156 6: Postmodern Th eory
change was published in the Journal of Public Aff airs Education, the “fl agship
journal of the National Association of Schools of Public Aff airs and Administra-
tion.” As graduate schools consider such changes, scholarship in this area will, by
necessity, remain qualitative and in the postmodern (or critical theory) tradition
of focusing on how relationships develop and change over time, and what can be
done improve the experience of individuals. Mastracci, Newman, and Guy con-
clude that “emotional labor skills are as important—if not more important—than
cognitive skills” (137). A positivist approach is limited in the extent to which it
can answer if that is the case, and public administration scholars would be foolish
to ignore the role of emotional labor in bureaucratic behavior and organizational
effi ciency.
Ken Meier, Sharon Mastracci, and Kristin Wilson (2006) provide one of the
few empirical and positivist approaches to the study of emotional labor. Examin-
ing school outcomes in Texas for three years, the authors fi nd a positive relation-
ship between the number of female teachers in the district and quality measures
of school performance. Th e authors admit that they “did not measure emotional
labor directly” and “it is unclear how one might do so in larger study” (905–906).
Such an approach is useful in providing indirect empirical support for the inter-
action between gender and emotional labor, but the fundamental assumption of
emotional labor and the invisibility with which it occurs and is directly compen-
sated, will continue to require a heavy dose of qualitative methods and a post-
modern, and possibly a feminist, framework.
Th e search for greater imagination in public administration is an enduring
feature of both postpositivism and postmodernism. Indeed, because frustration
with rigid unresponsive bureaucracy is probably as old as bureaucracy, the call for
organizational creativity is equally as old. In postmodernity, this yearning has a
somewhat diff erent language and is more associated with rejecting old paradigms
in search of new paradigms. Postmodernists base their quest for greater imagina-
tion in public administration on rejecting rationality and rationalization: “Mo-
dernity’s rationalization extended more and more throughout society, bringing
more and more under the domain of rationality. Th e basis of science, technology,
and modernist interpretations is rationality. . . . Postmodernity’s imaginization,
in a parallel fashion, can be expected to spread through society. Individuals in
society, and elements of society, might try to give imagination the central role in
their interrelationships and in their lives that modernists previously give to ratio-
nality” (Farmer 1995, 158).
Imagination is important to postmodern public administration theory because
of the view that the metaphor, images, allegory, stories, and parables play a cen-
tral role in how people think. Our preoccupation with objective rationality, both
in bureaucratic practice and in public administration theory, limits, it is claimed,
our possible capacity for imagination or creativity. Gareth Morgan (1993) refers
to imaginization as the art of creative management. Th is resembles the standard
humanist management training/interventionist menu of improving abilities to