This engaging book presents a model for personal reflection on what a career in public service means. It's designed not to convince the reader to take up a public service career, but rather to invite him or her to explore the implications for one's identity that are inherent in the public service life. Lively and anecdotal, Invitation to Public Administration directly confronts the various difficult issues involved with a public service career even as it evokes self-reflection. It is equally useful for undergraduate through Ph.D. level readers, and it is ideal supplemental reading for any foundational course in Public Administration. The book will also stimulate public service professionals seeking fresh insights for their own careers.

This engaging book presents a model for personal reflection on what a career in public service means. It's designed not to convince the reader to take up a public service career, but rather to invite him or her to explore the implications for one's identity that are inherent in the public service life. Lively and anecdotal, Invitation to Public Administration directly confronts the various difficult issues involved with a public service career even as it evokes self-reflection. It is equally useful for undergraduate through Ph.D. level readers, and it is ideal supplemental reading for any foundational course in Public Administration. The book will also stimulate public service professionals seeking fresh insights for their own careers.

Makes the case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethicsThis study of the critical role of ethics and moral responsibility in the field of public administration, Michael M. Harmon and O. C. McSwite posit that administrative ethics, as presently conceived and practiced, is largely a failure, incapable of delivering on its original promise of effectively regulating official conduct in order to promote the public interest. They argue that administrative ethics is compromised at its very foundations by two core assumptions: that human beings act rationally and that language is capable of conveying clear, stable, and unambiguous principles of ethical conduct. The result is the illusion that values, principles, and rules of ethical conduct can be specified in workably clear ways, in particular, through their formalization in official codes of ethics; that people are capable of comprehending and responding to them as they are intended; and that the rewards and punishments attached to them will be effective in structuring daily behavior. In a series of essays that draw on both fiction and film, as well as the disciplines of pragmatism, organizational theory, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and economics, Harmon and McSwite make their case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethics. “Exercising responsible ethical practice requires attaining a special kind of relationship with other people. Relationship is how the pure freedom that resides in the human psyche—for ethical choice, creativity, or original action of any type—can be brought into the structured world of human social relations without damaging or destroying it.” Furthermore, they make the case for dropping the term “ethics” in favor of the term “responsibility,” as “responsibility accentuates the social [relational] nature of moral action.”

In this "postmodern, end-of-the-century" moment, the question of what role public administration can legitimately play in a democratic society has deepened and taken on increased urgency. At the same time the movement toward global marketization has gained enormous momentum, traditional prejudices and racial and ethnic violence have appeared with a renewed virulence, presenting unprecedented challenges to democratic governments. Legitimacy in Public Administration reveals how the issue of administrative legitimacy is directly implicated, indeed central, to this broader issue. It argues that legitimacy hinges at the generic level on the question of alterityuhow to regard and relate to "different others." This book reviews the history of the legitimacy issue in the literature of American public administration with the purpose of demonstrating that this discourse has been distorted by an underlying and undisclosed commitment to an elitist "Man of Reason" model of the public administratorAEs role. Current attempts to reformulate administration to meet the challenge of new conditions will fail, the author argues, because they have not escaped the grip of this implicit distortion. Legitimacy in Public Administration includes a challenging concluding chapter that uses insights from gender theory and demonstrates the connection between the legitimacy question and the critical problem of alterity. The author also offers a new way to fundamentally reframe the legitimacy question, so as not only to help the field of public administration resolve it, but to show how this resolution can create a new understanding of the problem of racial and ethnic prejudice.