Is a Useful and Reliable Public Administration Th eory Possible? 9
be verifi ed by known measurement techniques, deny themselves some of the
most important tools presently available for coming to grips with the substance
of public administration. By denying the importance of intuitive guesses, judg-
ment, and wisdom, theorists working exclusively from the scientifi c and be-
havioral perspectives can make themselves remote from all that is important
in public administration. Th is argument is especially strong when it comes to
issues of ethics and morality in policy and public management. Traditionalists
argue that by being more scientifi c, public administration shies away from the
big questions of right and wrong. Th e tidy models of the behavioral theorist, they
argue, can lend a specious air of authority to such work.
By contrast, the behaviorists’ argument takes the positivist position that col-
lective human behavior exhibits enough order to justify a rigorous search, mea-
surement, classifi cation, and depiction of that order. Th is can be done either by
separating facts from values—logical positivism—and theorizing about the facts
or by explicitly dealing with the value implications of factually derived theory.
Th e behaviorists’ position claims that simplifying models based on explicit as-
sumptions furthers the development of experimentation and reliable fi ndings.
Besides, if there is disagreement regarding the theorists’ assumptions, theory in
the long run will be the better for it. As for issues of ethics, morality, wisdom,
and other fuzzy concepts, the behaviorist position is that such variables are not
beyond the reach of empirically derived theory.
Weber (1952) was a social scientist in the positivist tradition who argued
that human behavior, particularly bureaucratic behavior, exhibits observable
and describable patterns that can be scientifi cally verifi ed. But he also argued
that social reality is composed of the ideas and beliefs of social actors. Th e task
of social science must therefore be the interpretation of action in terms of sub-
jective meaning. Today, a fully developed theory of interpretive social science
(Weber 1952; Winch 1995) argues that in the social context humans act inten-
tionally according to shared ideas and beliefs and shared meanings associated
with those ideas and beliefs. Th is argument has evolved to the widely supported
view that reality is socially constructed; indeed, it is further suggested that it is
useful to think of organizations as shared meanings or understandings (Weick
1979). Interpretative social science can include interpretations of the past (his-
tory), interpretations of events (case studies), and interpretations of decisions
and actions by participant observations.
Some argue that interpretive social science and positivist, or behavioral, social
science are competitive and irreconcilable (Winch 1995). But it is our view, and
the dominant perspective in contemporary social theory (MacIntyre 1984), that
there can be theory that describes empirically observed regularities in the social
world as well as interpretations of those regularities.
Today, the traditional and behavioral positions in public administration are
in many ways reconciled. Both positions are essentially right in that they ac-
knowledge the importance of observation and categorization and the central