Suchergebnisse

Camilla Stivers'book, Bureau Men, Settlement Women, is being misread as a feminist political tract and overlooked as the resource that it is for the field of public administration. A review of the current literature of feminism reveals that Stivers'work, a historical study of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, cannot be described by any version of feminist theory. Rather, her central concern is how the male-dominated Bureau movement pushed the field away from the model of the city as "home"—which developed in the women's reform movement—and toward the idea of the city as "business." A Lacanian psychoanalytic reading reveals a critical implication of her research: The women's movement carried the potential to bring a balance to public agency discourse, one adequate for the new realities that the social problems of the day required. The administration as business model denies the achievement of this balance.

Theoretical development in the field of public administration is impaired by its implicit, unacknowledged commitment to the incompatible ontology of economics. This ontological commitment restricts the possibility for defining the role of the public bureaucrat to that of being no more than a technically proficient of services, a definition that the field has long sought to escape. A psychoanalytic perspective, especially the one formulated by the French theorist Jacques Lacan, can help this problem. The aspects of Lacan's psychoanalytic model relevant to this issue are explicated. It is then argued that the model holds major implications for public administration, among which are (a) a radical change in its epistemology, (b) a complete reassessment of the function of the human ego in social life, (c) an ontological rationale for moving beyond the instrumental goal attainment schema for administrative action, and (d) a venue for public administration to move past its anachronistic modernist conceptual framework and into a more appropriate postmodern manner of thinking about its identity.