Postmodern Th eory 259
management style. Yet, even when we acknowledge these concerns, there is little
doubt that the principles approach is continually recycled, relabeled, and adopted
by public administrators as a useful guide to action. If nothing else, this longevity
suggests that theories of public management have a supportable claim to meet the
ultimate test of theory: Many fi nd them to be useful.
Postmodern Th eory
Postmodern theory in many ways is the culmination of the theoretical frag-
mentation in public administration that began with the assault on the politics-
administration dichotomy. Certainly the balkanized frameworks that appeared
aft er the “golden age” of theoretical hegemony (though this was perhaps more
imagined than real) give the foundations of postmodernism in public adminis-
tration a mea sure of face validity. Th is is because postmodern theory rejects the
possibility that any given paradigm is capable of producing universal truths about
any social phenomena. Postmodernists are not surprised that, having decisively
rejected the politics-administration dichotomy as its theoretical touchstone, pub-
lic administration has failed to generate a universal replacement. Postmodernists
would suggest that no universal replacement, at least in the positivist sense, is
really possible.
Postmodern theory is a subjective approach to studying social phenomena
that focuses heavily on language, the context of human interactions (particularly
scholarship on emotional labor), and the social construction of reality. Post-
modernists believe that there are no absolute truths and therefore that any given
question will have several possible answers, all of which may be equally valid. As
such authors as David John Farmer (1995) and Charles J. Fox and Hugh T. Miller
(1995) apply the postmodern lens to the study of public administration, what
emerges is the belief that there is no “best” or “universal” method of organization
or of understanding administrative processes. Moreover, and despite the theory’s
theoretical pluralism, postmodernists in public administration see the existing
choices of intellectual frameworks as too constraining, that is, too confi ned not
only by geography (there being a particular concentration in the United States)
but also by the boundaries of the scientifi c method. As discussed in Chapter 6,
grounded research methodology provides an outlet for postmodernists by focus-
ing more on contextual factors and less attention on “hypothesis-driven sampling
schemes” (Frederickson and Frederickson 2006, 196; see also Strauss and Corbin
1990). Postmodernists question the scientifi c method’s claim to produce a steady
accumulation of knowledge, and with these doubts come questions about the re-
search that underpins empirical research in public administration.
Given this perspective, postmodern theory is not particularly supportive of
the traditional cornerstones of applied public administration, especially the au-
thority and legitimacy of hierarchical bureaucratic organizations and their reli-
ance on technocratic experts. Questioning these traditional approaches provides