Is public administration so effective that, as William Poole once
wrote, "it is highly desirable that policy practice be formalised
to the maximum possible extent"? (FAM 2014) This favourable view on
policy and implementation can be contrasted with an opposing view
by Thomas Sowell, who warned that "you will never understand
bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure
is everything and outcomes are nothing." (FAM 2014a) Contrary to
these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the
book), public administration (in relation to policy and
implementation) are neither possible (nor impossible) nor desirable
(or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on
different sides) would like us to believe. Needless to say, this
questioning of different opposing views on policy and
implementation does not suggest that the study of public
administration is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related
to public administration) -- like policy analysis, program
evaluation, sociology, psychology, philosophy, performance
management, organisational development, economics, anthropology,
geography, law, political science, social work, environmental
planning, human resources, organisational theory, budgeting,
ethics, and so on should be ignored. (WK 2014, 2014a & 2014b)
In fact, neither of these extreme views is plausible. Rather, this
book offers an alternative (and better) way to understand the
future of public administration in regard to the dialectic
relationship between policy and implementation, while learning from
different approaches in the literature but without favouring any
one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily
compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a
new theory (that is, the tensional theory of public administration)
to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way, and is
organized in four chapters. This seminal project will fundamentally
change the way that we think about public administration in
relation to policy and implementation from the combined
perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with
enormous implications for the human future and what I originally
called its "post-human" fate.
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