158 6: Postmodern Th eory
Th e modern nation-state is essential to the core logic of public administration
because the fi eld simply assumes the existence of the nation-state and assumes that
public administrators are agents of the state and of the public interest. It is diffi -
cult for scholars working from the perspectives of institutional theory, decision
theory, managerial theory, rational choice theory, political control-of-bureaucracy
theory, and bureaucratic theory to assume away the polity, the jurisdiction, or the
state. Only governance theory and postmodern theory are open to challenges to
the assumption that practicing public administration is the representation of the
nation-state and state sovereignty. In postmodern public administration theory,
the particular form these challenges take include elements of deconstruction,
imagination, deterritorialization, and alterity.
Th e emergence of the modern nation-state parallels in time the coming of the
Enlightenment. Although bureaucratic theory came much later, the practices of
bureaucracy preceded the emergence of the state and were simply patched into
the modern state (Weber 1952; Gladden 1972). In modern democratic states,
bureaucratic assumptions of legitimacy based on laws, constitutions, formal ap-
pointments, and tenure are all associated with the core assumption of jurisdiction
and national sovereignty. Th e postmodern deconstruction of the state concept
and the functioning of the state takes this form:
- Th e state is a place, a physical territory with borders and boundaries.
- Th e state is a particular history, social construction of reality, and
usable past. - Th e state includes founding myths that take on great importance.
- Th e state is oft en sustained by traditional or hereditary enemies.
- Th e state is the exercise of authority in the form of sovereign-legitimated
actions based on the exercise of authority in the name of the state. - Th e state rests on some capacity to tax its residents.
- Th e state is expected by its residents or citizens to provide order, stability,
predictability, and identity.
Postmodernists, and many others, argue that in the modern world all the
characteristics of the state are in play. Borders are porous to people, money, dis-
ease, and pollution. People are increasingly mobile, less and less attached to one
place and to one jurisdiction or nation. Business is increasingly global. Many
modern transactions are now virtual, accomplished electronically and without
respect to national boundaries; and, too, transactions are increasingly diffi cult
to tax and regulate. Enemies of the state might be other nations; but they might
be, as the United States learned on September 11, 2001, stateless movements or
groups. Wealth has less and less to do with fi xed property and the production of
goods, and more and more to do with information and ideas, which are diffi cult
to contain and manage by one state because they have nothing to do with borders
or sovereignty. Th e modern nation-state is “too remote to manage the problems