Looking for Postmodern Public Administration Th eory 147
Administration Review and other leading journals. Th e recent emphasis on the
deregulation of business and on privatization has also been critiqued (Freder-
ickson 1999a). Th e public administration critique concerning the application of
business ideas holds that business concepts seldom carry the day in the public
sector. But there are powerful political and economic forces generally supportive
of applying business concepts to public management. Th e greatest inroads into
applying enterprise to the public sector come from rational choice theory, a sub-
ject considered and critiqued in Chapter 8.
To sum up: From the postmodern perspective, criticisms of modernist pub-
lic administration include (1) its overreliance on the logic and epistemology of
objective rational social science; (2) its implicit support for authoritarian, unfair,
and unjust regimes; (3) its bias toward American particularism; (4) its too-great
attachment to functional management and organization technologies; and (5)
its willingness to be overly infl uenced by the capitalist logic of enterprise. Hav-
ing reviewed the postmodern critique of modernist public administration, we
now turn to the more diffi cult question: What, aft er all, is postmodern public
administration?
Administration Th eory Looking for Postmodern Public
Th e primary reason it is diffi cult to pin down a description of postmodern public
administration theory or a serviceable defi nition of the postmodern perspective is
this: One cannot, it is claimed, understand, judge, or evaluate postmodern public
administration by using modernist criteria or standards (Farmer 1995, 144–145).
When we are “involved with the assumptions of modernity and regard them as
constituting ‘common sense,’ we fail to understand and justify the claims of post-
modernity in terms of modernity” (145).
Postmodern public administration should be understood as negating the core
mind-set of modernity, as negating the assumptions that have underlain impor-
tant thinking during the last fi ve centuries. Postmodernity should be interpreted
as denying the core pattern of ideas, the Weltanschauung [a generally accepted
worldview or philosophy of life] that constitutes modernity; this denial would
include denying the very process of having a Weltanschauung. It would deny
that the central task is the picturing of the world, denying the value of grounding
the subject’s knowledge of the world in the subject. It would deny the view of
nature and role of reason implicit in modernity’s view of the centered subject. It
would deny macrotheory, grand narratives, and macropolitics. It would deny the
distinction between reality and appearance. Postmodernity’s denial of moder-
nity, as this list implies, is denial in a particular way. It would not permit a denial
of modernity in the sense of a return to premodernity. According to postmod-
ernists, we cannot return to the old gods, to the old society where the subject is
embedded in a social role and a value context.