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"Harmon, Michael M., 1941-"
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Public Administration's Final Exam
Examines why public administration’s literature has
failed to justify the profession’s legitimacy as an
instrument of governance Michael Harmon employs the
literary conceit of a Final Exam, first “written” in
the early 1930s, in a critique of the field’s answers to
the legitimacy question. Because the assumptions that underwrite
the question preclude the possibility of a coherent answer, the
exam should be canceled and its question rewritten. Envisaging a
public administration no longer hostage to the legitimacy
question, Harmon explains how the study and practice of public
administration might proceed from adolescence to maturity.
Drawing chiefly from pragmatist philosophy, he argues that
despite the universal rejection of the
“politics/administration” dichotomy on factual
grounds, the pseudo-problem of legitimacy nonetheless persists in
the guise of four related conceptual dualisms: 1) values and
facts, 2) thinking and doing, 3) ends and means, and 4) theory
and practice. Collectively, these dualisms demand an impossible
answer to the practical question of how we might live, and
govern, together in a world of radical uncertainty and
interdependence. Only by dissolving them can the legitimacy
question (Woodrow Wilson’s ghost) finally be banished,
clearing away the theoretical debris that obscures a more vital
and useful conception of governance.
eBook
Whenever Two or More Are Gathered
This study of the critical role of ethics and moral responsibility in the field of public administration, Michael M. Harmon and O. C. McSwite posit that administrative ethics, as presently conceived and practiced, is largely a failure, incapable of delivering on its original promise of effectively regulating official conduct in order to promote the public interest. They argue that administrative ethics is compromised at its very foundations by two core assumptions: that human beings act rationally and that language is capable of conveying clear, stable, and unambiguous principles of ethical conduct. The result is the illusion that values, principles, and rules of ethical conduct can be specified in workably clear ways, in particular, through their formalization in official codes of ethics; that people are capable of comprehending and responding to them as they are intended; and that the rewards and punishments attached to them will be effective in structuring daily behavior. In a series of essays that draw on both fiction and film, as well as the disciplines of pragmatism, organizational theory, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and economics, Harmon and McSwite make their case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethics. “Exercising responsible ethical practice requires attaining a special kind of relationship with other people. Relationship is how the pure freedom that resides in the human psyche—for ethical choice, creativity, or original action of any type—can be brought into the structured world of human social relations without damaging or destroying it.” Furthermore, they make the case for dropping the term “ethics” in favor of the term “responsibility,” as “responsibility accentuates the social [relational] nature of moral action.”
eBook