Ways of Knowing and Inclusive Management Practices

Martha S . Feldman University of California, Irvine Anne M . Khademian Virginia Polytechnic University Helen Ingram University of California, Irvine Anne S . Schneider Arizona State University Articles on Collaborative Public Management Ways of Knowing and Inclusive Management Practices Martha Feldman is the Roger W. and Janice M. Johnson Chair in Civic Governance and Public Management at the University of California, Irvine. E-mail : feldmanm@uci.edu. Th e authors engage structural and agentic perspectives to examine opportunities for deliberation and the purposeful role of managers in creating those opportunities. Drawing on actor-network theory as a way of understanding the process of structuring knowledge, this essay focuses on the continuous enactment and reenactment of networks of human and nonhuman actants and the associations that connect them. Th is thinking is applied to policy issues, which the authors propose should be understood as ways of knowing. Th e ﬂ uidity of such ways of knowing provides opportunities for public managers to use the inclusive practices associated with boundary experiences, boundary objects, and boundary organizations to facilitate deliberation. Anne M. Khademian is an associate professor at the Center for Public Administration and Policy in the School for Public and International Affairs, Virginia Polytechnic University. E-mail : akhademi@vt.edu. Helen Ingram is the Drew, Chace and Erin Warmington Endowed Chair of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. E-mail : hingram@uci.edu. Anne Schneider is a professor in the School of Justice Studies and a faculty affi liate with the Center for Urban Inquiry at Arizona State University, where she was dean of public programs for 15 years. E-mail : anne.schneider@asu.edu. A distinguished history of scholarship holds out deliberation as the ideal means of making public decisions and promoting democracy (Dewey 1916; Elster 1998 ; Ingram and Rathgeb-Smith 1993; Manin, Stein, and Mansbridge 1987; Rousseau 2003 ). Th e scholarly literature is split, however, on the best means of accomplishing deliberative democracy. One body of scholarship focuses on the role of civil, social, and political structures to generate opportunities for participation and deliberation ( Landy 1993; Mansbridge 1980 ). Th ese authors focus on the creation and maintenance of a civil deliberative space that is often structurally distinct from government ( Dryzek 2002 ), the creation of ideal speech conditions ( Habermas 1975, 1989 ), the establishment of institutions of citi- zen deliberation and participation to enhance both representation and deliberation ( Fung 2006 ; Fung and Wright 2003), and the establishment of “structures and processes that deﬁ ne relations between civil society … . and the state” ( Chaskin 2003, 162 ). Another body of scholarship focuses on the role of agents in creating and facilitating opportunities for deliberative democracy. Th is perspective is prominent in the public management literature, which presents the manager as a catalyst for deliberative processes ( Heifetz 1994; Heifetz and Sinder 1988; Reich 1988 ), a facilitator of civic engagement ( Box 2000; Bryson 2004; Kirlin and Kirlin 2002 ), a key to forging an alternative consensus around public goals ( Behn 2001; Moore 1995 ), and a “public servant” who is able to “help citizens articulate and meet their shared interests” (Denhardt and Denhardt 2000 ). Th is paper contributes to a small but growing body of scholarship that engages both the structural and agen- tic perspectives in order to examine opportunities for deliberation and the purposeful role of managers in creating those opportunities (Bingham, Nabatchi, and O’Leary 2005; Feldman and Khademian 2002 , 2005, forthcoming; Roberts 1997 , 2002, 2004; Th acher 2001; Vigoda 2002; Weber 2003 ). In this paper, we propose a way of understanding the structuring of knowledge that is associated with policy issues and that can be used by public managers to create oppor- tunities for inclusive practices, or actions aimed at increasing the range of perspectives in deliberation. We can recognize distinct and stable ways of knowing any given policy issue, such as “pro-life” and “pro- choice,” which represent ways of knowing abortion as a policy issue, or “resource development” and “preser- vation,” ways of knowing the environment as a policy issue. Yet, as we will discuss here, ostensibly stable ways of knowing an issue must be continuously re- newed. Th e ways of structuring and knowing associ- ated with a policy issue, even those that endure, are active and ongoing. We suggest that the ﬂ uidity of knowing an issue is an opportunity for public manag- ers to use inclusive practices to facilitate deliberation. Th is perspective helps them employ tools such as boundary experiences, boundary objects, and bound- ary organizations to bring together diﬀ erent ways of knowing and to create opportunities for new ways of knowing to emerge. By relating the process of struc- turing to the creation of opportunities for inclusive practice, this paper brings together the structured features of the civil society literature with the agentic features of the management literature. As a baseline, we oﬀ er a deﬁ nition of deliberation: “Deliberation is not ‘the aggregation of interests.’ It Ways of Knowing and Inclusive Management Practices 89