Making It Meaning Full: Postmodern Public Administration and Symbolic Interactionism

Abstract

Ten years ago Charles Fox and Hugh Miller (1995) published Postmodern Public Administration, which made a strong case for a discourse model of public administration and policy-making. Around the same time other books on discourse appeared, which helped create the sense that a discourse movement was underway within the discipline of public administration. This paper argues that if this movement truly is to effect a “sea change” within the discipline, then it is important to conduct empirical research informed by interpretive methods that investigates how meanings are produced and disseminated, how meanings are collectively established in actual policy and administrative situations, and how norms are introduced, negotiated, shared, and applied to policy and administrative situations. What is needed, then, is a broad, theoretical perspective that is compatible with Fox and Miller's discourse theory, but which also can serve to guide scholars' efforts to conduct empirical research into policy and administrative discourse. This paper argues that symbolic interactionism offers such a perspective. It is theoretically congruent with Fox and Miller's position, it is methodologically broad and has generated an exceptionally rich set of empirical discoveries on all manner of human activity.

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