Peter Bogason

The Democratic Prospects of Network Governance

This article considers the democratic implications of the shift toward policy making and implementation through networks, integrating articles presented at a 2003 conference on democratic network governance. The authors argue that the effect of increased cross-sectoral and civil society involvement in governing has been to stretch liberal democratic processes to comprise greater numbers of actors involved in lateral network relationships. Although network governance has the potential to promote deliberation and to improve flexibility and responsiveness in service provision, it also raises serious issues regarding equity, accountability, and democratic legitimacy. There is a need to improve political coherence through, for example, steering or metagovernance of governance activities. Important questions for future research involve the character of actors who will take responsibility for metagovernance (e.g., politicians or public administrators) and the approaches they will use to steer governance processes.

Introduction: Networks in Public Administration

In the introductory article to the special issue on Comparing Networks, the editors discuss the meaning of the concept of networks in relation to other recent conceptual developments in public administration such as (neo)institutional and (neo)managerial analysis. They trace the broadly understood historical development of network analysis back to the late 1960s and early 1970s and highlight some important factors in its development up to the present-day demands placed on public administration by both globalization and decentralization. The result is organizational fragmentation. Network analysis makes it clear that people working in government and administration will have to learn to think of organization as an external, not internal activity. The prospect is that hierarchical control will be replaced by continuing processes of bargaining among interested parties within most fields of public administration.

Postmodernism and American Public Administration in the 1990s

The 1990s debate on postmodernism as a metatheoretical basis for American public administration is reviewed based on its progress over time. Important themes in the debates are social constructivism and anti-foundationalism; deconstruction and narrative and linguistic analysis; pragmatism; and quantum theory. Considerable differences exist between the participants, and strictly speaking, there are rather few true postmodernists, but there is a large group of theorists who share a strong skepticism for the generalizing type of theory and instead recommend more situational analysis. Most of these theorists are pragmatists with a strong interest in public administration as an instrument to achieve a better society on the basis of democratic participation.

Changes in the Scandinavian Model. From Bureaucratic Command to Interorganizational Negotiation

Scandinavian local government is increasingly changing its organizational pattern away from the principles of local centralized bureaucratic control that were held sacred after the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s - reforms that made local government the building block for the welfare ‘state’. Organizational fragmentation is taking place, making room for both new managerial styles similar to those of the New Public Management, featuring contracting out and similar market-like arrangements, and for democratic initiatives which place service users in command of service institutions. Such developments call for new approaches to the study of local government, approaches that take interorganizational relations more directly into account. Suggestions about such an approach are made, based on studies of intergovernmental relations. Distinctions are made between intergovernmental politics which is concerned with symbolic values linked to the status of an organization, and intergovernmental management where processes of making do are seen as most important. In spite of the managerial fashion for strategic goal-setting, it is expected that the new political actors are more interested in day-to-day results and thus challenge politicians, moving them away from the abstract goals in favour of advancing and monitoring actual accomplishments. This increases the need to understand network relations and, in turn, may yield better understanding on the part of citizens of how local politics and management works.

Pragmatic, Extra-Formal Democracy

Based on trends in local political participation, we wish to develop the notion of extra-formal democracy. Extra-formal democracy-democratic practices that exist outside the formalisms of electoral processes-links citizens with one another. Citizens collaborate with, or contest one another in direct, robust ways. Representative democracy, as a passive and indirect expression of desire, is not energizing in the same way. Despite its attractions in terms of it directedness and situatedness, extra-formal democracy does not necessarily bring more or better democracy; and that is why research is needed. Extra-formal democracy can take many forms, and they all raise questions of authorization, both in practice and in theory. The authors propose a pragmatic form of democracy-emanating from particular questions arising from the situation. In the process, pragmatism is reconceptualized. Action emanates not only from intentions and new projects; it is also rooted in historical practices and relationships.

Public Administration and Postmodern Conditions: Some American Pointers to Research after the Year 2000

AbstractA number of recent more or less postmodern publications in American Public Administration are presented under four headings which are not mutually exclusive: antiloundationalism, discourse analysis, pragmatism and New Quantum Theory. Three themes for future research are identified: the public interest, citizen participation and public employees as intermediaries. These themes will be addressed in and after the year 2000. The morepostmodern values prevail, the more people will demand to become involved in decisions that may affect them. Consequently, research must concentrate on societal values and the way they affect various interests within public administration and in the links to the society it was designed to serve.

Public Administration under Postmodern Conditions

Allow me some parochialisms. For this short comment, the scholarly world is reduced to two individuals. I want to acknowledge, of course, that I draw on a whole world of scholars. But I only quote Spicer and Bogason. All the others are found in the literature lists in the works quoted. Michael Spicer’s book on Public Administration and the State was published in 2001; his main argument was found earlier on in an article in a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist on postmodernism (Spicer, 1997). I cannot but wonder if he would rephrase his image of American Public Administration after 9/11, at least to some degree. The Department of Homeland Security seems to me to fulfill the requirements of a classic state agency. Classic? Well, then, classic European. In Continental Europe, theorists in public administration have found no difficulty in linking the state and public administration. Indeed, Public Administration theory is based on theories of the state—think of Weber’s theory of bureaucracy. And the signs of the state were many when you looked around. Until 1969, all Danish employees of the state were civil servants; that is, servants of the Crown, of the head of state, the Danish Queen. After 1969, this status was reserved for the top echelons of state directors and permanent secretaries, and full professors at the universities. Part of the promotion was the honor of becoming a civil servant, meeting the Queen to say thank you and ten years after, receiving the Order of the Danish Knighthood. By accepting the order, you confirmed your allegiance to the Crown—therefore, by tradition, Social Democrats turned down the benevolent offer. And when the time was up, you would get a pension—even if you were a Social Democrat. But the classic state, I would argue, is being downsized, if not withering away, in many Western countries. Not in Asia, not in Africa, not in Eastern Europe—in those areas the state is being reinforced either as a basic element in securing a more or less liberal regime with a market economy, or as a prerequisite of dictatorship. In many Western Euro-

Book Reviews: Review of Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method and Method and Power, Knowledge, and Domination

This review deals with two books that relate to the meta-theoretical discussion among American political scientists dubbed “Perestroika.” Making Political Science Matter is a series of articles spot-on the debate, containing the centerpieces by Laitin and Flyvbjerg and twelve other articles on the subject. Power, Knowledge, and Domination is a monograph implementing some of the advice from, among others, Flyvbjerg. So let us have the cake with the anthology and eat it with the monograph.

Further Reflections on Public Administration and the State

I want to thank Jennifer Eagan for organizing this symposium and also Peter Bogason, R. McGreggor Cawley, Hugh Miller, Patricia Mooney Nickel, Christine Reed, and Mark Rutgers [and Sebastiaan Tij sterman in this issue], all of whom were gracious enough to read and comment on the ideas I laid out in Public Administration and the State some seven years ago. So as to engage more effectively the variety of comments raised by my colleagues here, I would like to use this short essay to explore further the meaning of the state, the nature of govern mentality, the practice of critical theory and pluralism, and the useful ness of our habits or traditions of civil association and constitutionalism in thinking about and practicing American public administration. Before doing this, however, I will review briefly the arguments that I advanced in the book. Such an exercise may be helpful to those scholars who have not read the book and also to those who have, but, like my self, cannot quite recall what it was all about. Specifically, in this book, I argued, firstly, that much of our literature in public administration, notwithstanding its frequent pretensions to po litical and ideological neutrality, articulates a vision of the state as a purposive association, that is to say, a state as an organization driven by some coherent set of substantive ends and organized and managed by a powerful teleocratic or purpose-driven government in pursuit of these ends?a state conceived in the image, for example, of a church, a fac tory, an army, or a hospital. Following this, I suggested that the pursuit of this vision of the state is impractical within the United States because our constitutional form of governance reflects a quite different vision of the state, namely that of the state as a civil association, one in which individuals and groups are free to pursue a variety of different interests and ends within a framework of a set of rules of conduct. Moreover, I also argued that, because of the seriously fragmented character of our postmodern political culture, encouraging public administrators to pur sue a vision of the state as a purposive association is potentially harmful in that it invites divisive administrative actions that sometimes ignore or

A Review of: “Organizational Knowledge. The Texture of Workplace Learning by Silvia Gherardi with the Collaboration of Davide Nicolini”

Many books are written as an opposition to other books—theorists fight an ongoing war to subdue the other ones who clearly are mistaken in their approaches. Those who are attacked fight back. And our bookshelves are growing as the publishers distribute fighting territory—pages—to the warriors. Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning is no exception. It can best be understood in its theoretical universe—as a text relating to the field of organizational learning and knowing. It is a rebellion against the rational organizational paradigm—it is produced within a non-rationalist and non-cognitivist theoretical framework. But Silvia Gherardi is not alone in that war; there are many contestants, and they certainly do not agree how to fight the common enemy of rationalism. This probably is why most academic books are not popular outside a small minority of academics. In order fully to understand the book the reader is required to have solid knowledge of quite a range of organizational and sociological theory from the last half a century or so. And s=he must be able to link many fragments of theory in order to fully appreciate the ideas and conclusions of the author. This book aims to show how an organizational researcher can empirically describe activities like learning, knowing, and organizing as elements of practice. The empirical theme is: How does safety in the construction industry become expertise, conserved and transmitted within a texture of organizational practices, and performed through being put into practice? The usability for management theory and practice should be obvious. The reader learns how construction workers, architects, engineers, etc., perform in order to International Public Management Journal