Miller H.T., Fox C.J. Postmodern public administration

Rev. ed. — New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2007. — 157 p.This widely acclaimed work provides a lively counterbalance to the standard assessment-measurement-accountability prescriptions that have made showing you did your job more important than actually doing it. Now extensively revised, it articulates a postmodern theory of public administration that challenges the field to redirect its attention away from narrow, technique-oriented scientism, and toward democratic openness and ethics. The authors incorporate insights from thinkers like Rorty, Giddens, Derrida, and Foucault to recast public administration as an arena of decentered practices. In their framework, ideographic collisions and everyday impasses bring about political events that challenge the status quo, creating possibilities for social change. "Postmodern Public Administration" is an outstanding intellectual achievement that has rewritten the political theory of public administration. This new edition will encourage everyone who reads it to think quite differently about democratic governance.The Representative Democratic Accountability.
Feedback Loop.
Orthodoxy.
The Loop Model of Democracy.
The Folly of Binding Behavior by Writing Rules.
Quixotic Mainstream Reforms.
Positivism in Public Administration.
The Problem in Practice.
Persistent Problems That Stem from Positivist Influence.
Falsifiability.
Self-Referential Systems.
Deconstructing the Loop Model.
Presence and Representation.
Representation in a Symbolic System.
Symbols Unmoored.
Alternatives to Orthodoxy.
Neoliberalism.
Privatization, Contracting Out, and Performance Assessment.
Critique of Neoliberalism.
The Constitutionalist Alternative.
Rohr’s Thesis.
Critique of Constitutionalism.
Communitarian/Citizen Alternative.
Communitarianism: Bedrock View.
Communitarianism: Criticisms and Responses.
Hyperreality.
Instability and Incommensurability.
Unstable Signs Leading to a Virtual Reality.
Stable Communication/Epiphenomenalism.
Referents Yield to Self-Referential Signs.
The Thinning of Reality.
Neotribalism and the Decentered Self.
Otherness and Incommensurability.
Fractions and Fragments.
Symbolic Politics.
Symbolic Politics Ascendant.
Corporate Talk.
Suppression of Discussion Regarding Public Concerns.
Hyperreality Versus the Alternatives.
Neoliberalism as Free Market Sloganeering.
Foundationalism of Constitutionalism.
Community as Sovereign.
A Place for Discourse?
The Social Construction of Government.
Constructivist Social Theory.
Constructivism and Structuration Theory.
Using Constructivism to Deconstruct the “Conflated.
Aggregation” Bureaucracy.
Governmentality.
Governmental Rationality.
Subjectification.
Ideographic Discourse.
Symbols as Ordering Devices.
Symbols and Metaphors.
Physics and Metaphors.
Ideography.
Subjective Reality as Pictured Objects.
Ideograph as Unit of Analysis.
Derrida and the Reality of the Image.
Relief from Dissonance.
The Struggle for Meaning Capture in the Public Sphere.
Events, Impasses, and the Authority of the Archives.
Metaphors, Frames, and Ideographs.
Theory/Practice.
Ideographic Events.
From Top-Down Bureaucracy to Bottom-Up Events.
The Spark of Difference.Orthodoxy and Its Alternatives.
Deconstructing the Loop Model of Democracy.
Neoliberalism: The Reform That Hates Government.
Constitutionalism.
Communitarianism.
Media-Infused Hyperreality.
Constructivism and Governmentality.
Recursive Practices.
Governmentality.
A Field of Political Contestation.
Symbolization.
The Momentous Event.
The Changing Game.
Decoherence.
Implications.
References.

About the Authors.