Janet R. Hutchinson

Feminist Praxis: Administering for a Multicultural, Multigendered Public

The dominant model of administering in public administration is fundamentally liberal and, we contend, significantly restricts the potential for ongoing feminist praxis. Although we have witnessed progress in achieving womens rights and improving their status in the public sphere following the liberal tradition, our work continues in a narrow conceptual framework that leaves many frustrated and wondering if real change for women will ever be fully realized. This paper addresses some of the challenges to traditional feminist theories of organizing and to conventional approaches to feminist praxis in public administration. We propose a multicultural, multigendered administration that challenges the restrictive constructs that define us and determine our relationships to one another and to the organizations in which we work. We suggest that this new paradigm, grounded in postmodern feminist and queer theories, problematizes extant PA methods and encourages engagement in an introspective evaluation of our own cultural and gendered boundaries. It also suggests ways in which we might cross those boundaries and enter entirely new worlds.

Women in Public Administration Extending the Metaphor of the Emperor's New Clothes

Have 30 years of concern for womens equity, together with the infusion of new feminist theories andperspectives, influenced the development of recent public administration research? The authors examine eight major public administration and policy journals to determine how many women are publishing, their patterns of publication, and the content of their research. Their results suggest that women are historically underrepresented in most, but more recently are publishing at rates commensurate with their numbers in the academy. However, a surprisingly small number of articles by women and men scholars address traditional womenspolicy concerns orapplyfeminist perspectives to research in public administration. They conclude that public administration has yet to be influenced significantly by the research and theoretical contributions of the womens movement found in the wider academic community.

Multigendering Pa: Anti-Administration, Anti-Blues

Abstract The modernist administrative ethos does not permit space for a radical reconstruction of gender–restricting and thereby oppressing the articulation of a radical feminist project in public administration. This paper addresses gender discourse in anti-administration, suggesting that multigendering is one remedy for the pervasive melancholy that afflicts women, men and organizations–the oppressed and the oppressors, alike. The feminist experience and perspective, largely absent in public administration discourse, brings radically different and new insights to old problems in theory and praxis. The paper concludes with a plea for a “new enlightenment” that resists the “urges to power” which undermine prospects for anti-administration and anti-melancholy.

Using the role repertory grid technique for item generation in a survey of knowledge use

Abstract This article reports on the use of a variation of G. A. Kellys (1955) Role Repertory Grid technique for generating survey questionnaire items. The study for which the questionnaire was designed explores the uses of research-based information by child welfare professionals and seeks to improve on earlier research designs that rely on traditional methods of data collection by combining the latter with constructivist methods. The multimethod design used in this study suggests that the grid, when used for item generation, enriches ones understanding of the subject matter and provides a tool for overcoming the researcher biases inherent in traditional methods of questionnaire construction.

En-Gendering Democracy

Despite the great disparity in wealth and privilege, women in the United States and in developing countries have in common a core principle: Women must be equal participants in our governing institutions and in policy-making. In this paper, I take the position that deep democracy, and other new participatory democratic models will fail, if true participation is really the goal, as long as there are basic inequalities between men and women that prevent women from full and proportionally equal participation. I suggest that an en-gendered democracy is a multigendered democracy. Multigendering is based on the notion that gender is not static, is relational, fluid, and changing in reference to the environment. The relational aspects of gendering, once understood and accepted, may be an answer to the dilemma of the representation of women and our equal participation in the institutions that govern our lives.

Predictive Validity of the Graduate Record Examination with and without Range Restraints

Most studies show that scores on the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) have low predictive validity for graduate grade point average. One suggested explanation is that the input and output variables have restricted ranges. Restriction of the input variables results when students with low GRE scores are omitted from the analysis. The output variable is constricted since most students receive an A or B in courses. However, the present study shows that the GRE has low predictive validity even when both the input and output variables are more widely distributed for a sample of graduate students. The need for better screening mechanisms to select from among applicants to graduate school is discussed.

Symposium: Public Administration Theories of Feminism: Introduction to the Symposium

Once upon a time, hidden among the brambles and tended only by a small band hardy enough to breach the thorns and tightly knitted vines, there grew a garden. The small band of hardy souls tended and played in the garden, posing and posturing for one another, exciting each other to boldness, and teasing, siren-like, the creatures outside its brambled confines to come hither and to partake the wine and sweet offerings so pleasingly displayed there. But the outsiders were afraid. They feared the garden’s strangeness, and the difficulty they would encounter getting to it. Some feared even more, that once there they could not return to old habits and comfortable places. Public administration has a small band of scholars who ponder a life in which the social prohibitions and secret handshakes that mark the patriarchal boundaries within which women strive for recognition, are stripped away and cut down like the thorns and brambles in my metaphorical garden. To its particular credit, ATP has made a home for those who want to try out their ideas, thoughts, and theories in the relative safety of an enlightened and erudite audience. The symposium which follows is composed of new and seasoned scholars who seek to expand our thinking about the relationship of feminisms and feminist theories to theories of PA and PA praxis. The five papers that follow seek to stretch readers’ intellectual boundaries on a subject that receives relatively little attention in our field. Yet, as you will read, there is a great deal to think about: posing new ideas that test the intellectual habits upon which we have come to rely, and reframing to our own contextual space the timeless writings of our foremothers. This symposium was inspired by a desire to explore feminist theories of public administration. Patricia Nichols and Angela Eikenberry propose a new theory of democratic feminist management that encourages marginalized individuals to question rather than accept unquestioningly and internalize socially constructed spheres (e.g., the public/private di-