Secularization of public administration

·期刊原文
Secularization of public administration
by Thomas D. Lynch; Richard Omdal; Peter L. Cruise
JJournal of Public Administration Research and Theory
VVol.7 No.3

JJuly 1997

PPp.473-487

CCopyright by University of Kansas

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At issue is the method used to define values in the discipline. For
example, when we discuss ethics, we base our inquiry on "regime
values" and ignore the broader established literature concerning the
"common spiritual values of mankind. "Like much of western culture,
secularization as a value strongly influences public administration.
This article examines the history of values in public administration
research and questions secularization with its removal of linkage
between spiritual wisdom and public values. Research in public
administration evolved from a value-neutral basis immortalized in
Woodrow Wilson's political/administrative dichotomy, to a logical
positivism basis advanced by Herbert Simon, to a call for the return
to value-based traditions. Recent research in the field, including
research on ethics for public administrators, has acknowledged that
values do play an integral role and that the value-free neutrality
approach was invalid. This article makes the case that public
administration should not narrow its choice of values to only
secularization but should use the full range of human inquiry
available to us, including the various Holy Scriptures from not only
the Jewish and Christian traditions but other traditions as well,
such as the Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Kansas
The excitement and meaning of our very existence--indeed, the future
of life itself on this planet--is linked to the administrative
process. Theory, values and practice are inexorably interwoven and
enmeshed. It is this complex net which is the center of attention in
the study of public administration. (Simmons and Dvorin 1977, 3-4)
In their book Public Administration Values, Policy, and Change
(1977), Robert Simmons and Eugene Dvorin make a strong argument (as
noted above) for the importance that values play in public
administration. They note the existence of a current, so-called,
value-free neutrality approach that has been so long and assiduously
cultivated within public administration. The authors state that
public administration was not and is not now value free, but value
full. They assert that any other assumptions are "out of touch with
the value conflicts of the broader society" (p. xiii). Moreover,
according to Simmons and Dvorin, public administrators should not ".
. . hide behind the guises of `scientific objectivity' or scholarly
remoteness" (p. xiii). Adding to this discussion, a section from a
recent essay by Robert Berne, dean of the Wagner School of Public
Service at New York University, further highlights our point.
According to Berne:
Just as there is no way to separate policy from administration,
there is no such thing as value free work in public service. Like it
or not, the public sector is all about values and I believe that
some of our current problems (in public administration) stem from
our inability (as academics) to address the role that values play.
(1995, 82)
The role and treatment of values in public administration is a
debatable issue which is often focused on how to define the idea of
values themselves (e.g., Denhardt 1991).
John Rohr, in his book Ethics for Bureaucrats, An Essay on Law and
Values (1978, 65), broadly defined values as the "beliefs, passions,
and principles that have been held for several generations by the
overwhelming majority of the American people." Rohr suggests that
the use of the more specific concept regime values is the most
appropriate approach to define ethics in public administration (p.
59). He defined regime values as "the values of that political
entity that was brought into being by the ratification of the
Constitution that created the American republic.
Rohr noted that the method of regime values rests on the following
three considerations:
* Ethical norms should be derived from the salient values of the
regime.
* These values are normative for bureaucrats because they have taken
an oath to uphold the regime.
* These values can be discovered in the public law of the regime (p.
59).
As a conceptual tool, regime values have been used to determine what
is acceptable in terms of discourse in values discussions in public
administration theory. However, some do question the use of regime
values. For example, Robert T. Golembiewski, in his 1965 work Men,
Management, and Morality, raised the issue. He noted that the
failure of formal theories of organization to address the question
of individual freedom reveals an insensitivity to the moral posture
of the individual worker. He listed five values, associated with
economic life, that follow the Judeo-Christian ethic:
* Work must be psychologically acceptable to the individual.
* Work must allow individuals to develop their own faculties.
* The work task must allow the individual considerable room for
self-determination. The worker must have the possibility of
controlling, in a meaningful way, the environment within which the
task is to be performed.
* The organization should not be the sole and final arbiter of
behavior; both the organization and the individual must be subject
to an external moral order (R. Denhardt 1984, 102).
The fifth point indicates a disagreement with the idea that regime
values should be used to define the generic term values. The
question is: What should be used to form the basis for defining
values in public administration theory? Notwithstanding the problems
illustrated by the religious persecution of scientists prior to Rene
Descartes, perhaps values found in religious traditions would
provide a better basis.
The thesis of this article is that we have allowed public service to
be secularized and have largely removed the moral and spiritual
wisdom of civilization from what we teach, research, and do in
public administration (e.g., McCurdy and Cleary 1984; Adams and
White 1994). We are losing our focus due to our so-called objective
commitment, our lessened concern for social purpose, and our nonuse
of spiritual wisdom--for example, regime values as a foundation for
ethics is not adequate, as noted by Golembiewski (R. Denhardt 1984).
Limiting research on values in public administration to those
associated with a regime ignores the accumulated spiritual wisdom
developed over centuries of human experience. Similar and recurring
themes of values and morals are found in the literature of all the
major religions. Thus, it provides an alternative basis upon which
to examine the values of the profession, apart from the use of
regime values.
The roots of American public administration as a profession and
inquiry were closely linked and motivated by spiritual concerns. For
example, at the beginning of the twentieth century and the beginning
of the formal study of public administration in America, Luther
Gulick brought his background as the son and grandson of
missionaries to his work and work style in promoting and even
creating what we now call public administration. He stated that, in
selecting the first students in public administration he and the
other founders sought sons and daughters of civil servants, but they
also sought those with strong religious backgrounds. In the 1950s,
Paul Appleby, a dean at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University,
wrote a stream of articles and books on morality and public
administration. Also in the 1950s, Dwight Waldo, at the height of
logical positivism's dominance in public administration, attempted
to force the discipline away from a total reliance on Simon's
value-free perspective (Waldo 1955). In the 1970s, the New Public
Administration brought morality again to the literature of public
administration (e.g., Marini 1971). Even today we have researchers
and practitioners who address ethics in government in their
teaching, research, and practice. (Lynch and Lynch 1995, 3).
Nevertheless, many of us feel uncomfortable about linking spiritual
and moral wisdom with public administration.
This article argues that we have inappropriately secularized public
administration. The first section addresses epistemology and its
impact on public administration. The next section argues that public
administration has largely been secularized and is ignoring the
spiritual wisdom over recorded history. The conclusion suggests how
to bring that wisdom into public administration.
EPISTEMOLOGY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
A Definition and Redefinition of Focus
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory
of knowledge. Traditionally, central issues in epistemology are the
nature and derivation of knowledge, the scope of knowledge, and the
reliability of claims to knowledge (Edwards 1967). Students and
academics interested in exploring the major epistemological views in
public administration might typically ask:
How does each view largely define accepted knowledge?
What are the implications to public administration?
Are any of the views dysfunctional?
In what ways?
What are the implications to the development of the field or
discipline?
Philosophers frequently have been divided over epistemology. For
example, rationalists such as Plato and Rene Descartes argued that
ideas of reason intrinsic to the mind are the only source of
knowledge. Empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume argued that
sensory experience is the primary source of our ideas and therefore
of knowledge. The debate between the rationalists and empiricists
continued for quite some time and later took a significant turn with
Immanuel Kant. He asked whether there could be synthetic a priori
knowledge, that is, knowledge not based on experience but which is a
condition of the comprehensibility of experience (Popkin and Stroll
1990). Kant, although antiempiricist in the derivation-of-knowledge
question, agreed with the empiricists regarding the
scope-of-knowledge question, in that knowledge is limited to the
world of experience (Popkin and Stroll 1990; Beck 1966).
On the reliability of knowledge, the skeptics were a significant
influence in the history of epistemology. They questioned whether
any claim to knowledge can be upheld against the possibility of
doubt. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) focused his inquiry on the
elimination of doubt. This role of the skeptic was to increase the
level of rigor and precision necessary to posit what should be
considered as knowledge (Edwards 1967). In contemporary
epistemology, the role of the skeptic is diminished. George Edward
Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others have redirected
epistemological attention from concern about claims of knowledge due
to doubt toward analysis of their linguistic meaning.
Empiricism and Modern Science
An understanding of the empiricist perspective can be determined
from the word empiricist itself. The term comes from the Greek word,
emdeiria, which means experience. The basic tenet of empiricism is
that legitimate human knowledge arises from what is provided to the
mind of the individual by introspective awareness gained by
experience. Empirism is
a rejection of other doctrines such as the view that when the human
mind first encounters the world it is already furnished with a range

of ideas or concepts that have nothing to do with experience; and
an acceptance of the idea that, at birth, the mind is a tabula rasa,
or
white paper, void of all characters, and that only experience
can provide it with ideas (Edwards 1967).
Empiricism has taken many forms. However, one common feature is that
it starts from experimental science as a basis for defining human
knowledge (Edwards 1967). This is opposed to the rationalist
approach, which starts from pure mathematics as the basis for
understanding human knowledge. Empiricism and its major proponents
developed during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It
arose directly from the growing success and importance of
experimental science with its gradual separate identity from pure
mathematics. Major early proponents of empiricism were called the
British Empiricist School of Philosophy and included Francis Bacon,
John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. Later proponents--also
usually classified as empiricists--in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries include John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell
(Beck 1966). Russell was the major personality link between the
classical British empiricists and the beginnings of logical
positivism in the twentieth century.
Modern science, as developed by Descartes from his emphasis on
doubt, has a number of parallels to empiricism. These parallels are
important to the development of logical positivism. According to
Descartes, the solutions to the questions posed by epistemology lay
in the systematization of knowledge. In the ideal method described
by Descartes, man starts with basic axioms whose truth is clear and
distinct and he sets aside anything that can be supposed to be false
until he arrives at something that cannot be supposed to be false.
Critical to this basic analysis is that nothing is accepted as true
unless it is clear and distinct. Next, one analyzes the basic axiom,
starting with simple thoughts, and only later proceeds to more
complex thoughts. Following these steps, one reviews the entire
process so that no possible consideration is omitted (Popkin and
Stroll 1990).
Important similarities between modern science and empiricism include
the need to systematize the acquisition of knowledge. This avoids
the introduction of extraneous variables that could confuse and
cloud the final product. It also promotes the need for careful
self-correction and comprehensiveness throughout the process, thus
not overlooking or omitting important variables that could affect
the final outcome.
The most important difference between modern science and empiricism
is the issue of the existence of certain innate truths. Modern
science and Descartes propose that the universe can be explained in
terms of absolute properties or truths. By employing the appropriate
procedures described previously, we can discover knowledge that
under no circumstances can be false. Empiricists, on the other hand,
say even if systematized procedures for the acquisition of knowledge
were employed, man cannot discover absolute truths. Man can only
develop probable hypotheses about the universe. Within certain
confidence intervals and at certain levels of significance, man can
work out a theory of knowledge, but only within the bounds of the
actual achievements of scientists. Discussion of limits and bounds
along with the disputation that certain organizational absolute
truths were, in fact, proverbs, would resonate strongly nearly a
century later. They were first discussed in public administration
when logical positivists like Herbert Simon examined behavior of
individuals within organizations using concepts such as bounded
rationality and satisficing (Simon 1946 and 1947).
With the breakaway of science from classical philosophy in the late
nineteenth century, the following questions became significant:
What is philosophy apart from science?
What kind of knowledge (if any) results from philosophical activity?

Is philosophy different from science? (Popkin and Stroll 1990)
In the twentieth century several influential philosophical movements
developed, each with answers to these and other important questions
in philosophy and science. Important to the development of logical
positivism was the perspective of logical atomism and the works of
Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, and eventually, the Vienna Circle.

From Logical Atomism to the Vienna Circle
After more than ten years of work, Alfred North Whitehead and
Bertrand Russell, in a series of three volumes entitled Principia
Mathematica (1962), described a new type of logic. It was broader in
scope than what was then the standard and accepted logic system
based on the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. This new
system of logic described the relationship of symbols to each other,
or symbolic logic. The importance of the work by Whitehead and
Russell lay in the fact that it did not reject the centuries of work
by philosophers since Aristotle, but refined it through mathematics
to a degree of precision never before seen. This symbolic logic
could also be used to develop a precise new symbolic language,
beyond that of natural languages like French, English, or Spanish,
that could clarify the meanings of sentences for further
philosophical analysis (Popkin and Stroll 1990).
Principia Mathematica and the writings of Whitehead and Russell
received further explanation and elaboration with Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1899-1951), who many regard as the greatest
philosophical genius of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein thought
of philosophy as an autonomous discipline (e.g., separate from
science) dealing with its own sort of particular problems. He did
not believe that science could solve philosophical problems, and in
later life he would say that even philosophy could not provide any
factual information about the world (Popkin and Stroll 1990). The
great body of his work launched the logical positivist movement.
Moreover, because of several statements in Wittgenstein's 1922 work
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1961) a small group of students in
Austria, led by a University of Vienna professor, Moritz Schilick,
began the famous Vienna Circle.
The logical atomist perspective of Whitehead and Russell received
its most comprehensive explanation in Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein's version of logical atomism
became known as picture theory. A perfect language, according to
Wittgenstein, is like a map, as it pictures or mirrors the structure
of reality. As philosophers attempt to utilize the logical atomistic
perspective and symbolic logic to develop aspects of the structure
of reality, they would be actively engaged in the process and not in
a merely passive and reflective stance as in the past (Berg 1967).
This single part of Wittgenstein's massive work would become
extremely significant for the eventual development of logical
positivism. Wittgenstein's contention that philosophy is a genuine
activity just as science is would become a major focus for the
Vienna Circle. But, unlike science, philosophy does not discover new
facts or new knowledge. Philosophy describes the structure of the
world and how its basic ingredients are constructed. This is
knowledge, but not the same kind of knowledge that science develops
(Popkin and Stroll 1990). The philosophical system of logical
atomism was a metaphysical system in the traditional sense. As such,
it would be rejected by thinkers who would use the same symbolic
logic developed by logical atomists to contend that metaphysical
knowledge developed by such thinking was itself not sense (Bergmann
1967).
Logical positivism is often thought to have been initiated by the
"philosophy as activity" remarks of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus. However, the group associated with the
beginnings of the logical positivism movement were individuals who
met in the early 1920s in seminars in Vienna that were conducted by
Moritz Schilick. The original members of the group were committed to
science either by scholarship or profession. To them, philosophy was
an avocation. Among the group's members were Hans Hahn, Fredrich
Waismann, Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Carnap. The
original focus of the group was empiricism. However, they were
heavily influenced first by Whitehead and Russell and then, more
profoundly, by Wittgenstein (Gross 1970).
In elaborating upon Wittgenstein's view that philosophy was not a
theory but an activity, the Vienna Circle held that philosophy does
not produce propositions that are true or false. Instead, philosophy
merely clarifies the meaning of statements and in that process it
shows some to be scientific, some to be mathematical, and some to be
nonsensical (Wedberg 1984). Four principles of logical positivism
eventually were developed by the Vienna Circle. The first principle
is that of logical atomism. The truth of all complex statements
depends on simple statements about what may be sensed. However, none
of these simple statements may entail any others.b