Postmodern Perspectives in Public Administration 137
persists, we have learned, because hierarchical organizations provide highly val-
ued order, stability, and predictability not only to those who are expecting ser-
vices from public institutions but also to those who work in them (Jaques 1990).
Despite all the proposed alternatives to hierarchy, and despite the “pathology” of
hierarchy, we have not been able to invent an equally reliable way to divide work,
coordinate that work, and fi x responsibility for it.
Among most of its adherents, postpositivism is not thought to be primarily
antipositivist. Table 6.1 provides a summary of organizational paradigms. Among
postpositivists and organizational humanists, there are theoretical challenges
to social science epistemology, and pronounced challenges to change-resistant
public bureaucracies. Nevertheless, most postpositivists have generally accepted
empiricism and the logic of the accumulation of knowledge. Postpositivists, it
could be said, display a kind of post-Enlightenment pessimism because social
science has not delivered as promised. Th e positivist notion that the social world
is orderly, that this order can be understood, described, and explained, and that
accumulated knowledge thus attained can form the basis of theory is, in the view
of most postpositivists, simply wrong. One of the two leading treatments of post-
modernist public administration puts it this way:
We are urging movement away from the idea that there is a reality “out there”
that a value-free research can account for by formulating law-like generaliza-
tions whose veracity is observable, testable, and cumulative. We reject the notion
that the “what is?” question can be addressed credibly only by objective observ-
ers, as the emphasis on natural science would prescribe. Merely asking one ques-
tion rather than some other question betrays some measure of subjectivity. If
disinterestedness were required, there would be no inquiry. We acknowledge
that the positivist project and its methodology have some validity; but exclusive
reliance on it occludes many phenomena available to human perception. (Fox
and Miller 1995, 79)Although pessimistic about objective social science, most postpositivists
would not, however, be generally described as antistate or antigovernmental. Th at
would change with the coming of postmodernism.
Postmodern Perspectives in Public Administration
To attempt to understand postmodern public administration, one must begin
with the postmodern characterization of modernity or high modernity. Moder-
nity is the Enlightenment rejection of premodernity, of myths, mysteries, and
traditional powers based on heredity or ordination. Th e Age of Reason rejected
a natural order that subjugated many in the name of royalty or deity, and re-
placed that natural order with systems of democratic self-determination, capi-
talism, socialism, and Marxism. Equally importantly, the Age of Reason rejected