Chad B. Newswander

Encouraging Cognitive Flexibility and Interdisciplinarity in Public Administration Programs

In response to the increased complexity that comes from a shift away from government and toward governance, public administration programs need to adjust their traditional curriculum and encourage interdisciplinarity perspectives in students. Given the proper mind-set, administrators can be better prepared to face the challenges of governance in a highly integrated, real-life setting by having the capacity to integrate competing viewpoints, which includes a reintroduction of interdisciplinary theories, methods, and best practices to the classroom. Cognitive flexibility—the ability for an individual to understand, appreciate, and make use of various epistemological approaches—offers a theoretical perspective to guide practical pedagogy and practice.

Governing Alone and With Partners Presidential Governance in a Post-NPM Environment

Seeking to close the gap between expectations and capacity, presidents have utilized a broad interpretation of executive power to control administrative affairs. However, the emergence of a post–New Public Management environment characterized by loosely constructed networks and a surge of governmental activity has required an evolution in the tools needed to govern. In exploring this dynamic through a constitutional governance model, it becomes evident that a new ethos of presidential governance is starting to develop that is marked by a mixture of governing alone and governing with partners. This dynamic potentially enables more effective and responsible execution of public laws.

Metis Using Wile and Wisdom to Inform Administrative Discretion

When seeking to accomplish public ends in a prudent manner, administrators are occasionally put in precarious situations that require a degree of metis. Metis is a distinct form of knowledge characterized by a mixture of wile and wisdom and is valuable because it can offer viable alternatives for solving complex problems in contingent situations. Individualized problems often require administrators to forego routinized recommendations and pursue a path to prudence through shrewd thinking and action. However, if metis is not properly contained, it runs the risk of sinking under the weight of unscrupulous motivation and of negatively affecting the legitimacy of administrative action. What is important is that a crafty ethos is bound within a proper sphere. This is why a bounded metis informed by a modified version of intermediate scrutiny may provide a meaningful guide that legitimizes the ability of administrators to handle ambiguous situations in a prudent manner.

Chaos and Reordering: The Forces of Crisis Situations

Crisis situations disrupt the status quo, create dilemmas, and produce a fluid environment in which power relations can be recodified. Disruption of the status quo creates a space for agency, thereby enabling individuals to respond to dilemmas as subjects, and thus a problematic event can be an opportunity for enhanced agency—a momentary break in time during which administrators can become creators by severing past relations and establishing new meaning and practices. A modified Foucauldian framework focused on power illuminates certain aspects of crisis situations. Administrators in these spaces are in a unique position to establish new power relations that simultaneously create and constrict. They have the capacity to produce meaning by constituting governance values and practices that bind.

Foucauldian Power and Schmittian Politics The Craft of Constitution

A political pattern of power focused on defining enemies of the state permits administrative agencies to be grounded in framework that allows them to create meaning. In an effort to better understand how agencies act as political players in a web of power relationships, this article suggests a framework based jointly on Foucault’s concept of power and Schmitt’s understanding of the political. Although these models may at first appear to be incompatible, Foucault and Schmitt’s ideas on power and politics are in fact complementary, and together can enrich an understanding of how administration is deeply constitutive.

“Born again“ governmentality: the faith-based initiative as administrative agent

A careful study demonstrates that President Bush has implemented the faith-based initiative as a method of governmentality, one which appears to be biased toward Christianity. This paper examines the definition of Foucaultʼs governmentality as it relates to the ever-expanding structure of contemporary American governance and justifies the categorization of faith-based initiatives as an example of pastoral power. Ultimately, these arguments characterize the current state of governmentality as “born-again,” and call specific attention to what appears to be a strong affiliation of “charitable choice” with evangelical Christianity. By relying on evangelical Christianity to govern, the pastoral-panopticon coupled with governmental resources has brought back an older method of regulation which is less obvious in its intrusion, and more dangerous for it.

The Balance Wheel Reconsidered: Addressing Constitutional Principle Disputes in Practice

In handling contingencies that do not yield to categorical answers, Aristotle argues, deliberation grounded in a general purpose becomes necessary so that reason can be exercised in a way that effectively and correctly resolves particular problems. This article explores how Aristotelian prudence adjusted to constitutional conditions can serve as a normative guide not only in resolving ethical dilemmas but in molding administrative judgment. This modified consideration of Aristotelian thinking requires administrators to rely on regime values and principles as aims in making choices that are often in direct conflict with those of other parties. The deliberation of what these values and principles mean in practice requires that administrators have a sense of both the general and the particular. The ability to tap into these considerations defines a balanced administrator who is able to prudently make quality choices.

The Emergence of Partisans and Terrorists: How Enemies of the State Mold Public Action

The changing status and capacity of enemies of the state play an important role in the evolution of the securitization of the state. Examining how enemies of the state mold state action, this article uses Foucaults concern with governmentality and Schmitts theory of the partisan to describe how and where agencies have begun to manage closed and open spaces. From this administrative angle, the interplay between these two ideas sheds light on how administrators devise disciplinary and security-based measures. This article more fully describes the dynamic of how administrators have countered active threats by constructing closed spaces designed to discipline and operating in open spaces designed to exclude. The execution and interaction of extending mechanisms of control and calculation to closed and open spaces not only provide enhanced protection but also threaten the fruition of constitutional and democratic values in the twenty-first century.

The Recovery of Self-Interest Well Understood as a Regime Value What Is at Stake/Why This Is Important?

Understood in economic terms, interest elevates baser human impulses and degrades higher human potential as it motivates individuals to value material gains over moral ones. Because of this influence, it is difficult to consider interest as a regime value. But just because it is beleaguered does not mean it ought to be abandoned, especially because interest is placed front and center in the constitutional order. Providing a perspective of the merits of interest, Alexis de Tocqueville offers a conceptualization that allows this regime value to be relevant even for contemporary administrators operating in spaces of diffused public responsibility.

Administrative Character Hard and Soft Look Considerations

Managerial competence expressed in the promise of science provides administrators with a set of dispositions. In attempting to achieve such a character, the Supreme Court set up a hard look orientation that used rational means to justify the substance of administrative power. Even though this mode of operation grants legitimacy resulting from meeting a high threshold, it also began to cripple administrative reasoning and movement. When problems are multifaceted, administrative character must be given room to explore. Taking this into consideration, the court also established an alternative space rooted in a soft look that encouraged a different type of administrative character. It has done this by establishing the foundations of a legal framework that privileges deference, which allows for prudence to emerge. Rooted in classical origin and updated in modern parlance, prudence can be leveraged as a way to not only deal with questions of law but also with substance.