Replacing management with administration

A important driving impetus for O.C. McSwite's in Legitimacy in Public Administration is anxiety about the legitimacy of public administration as a discipline. Public administration focuses on the role and "legitimacy of administration as a part of democratic governance."  The problem is that administration can be seen as taking power away from the people and their elected representatives and vesting it in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats and other experts. As a discipline, PA resides within Political Science, which studies the mechanisms of democracy like elections and legislation. McSwite's experience was that political scientists questioned the legitimacy of PA's subject and methods. Public Administrationists were seen as apologists for authoritarianism. 

I approach the legitimacy of PA from a different direction.  In part it relates to the fact that I am a bad Public Administration student.  I'm interested in organizations, the Administration part of PA, but have been slow to absorb that I'm expected to care about the Public part. It seems strange to be to run across accounts of employee motivation and run across Public Service Orientation as a category.  Suggesting that the people working for a government agency are psychologically different from people in other sectors.  That's not so much my experience on street level, especially not in a town like Nashville where the State government is one of the largest employers, so employment with a State agency is just one of the logical and in some cases most available options for gainful employment and career advancement.  

I'm quite inclined to jumble up for-profit, public, and non-profit organizations. Legitimacy is a central question in Political Science, applied to governments, public agencies, officials, sovereigns, etc. But I see no reason why one should not look into the basis of legitimacy of for-profit enterprises. In the study of for-profits, rather than legitimacy you have agency and shareholder rights. It seems very simple. Are you making money for people who have a right to that profit?  You might debate the trade-off between short and long-term returns, and you probably need to do something to explain away public goods and make them someone else's problem.  Problems for the political scientist rather that the management scholar. 

But for-profit companies make up a huge part of the building blocks of our society, and as a constituent component of the social order they deserve to be subject to scrutiny on the basis of legitimacy. This is obvious on the part of the massive corporations like Facebook and Google that provide and manage much of what passes for public space today. We are long pas the point where shareholder interests can govern them. But I also think that the real estate developer who knocked down an older shopping strip in my neighborhood that was home to several locally important businesses to build a new Mapco should face questions of legitimacy. So far we have no effective ways for addressing the legitimacy of Facebook, and there is no legal basis for controlling that developer's actions. To start, there is at least a moral question and an assertion that people in society with no contractual interest in Facebook or that shopping center have a legitimate interest in what happens. Thinking in these terms--the basis for legitimacy for an economic actor--would point towards ways of managing the marketplace that give greater weight to the socially constructive and constitutive nature of any organization. We might never be able to move towards a different legitimacy framework in the US legal structure, but it seems like a legitimacy framework might ask the right questions. 

To me the question about the legitimacy of PA as a discipline is to compare it to the other primary discipline for studying organizations and the action of individuals within them--Management.  Management training focuses on for-profit organizations, but readily applies itself to the non-profit sector and there is a great longing in society to see public agencies managed rather than administered--run more like businesses.  I was trained in a business school, and it would have made sense for me to continue on and pursue a doctorate in management, but its approaches and methods didn't seem to get at truths that concern me.

Management science is going to evaluate organizations, strategies, and tactics in terms of profit or economic return. Questions about human experience are valuable only insofar as the answers lead to stronger economic performance.  Impact on society is also either an afterthought, or something that is of interest only if you can make the circuitous case that in the end it pays.   

The things that are of secondary importance to management are primary for me. Society is built through organizations of all types. That organizational experience is often inhumane and debilitating, and keeps reverting to various kinds of authoritarianism. Can these organizations can work in humane ways, can people retain their humanity in those environments? Management studies seems to offer little opportunity to go deep into those questions.  Public administration, thanks to the more ambiguous objective statements of public organizations, asks better questions about what goes on with and in organizations, and in other ways people come together.  Administration is more likely to imagine reorganizations of society.  Management will only tune up what is already here. 

So I'd flip the tables on legitimacy of these disciplines--PA, Poli Sci, Management. I would expand Public Administration into a field called Administration Studies and then have that drive the analysis of for-profit organizations, rather than the dispiriting sight of public organizations trying to get in line with ethically and intellectually impoverished business management.  And in the end, I would like to see businesses administered rather than managed. 

This may seem like a very technical distinction, but if you take Foucauldian ideas about governmentality into account, a society's technical practices (techne) and its ways of understanding (episteme) produce the disciplinary power that shapes the social world. Extending the application of legitimacy could create movement in the episteme and in the techne that start to shake something loose.  Simply getting past the point of feeling stuck would be a good start, as long as we can avoid spinning off into political authoritarianism.