Abstract
Editor’s Note:
This October issue begins a series of responses to Professor Kasdan’s Disputatio Sine Fine, “`Great Books’ of Public Administration, 1990-2010: Revisiting Sherwood’s Survey in the Wake of Reinventing Government,” from our July 2012 issue. The following pieces by Charles Goodsell, Ken Meier and Larry O’Toole, and Jos Raadschelders are just the first of the impassioned responses that will span at least three issues. If you have something to say on this subject, now is the time.
The answer to that question is doubtless in the affirmative for their authors, but we all know these books are not in the same league as their namesake, the classics assembled by Hutchins and Adler (1963). Yet, all six volumes are important contributions to the intellectual heritage of the field of American public administration, and I am most honored to have a book on the list.
At the same time, I can understand the disquiet among academics over the first choice. Indeed, in my own review of Reinventing Government, I said that the book comes very close to saying that public administration as we know it is obsolete. Yet the single criterion laid down by David Kasdan—and Frank Sherwood before him—was that of having influence. This test does not refer to intellectual elegance, empirical perfection, high literary quality, or even ordinary reasonableness. Yet, whatever the other qualities of Osborne and Gaebler’s (1992) book may be, it indisputably sent thunderbolts through academia and stirred whole governments.
I took the trouble of rereading Sherwood’s Great Books report, which covered the period 1940-1990. This first set of books was as follows, in priority order: Simon’s (1945/1976) Administrative Behavior, Bernard’s (1938/1968) Functions of the Executive, Wildavsky’s (1964/1984) The Politics of the Budgetary Process, Waldo’s (1948/1984) The Administrative State, Mosher’s (1968/1982) Democracy and the Public Service, and Ostrom’s (1973/1974) The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration. What strikes me about these volumes is that all of them helped lay, at least to some extent, the very foundations of today’s field public administration in the United States. Indeed the stated purpose of the Sherwood canvass was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of Public Administration Review (PAR) and, by extension, the creation of the American Society for Public Administration the previous year.
Yet by definition, the original founding of an institution can happen only once. Hence, it is nearly impossible for books published long after that time to have influence equivalent to that of bedrock statements laid down at the beginning. In its present more elaborated and more grizzled state, the field’s influential books are more likely to be more in the nature of extensions, revisions, reformulations, and syntheses. Hence, their impact is inevitably less earth shaking. This does not mean, however, that the 2012 set did not have significant consequences both conceptually and in practical terms; in that the reinventing volume urged a virtual reestablishment in the field, its position at the top is particularly appropriate.
I congratulate Professor Kasdan for taking the initiative to undertake this ambitious project and admire his boldness in doing so. If, however, such a step is ever done again, I have two suggestions to make.
First, I think it would be good to allow more time to pass before selecting the works that should be considered established as timeless. This is especially true for the criterion of manifest influence, because that can be rightly gauged only over time. The Sherwood exercise was published immediately upon the conclusion of the period covered (1990), but half the volumes he selected date from the 1930s and 1940s and the rest from the 1960s and 1970s. Kasdan’s choices were all published in the 1990s. Next time, how about a longer postpublication eligibility period?
Second, what was missing in the methodology of both attempts was spontaneous give-and-take dialogue among the panelists. Although both Sherwood and Kasdan note they talked their projects over with colleagues, the closest proximity to interactive discussion seemed to be exchanges of letters or consideration of comments that accompanied nominations.
Some years ago, I was asked to chair selection committees for awards to be given for outstanding articles published in prior year’s issues of both PAR and Public Administration Times. What I did was to get committee members to examine the universe of possibilities and contemplate the comparative quality of what they found. We then engaged in a lengthy telephone conference call to discuss openly and without inhibition how the given choice criteria should be interpreted and what kinds of possible selections seemed to match that interpretation. Each committee member then sent me their list of their top three. I consolidated these into a weighted priority master list and sent it out. In a final call, we discussed this list and made a decision. The process took time and work, but it raised points none of us had thought of previously and ended with a group-wide consensus. Would it be possible to adapt this kind of process to future “great book” surveys?