Abstract
We are excited to welcome you to our new feature, Perspectives, and its inaugural essay. Through this new feature, we will provide a venue for an exchange of ideas about administration and society. The focus will be on theoretical, philosophical, and methodological issues and controversies in the study and practice of administration in society. We expect the feature to offer a space for creative, novel, critical, and cross-disciplinary essays that challenge our understanding of administrative theory and literature. We particularly welcome commentary that pushes the boundaries of existing theory and research and offers different perspectives that are not well represented in public administration scholarship.
To that end, in our first essay, Udo Pesch and Pieter Vermaas provide a critical re-reading of Rittel and Webber’s classic 1973 essay Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Pesch and Vermaas argue that, although the paper is unquestionably influential, its influence has been limited to the discussion of the wickedness of problems in administration and policy, largely ignoring the discussion of the ‘dilemmas of planning’ upon which Rittel and Webber based their argument. Pesch and Vermaas argue that the fixed institutional set-up of administration, in its interplay with an evolving society, is ill suited to “re-solve” wicked problems because the institutional setting is itself one of the contributing factors of wickedness.
We expect Perspectives to offer more such stimulating analyses and reflections in future issues, enriching the content of Administration & Society and sparking lively exchanges of ideas.