This widely acclaimed work provides a lively counterbalance to the standard assessment-measurement-accountability prescriptions that have made showing you did your job more important than actually doing it. Now extensively revised, it articulates a postmodern theory of public administration that challenges the field to redirect its attention away from narrow, technique-oriented scientism, and toward democratic openness and ethics. The authors incorporate insights from thinkers like Rorty, Giddens, Derrida, and Foucault to recast public administration as an arena of decentered practices. In...

Postmodern Public Policy introduces new ways of investigating the urgent difficulties confronting the public sector. The second half of the twentieth century saw approaches to public administration, public policy, and public management dominated by technical-instrumental thought that aspired to neutrality, objectivity, and managerialism. This form of social science has contributed to a public sector where policy debates have been reduced to "bumper-sticker" slogans, a citizenry largely alienated and distant from government, and analysis that ignores history and context and eschews the lived...

By highlighting the degree to which meaning making in public policy is more a cultural struggle than a rational and analytical project, Governing Narratives brings public administration back into a political context.In Governing Narratives, Hugh T. Miller takes a narrative approach in conceptualizing the politics of public policy. In this approach, signs and ideographs that is, constellations of images, feelings, values, and conceptualization are woven into policy narratives through the use of story lines. For example, the ideograph acid rain is part of an environmental...