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Productivity & Management Review
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BOOK REVIEWS
These two books, written from the vantage points of public administration and
business management, respectively, address the challenges posed to managers by the
postmodern condition. I enjoyed them both for different reasons and found them
particularly useful when read together.
Fox and Miller begin by observing that, as an acceptable approach to governance,
public administration orthodoxy is dead. That combination of neutral public adminis-
tration, scientific management, and hierarchy continues to haunt us, however-not as
a ghost, but as a "legitimizing myth" that provides the underlying assumptions for all
mainstream public administration practice and reform efforts. The problem is that
myths, unlike ghosts, have no prescribed exorcism rituals. They make their presence
known by lurking for generations in the collective unconscious, where they can cause
as much damage as any poltergeist. Postmodern Public Administration offers a new
approach to governance that explicitly tries to free itself from the myth.
The book proceeds in two parts. The first offers a critique of orthodoxy and its two
most prominent alternatives, constitutionalism (neoinstitutionalism) and communi-
tarianism, or civism. The authors suggest a third alternative, discourse theory, in which
reified institutions are transformed into energy fields composed of "malleable demo-
cratic discursive social formations" (p. xv). Building on a foundation of the commu-
nicative ethics of Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt's agonistic democracy, and
constructivism, the authors propose a postmodern public administration that, they
contend, more closely approaches true democratic goals.
Public administration is facing "paradigm anxiety" (p. 4). Orthodoxy was based on
acceptance of the " 'representative democratic accountability feedback loop' model of
democracy" (p. 4)-the procedural model where individual preferences are aggregated
to popular will, codifed into legislation by elected representatives, implemented by
the executive branch (bureaucrats), and then evaluated by informed voters. "The loop"
is a comfortable fiction, neither democratic nor credible. Still, it is the approach that
continues to inform the practice of public administration, contributing to a clash of
cultures in which the tools of modernity continue to be used in a postmodern society.
As in many situations where the wrong tools are used, the result is slipshod at best and
dangerous at worst.
Public Productivity & Management Review, Vol. 20 No. 2, December 1996 204-212
C 1996 Sage Publications, Inc.
204
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BOOK REVIEWS 205
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206 PPMR / December 1996
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BOOK REVIEWS 207
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208 PPMR / December 1996
paradoxically reinforce them. The authors discuss GM's Saturn Corporation to illus
trate the dual possibilities of stakeholder inclusion: the "bright side" of postbureau-
cratic, decentralized, interactive organizations and the "dark side" of discourse and
interaction used to extend organizational control and manipulation in a form of
"organizational seduction" (p. 171). I think it is a distinction well worth noting.
The third section examines epistemological issues in environmental management,
seeking to reconcile the tendency of postmodernism to retreat from nature with the
simultaneous emergence of the ecology movement in postmodern politics. The fourth
section addresses the challenge of teaching and learning postmodern techniques in
conventional faculties of business and management. This section should be of interest
to both practitioners and professors of public administration. How can management
(or postmodern public administration) be taught in departments that emphasize "man-
aging by the numbers" without either succumbing to the quantitative approach or
focusing exclusively on cultural (organizational) critique, which further delegitimizes
the field? Essays in this section attempt to reconcile the paradox. The essay by Ghazi
F. Binzagr and Michael R. Manning advocates a participatory pedagogy. The authors
offer the example of a doctoral seminar in which the students spent an entire semester
reading classic works of management (Fayol, Taylor, Follett, Barnard, McGregor,
March, and Simon), deconstructed these works, and then reconstructed Fayol's clas-
sical functions into five new roles: invention, proactive reorganizing, persuading,
cocreating, and covalidation. The implications for applying this approach to public
administration education are intriguing.
The final section addresses globalization as an integral element of postmodernism.
Essays in this section grapple with issues of transcending the neoclassical economics
paradigm, avoiding privileged discourse and the dispersion of power (especially
through electronically disseminated discourses) in the global context. Gephart,
Thatchenkery, and Boje conclude with a summary essay calling for a positive recon-
struction of organizations.
Overall, this book was somewhat more difficult to read. The editors acknowledge
that the subject matter makes it difficult to avoid academic language and style. They
anticipate an audience of graduate students in management and organization theory
and "thinking managers"-those concerned with future issues and directions and
interested in nontraditional approaches. The emphasis is exclusively on private sector
management. Still, I found the collection relevant for the public sector manager.
Reading these two books in conjunction reveals how provokingly unpostmodern
our disciplines remain. Aside from references to major philosophical figures, there
was very little overlap in the bibliographies. The two books draw from almost entirely
separate bodies of literature. To the extent that public and private management face
different challenges (accountability to profit vs. accountability to constitutional
norms), this separation is understandable. Given, however, that one of the critiques of
modernity is the tendency to separate, classify, and divide the world into categories,
it would be gratifying to see the boundaries begin to blur a little more.
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BOOK REVIEWS 209
References
Lisa A. Zanetti
Department of Political Science
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Big Bets Gone Bad, by Philippe Jorion. San Diego: Academic Press, 1995, 176 pp.
Philippe Jorion has crafted a concise guide to the recent Orange County Investment
Pool debacle that features a whirlwind tour of investment markets, instruments, and
concepts. His narrative also spotlights the elemental dilemma of professional public
management: the public's desire for the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness prom-
ised by professional management versus its demand for controls on the discretion those
managers require to pursue that promise. The dynamic tension between the expert's
claim to autonomy and democracy's demand for accountability pervades the environ-
ment of public management, as well as this book. According to Jorion, Orange County
Treasurer Robert Citron's claim to autonomy was based on a false claim of expertise,
and the Board of Supervisors abrogated its responsibility to maintain adequate controls
on his discretion in the wake of his apparent successes.
Jorion states that no background in financial management is required of the reader
of his book, but his descriptions of the finer points of investment instruments, such as
derivatives, repurchase agreements, and structured notes, may not be readily accessible
to laypersons. The "impatient reader" is invited to skip these chapters, and perhaps
succinct, workable definitions of these instruments are too much to ask for-even
Citron apparently did not understand them. Jorion is much more successful in con-
trasting general concepts, such as maturity with duration, credit risk with market risk,
and risk minimization with risk management. This case study would serve as an
excellent second text in a graduate course in financial management that dealt with
investing public funds.
Citron was elected to the Orange County treasurer's office seven times in his
24-year career, although he had no college degree. For Jorion, Citron's ignorance of
financial markets and investment instruments was the key element leading to Orange
County's Chapter 9 bankruptcy proceedings and the liquidation of the investment
pool's holdings. Indeed, ignorance and ego are presented as the only possible expla-
nations for anyone taking such enormous investment risks in the absence of any desire
for personal monetary gain (none of the six felonies to which Citron eventually pleaded
guilty involved personal gain). When the red flags began to unfurl, however, Citron
may have had no option other than to stay the course that had been so successful in
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