Ralph P. Hummel

The Triumph of Numbers Knowledges and the Mismeasure of Management

We live in a world of numbers, but numbers have become so dominant that we consider nothing to be real unless it can be measured and mathematized. How did we come to live by the numbers? An answer is offered by Edmund Husserl. By constructing a history of mathematics rooted in the geometry of land surveying, it is possible to point to breaking points showing how it came to be that man is no longer the measure of all things. This provides indicators of typical misuses of measurement to be avoided in management.

Constructing Civil Space: A Dialogue

What are the possibilities for greater democratic authenticity in administration? How should this authenticity be understood? This dialogue looks toward the opportunities in constructing civil space, starting from the vantage point of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Some find it relatively easy to recognize what this greater authenticity stands against. It can be expressed in such oppositions as that between the administrative state and the authentic public, and it can be understood in terms of such targets as the traditional view of American public administration (P.A.) as a mere rationalizing project. Authentic citizen space is an issue that opposes the privileging of instrumental rationality and of the administrative itself. It speaks against the privileging of mere expert rationality, at the expense of notions such as citizen inclusion and dialogue (including participation and transparency). That these opposing inclinations should be live tensions is indicated whenever important decisions— such as those on economics or foreign policy—are “pushed down” into the bureaucracy. Consider an illustration. The prospect of decisions with adverse financial consequences for the elite surely has tended to encourage a pushing down of some major economic decision making (such as

A Once and Future Politics: Heidegger's Recovery of the Political in Parmenides

Can it be that the modern perspective on politics, policy-making, and administration is so inbred that we are disabled from envisioning alternatives? Martin Heidegger thought so. The present author attempts to give an initial insight into what may be the controversial German philosophers hidden opus on “Politics” as it revives the relationship between the polis and truth.

Toward Bindlestiff Science: Let's All Get Off the 3:10 to Yuma

Aperiodic check of the rails that carry the policy science train is necessary and obligatory. This science carries two great powers combined in one: the power to criticize policy via the power of measurement. The driving engine of policy science is not accidentally called statistics—a word directly derived from and still containing the word state. Statistics is the necessary tool of a state whose mission has become to know as much as possible about the needs and wants of its citizens. Yet the appropriateness of such knowledge has itself become an issue. The question becomes: How can policy scientists claim detached objectivity when their own tool for analysis is deeply implicated in a specific theory of the state? Is it purely coincidence that the prevailing methodology’s characteristics parallel the knowledge operations of the state? Here we find the logic rule of noncontradiction, which ignores the illogic of the emerging event. Then there is the dependence on large “n’s” and the averaging out of the idiosyncratic, which ignores the individual. There is the search for eternal rules, which denies the fact that such rules may not help a being that is mortal. In a world in which the new is always emerging, our emphasis on established structures and knowledge destroys the role of the imagination in dealing with change. Blind to the significance of the new, our purportedly critical methodology exhibits the same conservative preference for classification and rank ordering and centralized theory that parallels the state’s own preference for monocratic hierarchy. In short, statistics is politics in a state whose knowledge operations are, in a large sense, statistics.

What Do Theorists Do

What do theorists do? In ancient Greek days, a theoros was an ambassador sent by his home city to observe a celebration of another city. In our time, we have largely failed to visit, hear and celebrate the new voices within our own city. When it comes to patterns of life, our observations are many, their meanings sparse, our theories at odds, authority absent. In the absence of authoritative leaders, Greek calendars marked the year as “anarchon”—no archon. “No archons” signaled the polis in a state of anarchy. All the more welcome then, given our present state of theoretical anarchy, is the infusion of new theorists, whether they carry out embassies (in this case from Belgium) or fill in for the lack of authorities. New patterns do arise in their responses to an invitation for “intergenerational dialogue.” They do write on “questions and perspectives that are often marginalized by the mainstream.” And they also review “new” and “old” mainstream issues from a broader perspective. (Quotations from the symposium introduction by Patricia Mooney Nickel, 2006.) Yet, over all, the suggestion of conflict hovers heavily in the air, especially since a sense of unhappiness among our younger theorists was made explicit at the 2006 Olympia meeting of the Public Administration Theory Network. The reader expecting major illumination from this chance to rethink the foundations will be disappointed, but there are some patterns detectable both in theory content of the first batch of papers and in implicit suggestions for conducting the scholarly politics of a new generation. Tracing such contributions via the Greek metaphor may seem farfetched. Yet the reference may guard against the Greeks’ fatal failing. Rent by our divisions, within and among clusters of theory, we often do not know our history. And so we do not know whom to revolt against or who our allies are. Every theorist wants to be the progenitor of something new, not just an observer at someone else’s feast. This has been true of myself (Chuck Fox once chided me for being entirely too self-referential and too self-serving), and it has been true of my theory cohort. I regret to

Arendt, Kant and the Beauty of Politics: A Phenomenological View

This essay is an attempt to define Arendt’s “aesthetic politics” or “aesthetic political theory.” It is based on Kant’s aesthetics as the philosophical discipline of “the beautiful and the sublime” and Heidegger’s ecstatic conception of temporality as attunement (Befindlichkeit) to the world. Arendt’s aesthetic politics is found in her hitherto often unexamined “thinking diary” (Denktagebuch), which draws its inspiration from Kant’s “aesthetic judgment” as something entirely new and imaginative. It replaces the “war” of power politics with the “peace” of aesthetic politics. Aesthetic politics as “a new political principle” also reveals the poverty of American politics.

We Don't Need no Stinking Badges-Modernists vs. Post-Modernists: Kant, Foucault, Weber, Loewith, Arendt

In a movie of yesteryear, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Mexican banditos claiming to be sheriff’s deputies demand three prospectors’ gold. Challenged to show their badges, the leader laughs: “We don’t need no stinking badges!” The ensuing gunplay decides the issue. As modernists, we can see our own fate in the encounter of the modern prospector for knowledge and bandito post-modernists whose very lack of badges legitimates them. They now stake a claim on our property. Heir to centuries of modernists’ labor, the new banditos declare our tools obsolescent and, summing up all our fears, demand that all the foundations of knowledge be dug up—all except their own. These banditos in scholarly garb not only seem to covet our gold, they seem to have their minds set on the mother lode. In all fields of mining for knowledge, self-appointed sheriffs claim a stake in authority, no stinking badges required. Does that mean we, who moil and toil in the modern way, need to play dead? How strong is the case for post-modern analysis? How new their insights? How solid the modern defense? A test case to which both sides refer is the performance of each in critiquing the l8th Century project of the Enlightenment. Both modern and postmodern thinkers take an extraordinary interest in the Enlightenment for its aim of defining what is true, who can know it, and how truth relates to power. Its political aim had been to get human beings to free themselves from dependence on authorities and get them to think

Life Has a Mind of Its Own

Andrew Jackson once declared that the duties of administration were so clear that any ordinary citizen could do them. Today public administration has become a profession, a realm of experts. The experts think they have all the knowledge necessary to do the work of administration. But citizens know otherwise. They know administrators don’t have the knowledge citizens themselves have from leading their lives. On top of that, the public sphere comes under increasing attack from a cluster of academics who also think administrators don’t know what they need to know: but not for the reasons citizens think. The academic diagnosis is different.

Back to the Future: The 21st Century and the Loss of Sensibility

AbstractIntroducing to the public administration a long-standing dispute between Herbert Simon and the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus over the assumptions underlying artificial intelligence, the argument pursues the likelihood that computers will never encompass human intelligence as a whole but that human intelligence is being reduced to the level of computers.