of the three basic pillars of the field does not testify to a crisis of identity, but constitutes an interim variation of interrelationships under special circumstances and conditions.
Introduction
For many years, public administration has suffered from an identity crisis. Denhardt (1981: 628) describes it as ‘a situation in which we seem to be somewhat unsure of the historical and philosophical grounding of our work’. Researchers have posited various origins for this problem (Haque, 1996; Rutgers, 1998). Harmon and Mayer (1986) ascribe the causes of the crisis to the unresolved problem of the dichotomy between politics and administration. Public administration borrows its theories and approaches from many disciplines and tends to incorporate generic organization and management literature without respecting the difference between the public and private sectors. Ostrom (1974) went as far as characterizing this identity crisis in Kuhnian (1970) terms of crisis such as the abundance of theoretical diversity, intellectual discontent, and unsettled epistemological concerns. Pollitt (2010) adopted psychiatric terminology in his illuminating diagnosis of and prognosis for public administration as a scholarly field. In his words, public administration ‘suffers from multiple personality disorder … has a multiple personality partly because it comes from different places (multidisciplinary), and partly because it is attempting to get to different destinations’ (2010: 292).
It seems as if the problem may be rooted in the history of the discipline, one in which it was pulled in many directions as a result of the conflicting ideas of its ancestors. They left behind a broad and eclectic body of knowledge that remains unintegrated.
Therefore, this article will argue that public administration's identity actually exists in the form of abandoned and often neglected fragments of well-established knowledge stored on the shelves of many libraries. We maintain that assembling the pieces and integrating them into a coherent logic will crystallize the identity of public administration.
Before we present the conception of public administration's identity, we will explore several factors that have contributed to the magnitude of the identity crisis. Examples of such factors include the inherent tensions between administration and politics (Christensen, 2009), and between those who see administration as a science and those who regard it as a profession (Kettl, 2000). Each of these factors, and all of them together, created pitfalls into which even the best of researchers fell. However, almost every solution to a pitfall ended in a repetitive result in which the knowledge learned did not in itself or cumulatively advance the field; rather, it set it back time and again. The question, then is, is it possible to free public administration from its inherent traps, which during its intellectual history became an entrenched structural feature of the discipline? We contend that such a goal is possible if we can free the discipline from the intellectual limitations that have been forced upon it. First, we should reject the approach that has separated public administration from political science in an attempt to turn it into an independent field. Second, we must move beyond the practical goal of improving government work through prescription in order to set a new research agenda. In Frederickson's (1997) words, we must revivify the spirit of public administration.
In order to liberate the field from the traps in which it is caught, this article proposes a framework that is based on viewing public administration as a social science of results, not a profession relying on a generic view. Our approach is based on the relationships among the three pillars of public administration: the political, the legal and the managerial (Rosenbloom, 1983). The interrelationships between these three pillars create a configuration that can vary in its emphasis. At times, the configuration may favor one area over another. However, such favoritism is temporary and should not be viewed as a crisis of identity or exploited as a singular opportunity for reconstructing the past in the image of cyclical repetitions that do not advance the field. Rather, this article suggests examining the identity of the field through longitudinal historical studies in order to determine the conditions and circumstances that brought about variations in the configurations. Accumulating knowledge will help us develop a reasonable approach for public administration and free us from oft-repeated cries of identity crisis.
The cycle of repetitions
Public administration has suffered from an artificial and forced separation from politics (Lee, 1995: Meier, 2007). This separation denies the trialectic dynamics between the pillars noted above. It assigns public administration a very shallow intellectual base by emphasizing its practical, virtually neutral, role in executing public policy. This perception was pushed zealously to its extreme in the United States. Woodrow Wilson (1887), the founding father of public administration in America, set the tone in his seminal article in which he argued that, ‘the field of administration is a field of business … it is removed from the hurry and strife of politics’ (1887: 20). Apparently, since then, ‘the field of public administration seemingly cannot live with or without the dichotomy’ (Rosenbloom, 2008: 57).
The intellectual history of the field illustrates periods of attraction to and distancing from adherence to this logic of dichotomy. Progress throughout the years resembles the swing of a pendulum. In the decade between the late 1920s and 1930s, ‘public administration became established as a field of study and faith in the politics–administration dichotomy reached a zenith’ (Roberts, 1994: 221). Then, administrative functioning was dominated by the idea of managerial principles that were close to the laws of nature. Later on, in the late 1940s, new scholarship abandoned the dichotomy. Gaus (1950) and Waldo (1948) saw politics in any administrative undertaking. Decades later, New Public Management reasserted faith in the dichotomy by restricting public administration to managerial tasks (Kettl and Dilulio, 1995: 2). Therefore, the vision of public administration moved from managerial concerns to political concerns, and then back to managerial ones, creating a cycle of repetitions in which the discipline was trapped without an identity (Gray and Jenkins, 1995).
Such swings in the pendulum epitomize a crisis of identity for several reasons. First, it turns the logic behind public administration into a vicious circle with no point of exit. Second, it confines public administration's understanding of reality to one in which management is not a generic pillar, but is blended with politics. The perpetuation of the crisis of identity has severe implications for the image and conduct of public administration as a discipline and an academic field of inquiry. It suffers from a poor self-image, seeing itself as defensive and apologetic, a field with no disciplinary history or accumulated knowledge (Ventriss, 1987, 1998). It restarts itself anew each time (Olsen, 2005). Its boundaries are breached by various invaders, some from neighboring social science disciplines, who are greeted and appreciated as great contributors. At the same time, temporary invaders such as elected politicians destabilize the very conceptual foundations of public administration. Lack of agreement, whether with regard to the major questions concerning the discipline or with appropriate methodologies, produces almost obsessive self-questioning. Public administration is quick to regard any temporary, insignificant matter, as well as changing fashion, as a threat to the dominant paradigm or theory in the field. Sometimes, the field seems to engage in absolute acquiescence. At other times, it seems paralyzed. Such paralysis is evident in statements that there is actually no difference between public administration and private management (Boyne, 2002; Murray, 1975). Therefore, there is no place in political science for studying, researching, and teaching public administration. At other times, the dichotomy prevails, and advocates argue about which of the pillars comes first. At still other times, scholars engage in a futile, impossible search for the optimal combination of the three pillars.
Why are these issues a problem? They do not allow public administration scholarship to work through the arguments that deny its identity. Hence, the time has come to return to basics (Stillman, 2001). We maintain that public administration's unit of analysis is not merely the organization, efficiency or performance, or the number of individuals employed, but is the sum total of the interrelationships between the three pillars that are the managerial, the legal and the political.
The professional trap
Farazmand (2012: 499) argues that public administration ‘still suffers and will continue to suffer from a deficit of status and respect within and outside the university’. We maintain that the source of this lack of respect lies in the desire to be viewed as a profession. The debate over the nature of public administration dates back to the long-standing question of whether the practice of public administration is an art, a science or a craft (Berkley, 1975: 3–8; Dubnick, 1999: 7; Lynn, 1994, 1996: 149–166; Majone, 1989: 42–68). Dwight Waldo provided an in-depth study of public administration's identity problem in his two 1968 essays. He rejected the view of public administration as a sub-discipline within political science but was also opposed to granting public administration a distinct status as a discipline among the social sciences. Instead, he favored a solution that would deprofessionalize the field, claiming that ‘we try to act as a profession without actually being one and perhaps without the hope or intention of becoming one in any strict sense’ (1968b:10).
Herbert Simon (1957) promoted the scientific approach to understanding the problems of administration, arguing that decision-making is the heart of administration. However, uniting the field around one core concept (Raadschelders, 2009: 3) together with adherence to a strict positivistic approach to inquiry provoked substantial discontent among scholars who were and are concerned with the scientific aspects of public administration as a field of study. Greenfield (1986), Riccucci (2010) and Raadschelders (2011a) underscored the unfortunate consequences of Simon's work that shifted attention from questions about the nature of public administration to an obsessive concern with the methods of inquiry into it. The ontology of public administration study cannot be ascertained only by methodology (Raadschelders, 2011b: 920). Public administration is more than an organizational or management science, a technical discipline that pays little attention to law, politics and normative questions (Ringeling, 2012: 2). Goodsell (1992: 247) termed the derivatives stemming from law and politics ‘great beacons of administrative conduct [that …] are essential to democratic and honest administration [that …] should in no way be disparaged’. The debate raged between supporters of a narrow conception of science and analytical rigor (common in the natural sciences) and those who favored a softer approach (familiar in the social sciences and humanities). Such debates consistently invigorate the art/science dichotomy in public administration scholarship. In other words, if not confined to a strict, positivist rigor, public administration should be treated as an art. In Wildavsky's (1980: 15) words, art ‘is the solving of problems that cannot be expressed until they are solved’. Since its inception public administration has been an applied field, seeking to ensure that its findings are based on experience (art) and relevant to practice (Dodge et al., 2005: 287). This approach may explain why the unpredictability of complex administrative circumstances distanced positivist thinkers, who gained academic supremacy in the field, from the political, normative and legislative aspects of public administration, restricting their scholarly interest to managerial aspects.
Management or public management came to the fore in the early 1980s and was accepted by scholars in public administration as a special topic that departed from the normative orientation and the unscientific art and craft image of the field. Some saw it as having the potential to bridge the gap, viewing ‘public management as a movement in the direction of the elaborate body of research and theory in general or “generic” management’ (Rainey, 1997: 406). Generic management supplied the scientific basis for the professionalism to which public administration had long aspired.
In a subsequent development, New Public Management brought public administration back to its glory days when clear-cut, tailor-made principles and prescriptions promised to improve administrative conduct. Meier and O'Toole (2009) reassured us that New Public Management rolled public administration back to the early 1950s when Simon claimed that the principles of administration were proverbs.
How do we free ourselves from this science vs art debate in which we have trapped ourselves in our pursuit of professionalism? Our solution follows Lynn's (1994, 1996) analysis that encourages the strengthening of the scientific aspects of public administration. Rather than obsessing over whether public administration is an art or a craft, we should concentrate on identifying the factors that influence the interplay among its three main pillars: the political, legislative and managerial (Farazmand, 2012: 488).
Public administration's identity: the three pillars
The three pillars of public administration are well known. David Rosenbloom tried to put the three together, but contended that they must always remain separate from one another. Later, after the publication of his article in Public Administration Review in 1983, and after the appearance of the first edition of his co-authored book with Kravchuk, he termed the three pillars in the fifth edition of the same book (2002) as the traditional managerial, political, and legal approaches. Viewing the three pillars as different approaches to public administration, and at times even as representing three different disciplines (Wright, 2011: 96) fuels rather than ameliorates the crisis of identity.
In contrast, we conceive of the identity of public administration as based on the mutual existence of and interaction among the three pillars. Each of the three addresses an essential function: what may be achieved (politics), how it may be attained (management), and under what strictures, limitations and rules (legality).
The legal pillar
Public administration is subject to the rule of law (Rohr, 1986). Normative and ethical activity in a democracy involves public ethics, substantive and procedural defenses granted to the public with regard to the public administration's rights of enforcement and the obligation to comply with its instructions. The legal aspect of public administration means that it must be a responsible institution (Rosenbloom, 1983: 222–223).
These are value constraints that any managerial activity is required to respect. When they clash with particularistic values or objectives that some seek to achieve, legality imposes constraints on the realization of these goals. Administrative law forces values and guidelines for activity and decision-making on public administration, a condition emanating from the fact that public administration is supposed to advance the public interest. To this end, the law is entrusted into the hands of enforcement authorities and governmental resources. Thus, public administration cannot simply do what it wants. It is subject to the law (Ben-Dor, 1991). Rosenbloom and Kravchuk (2002) noted this point best when they wrote that, ‘In the United States, the federal and state constitutions define the environment of public administration and place constraints on it’ (2002: 6).
The political pillar
Elected politicians use public administration to deal with problems troubling the public. However, we must clarify whether the politics involved are the politics of how or the politics of what. The politics of how emphasizes managerialism. Here public administration is enjoined to be efficient, small, economical and uninvolved in policy matters. In contrast, the politics of what derive from a political view and at times an ideology about the role of the state and the scope of the functions of public administration. Proponents of big government as well as believers in small government affect the broad construction of public administration, shaping and reshaping the balance between the pillars. Big government supporters may reduce the role of the managerial pillar while concomitantly reinforcing the importance of the political pillar. In contrast, those who favor small government may shift the balance toward management while weakening the value of politics and legalism (Lan and Rosenbloom, 1992: 536–537).
Even though politics controls and directs management, it is important to remember that political logic may contradict good administration. Politicians shape public administration and shift the emphasis on one pillar or another in accordance with their changing interests. Politics may require the undertaking of activities that are harmful to good administration and at the same time blame bureaucrats for the failures of the system.
The managerial pillar
Turning public administration into generic management restricts its practice to questions of how to accomplish certain goals. Therefore, significant efforts have been invested in introducing managerial tools, techniques and procedures to improve the functioning of government. Hence, concepts about organizational behavior have been in favor, separating politics and legalism from public administration. Public administration portrayed as management is preoccupied almost exclusively with the narrow, generic meaning of decision-making, motivation, commitment, communication, planning, efficiency, outputs, cost–benefit analysis, clients, service, speedy response, competition, marketing, entrepreneurship, quality, risk taking, ongoing improvement, and performance (Lan and Rosenbloom, 1992: 536–537; Rosenbloom, 1983: 219–220). Such an approach reflects the historical narrative of the dichotomy that has designated public administration's function as ‘pure’ managerialism.
In summary, the legal pillar describes the laws, obligations, and limitations defining the relationships among the pillars and has the power to critique them. The legal pillar determines the limits of the political pillar in its relationship to the managerial, for example, by proscribing patronage. As for the relationship between public administration and management, the legal pillar defines the processes that are necessary such as tenders, the criteria for proper conduct, transparency, and the methods of arriving at reasonable and rational decisions. In principle, the political pillar determines what needs to be achieved, while the managerial pillar decides how it is to be achieved. Of course, the reality is more complex and blurry. At times, politics intervenes, and at times management evades its legal obligations.
The trialectic relationships among the pillars
Years ago, Lawrence Lynn (2003) implied this trialectic interrelationship among the three pillars when he wrote: A fundamental intellectual challenge remains, however: formulating an approach to public administration, and to public managerial responsibility, that fully comprehends the implications for organizations, institutions, and practice of the Constitutional separation of powers among three branches of government and of Constitutional ordering of authority. Public administration is at the nexus of law and politics, of the judiciary and the legislature, and administrators' ideal points are compromised in the public service bargaining that results from the parallelogram of forces. (2003: 634–635)
Oscar Ichazo (1982), who created the term trialectic, argues that its central metaphor is a ‘material manifestation point’ (MMP): any identifiable state of a system at a given time – people, groups, objects, plants, animals, thoughts, emotions, ideas, etc. – that inevitably mutates into another MMP. Jeffrey Ford and Laurie Ford (1994: 765) clarified that ‘according to trialectics, there are no “things” in the world other than change, movement, or process’. Process refers to change, transition, movement, or motion. This constant pattern of movement in which relatively stable patterns are not fixed or permanent but constantly in motion eventually arrives at a temporary resting point in which equilibrium is achieved. It is this equilibrium that provides temporary stability.
One example of the trialectism logic is the interrelationship between the three pillars at different points in time, which create an empirical configuration. In its literal definition (Oxford English Dictionary), configuration means assembly, organization in the form of a shape for a certain time period. In the terminology of psychology, configuration is synonymous with gestalt, a unified whole, a pattern with characteristics different from its parts. Any individual part or element should be treated not as an absolute concept or fixed meaning but as a relative one, a variable whose meaning depends on its relationships with other elements in the overall configuration (Phillips, 1976).
In public administration, configurations crystallize due to variations in the balance among the pillars. These configurations create significant patterns of behavior for public administration. At some points, legal issues may dominate. At other times, it may be political or managerial issues. The key point here, though, is the relative nature of the interrelationships. This relativity implies that the meaning of the pillars varies depending on the relationships with the other components in the whole configuration. For example, public administration has no pure concept of efficiency as is customary in management. However, if accountability is to be defined only in terms of managerial efficiency, it will impinge on other significant democratic principles such as responsiveness.
Our approach accentuates configurations over other models in the earlier scholarly literature. Even when researchers acknowledged the existence of the three pillars of public administration, they offered varied characterizations of their interrelationship. Whereas configuration emphasizes the changing structure of the relationships among the pillars, Rosenbloom (1983) sought to unify contradictory pillars. Svara (1998: 57) proposed complementarity or a continuum as an approach to coping with the dichotomy, arguing, ‘A model of complementarity is a stronger foundation of public administration …. A complementary relationship … implies separate parts and distinctness, but the emphasis is on how each contributes to the whole’. Monjoy and Watson (1995) proposed redefining and reinterpreting the dichotomous relationship. Consequently, they granted supremacy to the legal pillar. Furthermore, in reinterpreting the dichotomy they reiterated that, ‘the dichotomy was a conceptual distinction underlying a theory of democratic accountability’ (1995: 232). Finally, Kettl (2000: 28) asserted with dismay that, ‘American public administration is unlikely ever to reach a stable equilibrium’.
The history of public administration reveals that the only stability that was achieved among the pillars manifested itself in the formation and dismantling of configurations. At times, management took the fore, dominating the vision of public administration, and at times politics or legality became the lens through which public administration was examined. Those who seek a stable balance among the pillars are engaging in a futile undertaking, which forces them to constantly reinvent public administration anew.
Viewing the history of public administration through the lens of configurations proves that balance, if it occurs, is temporary. Thus, configurative cyclicality should be regarded as public administration's normal, natural state of being. Normality means that a temporary configuration of the three basic pillars of the field does not testify to a crisis of identity, but constitutes an interim variation of interrelationships under special circumstances and conditions. A real crisis of identity may emerge in situations in which a radical deviation places undue stress on one pillar over the other two (Kelman, 2007; Moe and Gilmour, 1995). Newbold's (2010) article entitled ‘Toward a constitutional school for American public administration’ demonstrates the differences between normality and a crisis of identity. Failing to understand the difference between the two condemns public administration to a vicious circle of repetition that leads to paralysis rather than progress. It strengthens the sense of déjà vu, the sense that we have been down this road before. Rather than continuing to invest wasteful and superfluous efforts to rediscover what is already known and to constantly reinvent itself, public administration should embark on a different path.
Public administration is in urgent need of conceptual flexibility, of resigning itself to the fact that variations in the emphasis of any one pillar do not mean a crisis of identity. Instead, it indicates an arrangement, a temporary form of configuration, one that may be necessary in different periods and societies. This practical, conceptual flexibility is necessary for public administration; it emanates from its being a dependent field, externally motivated, responsive to changing circumstances through various arrangements of the pillars. Any temporary assemblage of the pillars in the form of a configuration does not imply a crisis of identity, but reflects the ability to be flexible and to adjust to a changing reality.
The real challenge facing researchers is the crystallization of all of the known configurations, all of the variations in emphasis among the pillars. A flexible conceptual framework grounded in elasticity is necessary, even obligatory, because it will be able to encompass the many empirical historical incidents in which public administration moved in diverse directions. Creating such a framework should at least reduce the constant refrains about an identity crisis. In particular, it will obviate the need to rediscover time and again what is already known. On a practical level, it will help us identify the variations among the pillars and explain why such variations occurred. This framework will promote a thoughtful analysis of the trialectic options and minimize potential pitfalls as we move forward.
An agenda for trialectic research
What should public administration be doing now in order to liberate its scholarship from the vicious circle of repetitions? Can public administration recover from this chronic pathology that involves constant proclamations about an identity crisis? Where should public administration be going, both intellectually and logically? Answering these questions is challenging. Indeed, it is debatable whether the goals implicit in them are entirely achievable.
We suggest several ways of dealing with these issues. First, there should be a new research agenda for public administration accentuating the three pillars that constitute public administration's identity in a democracy. Second, in order to break out of the vicious circle of repetitions, the field should establish several binding requirements for accumulating knowledge. Initial efforts should be devoted to identity studies. We maintain that by identifying the conditions and circumstances (Lynn, 2008) under which configurations were created and dismantled, an identity for public administration will materialize. Hopefully this identity will obviate any regressive urge to return to the old vicious circle of reinventing the wheel (Hood, 1996: 268). Attempts to understand the developments and changes within each pillar are also significant, particularly the identification of the exogenous influences and internal pressures that affect their relative positioning in any configuration.
Identity exploration
At the heart of identity studies based on the assumption that public administration is composed of three pillars is the need to identify the conditions and circumstances under which configurative changes, variations in the emphasis among the pillars, occurred.
Trialectic theory envisions that interactions amongst any three elements will result in perpetual transition, movement or motion (Ichazo, 1982). This constant structure of movement in which patterns are not permanent but constantly in motion until they eventually arrive at a temporary resting point (Ford and Ford, 1994) creates a framework of relationships that can provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena in question in this article. Jabareen (2009: 51) asserts that ‘conceptual frameworks possess ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions, and each concept within a conceptual framework plays an ontological or epistemological role’. Ontological assumptions deal with information about ‘the way things are’, while epistemological assumptions relate to ‘how things really are’ and how ‘things really work’. The methodological aspect provides ways and means to assess and analyze the occurrence of the phenomena in the real world. In sum, a conceptual framework guides us in formulating research questions, determining where to look for evidence and how to produce an answer (Allison, 1971: 245). In an empirical mode of operation, a conceptual framework identifies the research variables derived from theory and clarifies the relationships among the variables based on a solid methodology.
In order to improve our understanding of public administration's identity, we suggest a research agenda whose goal is to build a conceptual framework that will help future research move to the next level in empirical terms. This framework should incorporate the three pillars plus the exogenous factors that can amalgamate them into a singular configuration.
We maintain that public administration is a social science of results, one that responds to and accommodates its ontology and epistemology to exogenous influences. External events, the confluence of historical forces, economic trends, and changing political preferences (Roberts, 2004: 327) promote variations in the interrelationships among the three pillars. Hence, throughout public administration's history we have always understood the ‘nature of reality’ and how ‘things really work’ through these pillars. We contend that public administration lost its way when its scholarship overlooked the changing nature of the configurations among the three pillars. Therefore, to regain our footing as a discipline, we propose a focus on two research questions. First, how do changes in exogenous factors affect the interplay among the three pillars, possibly favoring one over the other? Second, how do changes in exogenous factors promote or impede the amalgamation of the three pillars?
In an extensive review of the literature we were unable to single out a specific theory that incorporates a comprehensive explanation of the factors that promote or impede the amalgamation of the three pillars. Therefore, we looked for partial theories that identified the possible effects of economic and ideological changes, globalization and changes in the concept of civil society on public administration. For example, Blyth (2002) pointed to the effects of changes in the economic situation on what governments could and should do. He asserts that the twentieth century witnessed two such events (2002: 4–6). The Keynesian economic ideas that arose in the wake of the Great Depression postulated that governments could and should control the national economy by institutional change. This approach resulted in greater governmental involvement in the economy and the creation of regulatory institutions and instruments. However, in the economic downturns of the 1970s and 1980s, these mechanisms were downgraded and ultimately neglected (2002: 4–5). Blyth‘s political economic explanation identifies the relationship between an exogenous factor (the independent variable) and public administration's (identity) amalgamation (dependent variable). Although we cannot prove causality between the two, an actual concurrence of events occurred. Thus, we cautiously hypothesize that in times of severe changes in the economy such as the Great Depression, public administration's scholarship will focus on the political and legal pillars rather than the managerial one. However, when the government reacted in the opposite direction in the 1970s and 1980s, the scholarship emphasized the managerial pillar.
Similarly, Haque (2004) tied shifts in state ideology to the functioning of government. Neo-liberal ideas shrank government power, relegating it to a managerial stance (Premfors, 1998). Hence, we can assume that public administration scholarship in this period would tilt towards the managerial pillar while neglecting the legal and political ones. Mander and Goldsmith (1996) explained that the globalized economy with its many super-structural changes, including supra-territorial power, affected public administration. Milward (1994) argued that those trends hollowed the state. Here we can assume that public administration's configuration would also focus on the managerial pillar, reflecting the spirit of managerialism that international organizations enforced worldwide.
In contrast, the current growing attention in the public administration literature to ‘publicness’, ‘citizens' participation’, ‘empowering citizens’, ‘citizens not customers’, ‘deliberation and collaboration with citizens for legitimate, effective and democratic public administration’, and ‘democratic values’ (Box et al., 2001; Denhardt and Denhardt, 2000; Eikenberry and Kluver, 2004; Haque, 2001; Roberts, 2004) signals a shift in public norms. Such exogenous changes shifted attention from the managerial pillar to the legal and political pillars.
Hood (1991) was skeptical about one-factor explanations for the rise or fall of a particular doctrine in public administration. His sophisticated analysis includes factors that are difficult to measure such as a sudden success, special social conditions, and the epoch-making attraction of opposites (1991: 6–9) as alternative explanations for public administration's managerial configuration. While we agree that a well-developed framework should incorporate factors that affect the relationship between the independent and dependent variables, we still maintain the value of collecting evidence that demonstrates public administration's adaptation to changes in various economic situations.
Relevant data may be obtained from archives and libraries that store academic publications. For example, Perry and Kraemer (1986) and Raadschelders and Kwang-Hoon Lee (2011) reviewed methodological trends in the study of public administration. The first authors discussed articles by topic written between 1975 and 1984. The second pair presented a similar analysis for 2000 to 2009. The distribution frequencies of the subject matter in categories such as management or citizen participation correspond to exogenous changes, allowing us to make inferences about changes that occurred. When it comes to our scholarship, mining the storehouse of information we have already amassed will free us from reinventing the wheel. Viewing public administration as a science of results requires a fresh vision that tries to determine how ‘things really work’. The data for defining the independent variables involved and identifying their complex interplay may reside on our library shelves.
Knowledge accumulation
Donald Kettl (1993: 408) stated very clearly that, ‘Public administration has lurched, since World War Two, from one fad to another’. Mary Guy (2003: 642) attributed the confusion to changing scholarly whims in public administration when writing that, ‘deciding which road to take was easy compared to understanding where it is taking us’. This article explained that public administration embarked on a faulty, bumpy road that condemned it to a vicious circle of repetitions with no exit. Breaking this cycle requires gathering up the fragments of existing knowledge, those abandoned between fads and those left in the middle of the road, that have not led to a satisfactory destination, namely, the creation of an identity. Therefore, meticulous attention to knowledge accumulation is crucial for shaping an identity for public administration. First, it will prevent future attempts to rediscover that which is already known. Second, it will direct future studies to explore and collect data resulting from variations in configurations, thereby crystallizing an identity for public administration. Appropriate knowledge accumulation should adhere to the following three guidelines.
First, public administration should not be separated as a field of knowledge from the behavioral social sciences or from political science. In order to accumulate knowledge, public administration must constantly refer to its roots. New Public Management detached public administration from its original home (Deleon and Denhardt, 2000), allowing old mantras or principles to revive, while pushing aside past research achievements. This approach favored normativity instead of empiricism; prescriptions instead place of probability-based explanations, simplifications instead of complexity, universality instead of relativity (Meier and O'Toole, 2009). Severing public administration from its natural home resulted in a knowledge shortfall. Important research findings were left to rest on library shelves.
Second, highlighting one pillar should not come at the expense of and/or erase the achievements reached by emphasizing the other two pillars. Therefore, in order to prevent circular repetitions, we must understand that public administration in a democracy is a three-dimensional phenomenon. For example, it is unthinkable that in order to strengthen the managerial pillar, prior achievements reached by emphasizing the legal pillar such as reducing patronage, nepotism, corruption, injustice and enabling transparency should be ignored.
Third, in order to foster public administration's identity, the field must be liberated from its intellectual and professional traps. First and foremost, it must break free from the imposed logic that forced a separation between administration and politics. Second, it must reject the aspiration to position itself as a generic profession. Without lifting these restrictive chains from public administration, it will continue to look to managerialism both for intellectual and professional reasoning. Constant, rigid devotion to a dialectic way of thinking supplemented by the desire to be a generic discipline obviates the flexibility that is urgently required to encompass the vast range of public administration configurations that hopefully will crystallize into an identity for public administration.
Summary and possible implications
This article claims that public administration's identity actually exists in the form of abandoned and often neglected fragments of well-established knowledge that are stored on the shelves of many libraries. We advocate a novel approach to the question of identity in which these pieces of knowledge are reassembled and arranged using a logic that will direct future research endeavors toward crystallizing an identity for public administration. We maintain that public administration is a social science of results, not a profession relying on a generic viewpoint. We also argue that the trialectic system of relationships among three pillars – the political, the legal, and the managerial – lead to outcomes in public administration. In addition, the interrelationships between these three pillars create configurations, temporary arrangements among the pillars geared toward dealing with certain issues. At any given time, these configurations may emphasize one pillar over the other two. These transient configurations are subject to exogenous influences emanating from the surroundings. Throughout public administration's history, such variations were interpreted as a crisis of identity. Scholars exploited such opportunities to reconstruct the past in the form of cyclical repetitions that do not advance the field. They reinvented the already known, thus impeding the accumulation of knowledge, which is a prerequisite of the sciences. In public administration's early history, most scholars focused on managerialism. Then, they discovered politics and later on reinvigorated legality. Currently, in the aftermath of New Public Management, they have rediscovered legality and politics (Box et al., 2001) as a means of coping with the deep frustrations and serious damage caused by the emphasis on the managerial pillar. Therefore, in order to enhance the accumulation of knowledge, we argue for the need to examine the identity of the field through longitudinal historical studies that investigate the construction and dismantling of configurations with the goal of determining the conditions and circumstances that led to the emphasis of one pillar over another. Longitudinal historical studies of identity that embody a new research agenda for public administration will also supply important information about the possible implications of the costs and benefits of numerous configurative variations. Creating such determinations will help avoid problems and facilitate damage control if they occur. Such a flexible attitude toward public administration is a key ingredient in the identity of public administration.