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By Michael W. Spicer
Students of public management have traditionally too frequently been disdainful in the direction of politics within the box, viewing political actions and pursuits as possibilities for corruption, mismanagement, and skewed priorities. Supporters of this anti-political stance became much more strident in recent times, a lot of them advancing clinical versions for the research and perform of public management and governance. Michael Spicer argues that politics merits to be defended as an important side of public management when you consider that it may possibly advertise ethical behavior in executive and in public management, largely via bringing to the foreground the position of values in administrative perform. Politics can facilitate the solution of conflicts that obviously come up from competing values, or conceptions of the nice, whereas minimizing using strength or violence. Drawing at the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Crick, and Stuart Hampshire, In security of Politics in Public management argues that price clash is an essential component of our ethical adventure, either in making our personal ethical offerings and in facing these whose values clash with our personal. This booklet is a lively announcement of rules and a well timed contribution to a discussion that's redefining public management, either in thought and in perform.
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Additional info for In Defense of Politics in Public Administration: A Value Pluralist Perspective (Public Admin: Criticism and Creativity)
Sample text
By providing such a context, an exposure to the history of our ideas can at least provide some partial protection, some degree of immunity, against the recurring fads or what Christopher Hood and Michael Jackson term “the administrative fashion, ‘consultocracy,’ . . pop management,” and “many incentives for amnesia” (1994, 484) that so often tend to infect our thinking and practice. Moreover, unless we are self-conscious about the moral and political ideas that are intimated in our words, writings, and actions, then there is a danger that public administration—both as a field of study and a practice—may become susceptible to influence by ideas that are not simply somewhat unhelpful, but are actually destructive of values we have come to cherish.
According to Bailey, “The bittersweet character of all public policy needs little further elaboration: welfare policies may mitigate hunger but promote parasitic dependence; vacationing in forests open for public recreation may destroy fish, wild life, and through carelessness in the handling of fire, the forests themselves. Unilateral international action may achieve immediate results at the cost of weakening international instruments of conflict resolution. Half a loaf may be worse than no loaf at all.
The value conflicts that those in government must deal with are often especially difficult because these conflicts present them with moral dilemmas that entail choices not between actions that are morally desirable, but rather between actions that are morally disagreeable. These are the choices that give rise to Machiavelli’s problem of “dirty hands,” in which a ruler or government official “must choose between two courses of action both of which it would be wrong for him to undertake” (Walzer 1973, 160).