Looking for Postmodern Public Administration Th eory 161
of precautionary microadjustments. Because there will be no institutional center,
the emphasis will be on the management of social, religious, ethnic, and cultural
diff erences. When this is done well, there will be an emphasis on modesty and
prudence in administrative action. Nation building as a goal will gradually dimin-
ish as the primary purpose of the nation-state, to be replaced by societies that fi nd
meaning in connections and associations. Th e network will become as important
as the individual, and networks always extract some level of individual confor-
mity for their functioning. Populations will continue to want to recognize each
other as nations, but even the most powerful nations will not have the capacity
in the postmodern global world to protect and serve their citizens. Th e declining
comfort of geographical boundaries will stimulate the discovery of new forms of
human community.
American approaches to postmodern public administration theory tend
to be less bold, choosing to emphasize improved discourse and more humane
and democratic administration (Fox and Miller 1995; Farmer 1995; Jung 2002).
American public administration postmodernists have little interest in postna-
tionalism, whereas European postmodernists tend to be more antistate and have
clearly been infl uenced by the formation of the European Union. Th e breakup of
the Soviet Union, continued social and political unrest in the Middle East, and a
generalized political and economic turmoil in Africa have also infl uenced Euro-
pean postmodernists more than their American cousins.
Finally, the postmodern condition is described as increasingly fragmented
jurisdictionally, with more and more small jurisdictions emerging. At the same
time, vehicles for eff ective regional multistate polities are absent. In the absence
of eff ective regional polities, there are no orderly patterns of regional politics.
Instead, regional power and politics tend to be in the hands of networked techni-
cians, public administrators, specialists representing states, and networked non-
state actors representing nongovernmental organizations and global business.
Th e International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are the best current ex-
amples. Th erefore, in the postmodern world, public administration is more rather
than less powerful and important. Insofar as there is regional and even global
governance, it is primarily the province of public administration (Frederickson
1999b).
One of the more interesting characteristics of postmodern public admin-
istration theory has to do with its approach to methodology. Although some
associated with postmodernism reject empiricism and objectivity out of hand,
most are empiricists in the qualitative methodology sense. Th e most complete
description of this methodological perspective is naturalistic inquiry, an ap-
proach more identifi ed with postpositivism than with postmodernism (Lincoln
and Guba 1985). Nevertheless, from the perspective of empirically based the-
ory, it captures what is now generally described as the postmodern approach to
fi eld research. Th e methodological approach in operational naturalistic inquiry
is as follows: