130 6: Postmodern Th eory
context by Douglas McGregor (1960). Individuals in organizations, McGregor
argued, are naturally inclined to work, to seek responsibility, to cooperate, to be
productive, and to take pride in their work. Organizations, however, are struc-
tured and managed on the assumption that employees dislike work and if given
the chance will be lazy and will shirk, and because of this, directions and produc-
tion quotas are necessary. By the mid-1960s, the humanistic or organizational
humanism perspective in public administration was emerging, based largely on
the work of Barnard and McGregor.
In the late 1960s, generally associated with what came to be known as the New
Public Administration, a group of theorists resistant to what they believed were
exaggerated claims to scientifi c validity in public administration met at Syracuse
University’s Minnowbrook Conference Center in upstate New York. Th ey were
concerned with what they judged to be the misuse of data and facts to justify con-
tinuation of the war in Vietnam, and they believed that behavioral and objective
public administration was relevant neither to such pressing public issues as war,
poverty, and racism, nor to the organization and management of public insti-
tutions. From the Minnowbrook Conference and many subsequent gatherings
emerged a set of concepts that challenged the orthodoxy of the day.^2 Among the
concepts and assumptions that emerged from Minnowbrook and the so-called
New Public Administration that are now core ideas in postmodern public admin-
istration are these:
- Public administrators and public agencies are not and cannot be either
neutral or objective. - Technology is oft en dehumanizing.
- Bureaucratic hierarchy is oft en ineff ective as an organizational strategy.
- Bureaucracies tend toward goal displacement and survival.
- Cooperation, consensus, and democratic administration are more
likely than the simple exercise of administrative authority to result in
organizational eff ectiveness. - Modern concepts of public administration must be built on postbehav-
ioral and postpositivist logic—more democratic, more adaptable, more
responsive to changing social, economic, and political circumstances.
(Marini 1971)
Over the years following Minnowbrook, some of the more humanistically ori-
ented participants continued meeting, usually in unstructured forums that func-
tioned more like a loose network than an organization. Th ese meetings evolved
into what is now the Public Administration Th eory Network, or PATnet, the
group of scholars most particularly identifi ed with postpositivism and now post-
modern theory. Two books were especially important in this evolution, Th omas
S. Kuhn’s Th e Structure of Scientifi c Revolutions (1962) and Peter L. Berger and