Toward Public Administration as a Humanities Discipline: A Humanistic Manifesto

Abstract

I would like to begin with an account of personal experience relating to my scholarly activities. From a humanities perspective, bias is not something that one eliminates, or at least attempts to reduce to an imperceptible influence on one’s thinking as in positivistic forms of research, but instead one uses legitimate forms of bias to understand the experiences one has, bringing, in Weber’s terms, a value-orientation theory of social action and method in achieving Verstehen that draws upon ‘an empathic or artistically appreciative quality’. (1968, p. 5) My own early university education was in philosophy, history, and literary studies. In other words, I am a humanities person. It was only later, and somewhat reluctantly, that I began studies in public administration. My father had been a Deputy Minister and Cabinet Secretary, and my impression while growing up was that public administration was one of the most boring technical fields one could study, and its practice fraught with an internal politics I did not find attractive. As I began my graduate programmes in administration I discovered that my initial impression was true. But only in certain respects. Public administration, at least as it exists in North America, is a technical enterprise. This means that it developed as part of the general pragmatic and practical tradition of Anglo-American scholarship and societal ethos. And as a professional discipline – unlike many European traditions of legalistic administration – it is primarily managerial. It was a shock moving from the humanities tradition centred on the individual and creative activity to one largely dominated by social systems, structures, functions, and cost-benefit analysis. These initial impressions were reinforced by eleven years as a management consultant primarily to government, working with a small team of senior consultants who, to put it kindly, were technocrats. Our work involved the redesign of government departments, rationalising and downsizing government, and evaluating organisations regulated by government. I felt at times as we sketched out on oversized sheets of paper the amalgamation or reorganisation of a ministry that we were moving groups of people around as one would on a chessboard. And in projects where we calculated workload standards, a small adjustment in the number representing workload ratios, 60 or more people could lose their jobs. The drafting of legislation bringing new organisations into being meant that even minor changes in wording

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