Spirited Dialogue: The Case for Administrative Evil: A Critique

Spirited Dialogue: The Case for Administrative Evil: A Critique Melvin J. Dubnick, Rutgers University--Newark Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour's Unmasking Administrative Evil (UAE) is an important book in several respects, not the least being the attention it has generated among readers both within and outside the field of Public Administration.(2) As a community of scholars, Public Administration is not known for its contributions to "popular" literature. We do not tend to publish books likely to be found on the shelves at Borders or Barnes and Noble--not even in the "management" section where just about anything associated with organizational life seems to sell. Beyond the rare exception or two, ours is not a field that draws attention to itself through publishing controversial volumes. Therefore, any work published by our colleagues receiving some critical attention is indeed an important publication for our community. And the fact that it has received two of the field's major "book of the year" awards(3) only reinforces that judgment. UAE is no doubt a book to be reckoned with for any serious student of Public Administration. UAE achieved its notable status by being a contentious work, putting forth a strong argument on behalf of a particular viewpoint. It is a work of rhetoric, designed primarily to introduce us to an insightful perspective and to persuade us of its value for understanding the problematic nature of modern public administration. To the degree that it stirs debate and reflection about important issues, UAE no doubt deserves the attention and honors it has received. But does it deserve the same degree of attention as a work of scholarship? What follows is a critical assessment of UAE as a work of scholarship, and my focus is on two general concerns. In the first section, I present a foundation for assessing the credibility of argumentative scholarship and offer an assessment of UAE on those grounds. In the second section, I highlight some of the special responsibilities --some of them ethical assumed by scholars who use rhetorical and argumentative approaches. Here as well, I assess UAE to see how welt it "measures up." In the final section, I discuss what the widespread enthusiasm for this work says about our field and its view of scholarship. The Credibility of Argumentative Scholarship Scholarship as Argument Hood and Jackson (1991, especially ch. 2) characterize the literature of Public Administration as argumentative and rhetorical,(4) a view they trace to Herbert Simon's classic critique of orthodoxy in "The Proverbs of Administration."(5) The characterization of the field's literature as rhetorical and argumentative may seem harshly judgmental at first, and I have previously offered a serious critique of the field's scholarship (Dubnick 1999). There is growing acceptance, however, of the idea that most academic scholarship is in fact focused on efforts to persuade, and that rhetoric and argumentation play key roles in the conduct and presentation of research in all disciplines (Gross 1996; Edmondson 1984; Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey 1987; Patterson 1996; Mailloux 1989; Fish 1989, ch. 20; Gusfield 1976; Overington 1977). Among students of social scientific inquiry, attention has shifted from the search for universal or reconstructed "logics" of inquiry to an understanding of the dynamic "discursive cultures" of inquiry (Nagel 1961; Hall 1999; Kaplan 1964). For some, this view reinforces the postmodern critique of "scientism," especially in the social sciences (Rosenau 1992). For others, it supports a more realistic view of the imperfect world of scholarship found in all disciplines (Sokal and Bricmont 1998). In this context, the characterization of UAE as a rhetorical work does little more than make explicit the argumentative form of inquiry used by the authors. They are in good company. Among the contemporary classics of Public Administration are works no less argumentative, from Hummel's The Bureaucratic Experience (1994) and Goodsell's The Case for Bureaucracy (1994) to Osborne and Gaebler's Reinventing Government (1992). …