Postmodern Perspectives in Public Administration 145
of science to public administration were debated over fi ft y years ago by the two
giants of the fi eld at the time: Dwight Waldo and Herbert Simon. Th is debate is
as meaningful now as it was then. Because this debate is also central to decision
theory, a summary is found in Chapter 7.
Today, public administration is still science and art, facts and values, Hamil-
ton and Jeff erson, politics and administration, Simon and Waldo. Some call for
a grand and overarching theory that “would bring the fi eld together.” For our
tastes, public administration is now very much together in all its complexity, a
complexity richly and forever informed by Simon and Waldo. Although a sim-
plistic characterization, Simon’s early work could be described as high modern
public administration. Because Waldo’s work always questioned the primacy of
objective rational social science, Waldo might be thought of as the fi rst public
administration postmodernist, although he would strongly have resisted such a
categorization.
Technologism
Public administration has always been associated with ways to organize and ways
to manage. Defi ned in its broadest sense, this is the technology of public admin-
istration. Much of public organization and management is low tech, to be sure,
but it is very oft en the management and organization of high-tech institutions
(Farmer 1995, 89). Th e operations of high-reliability systems, such as air traffi c
control, for example, combine high tech and low tech in what Farmer describes
as sociotechnology. An excellent recent example of empirically supported public
organization and management theory that would be described as sociotechnol-
ogy is Hal Rainey and Paula Steinbauer’s “galloping elephant” thesis (1999). Our
best research on the organization and management of large complex institutions
indicates that, using primarily traditional principles of public administration,
these institutions are “galloping elephants” that are surprisingly eff ective and
swift. In other words, low-tech public administration primarily founded on a
generalized understanding of modern theory in all its forms works surprisingly
well in practice. If this is so, empirical support is lacking in postmodern claims
that a public administrative theory built on a modernist scientifi c epistemology
doesn’t work well.
All modern social systems tend to wish to fi nd technological answers to so-
cial, economic, and political questions. A common contemporary argument,
for example, is that the Internet should enhance a citizen’s community and po-
litical involvement. Postmodernists rightly point out that the search for techno-
logical answers to social, economic, and political questions tends to be faddish.
Postmodernists, like social observers generally, worry about the dehumanizing
aspect of both low-tech bureaucratic functioning and high-tech systems, and
they have evidence to support their worries. Consider as illustrative the Tus-
kegee venereal disease project in the United States or the Holocaust in Nazi