The Paradox of Transforming Public Administration: Modernity Versus Postmodernity Arguments

Directing organizational change requires the ability to interpret—and reinterpret—the meanings customarily ascribed to crucial institutional values, norms, and events. If public managers are prepared to live with contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity, they can gain a new perspective on the complex social process of organizational change. An appreciation of the inherent tensions among crucial constructs in public administration—the binary opposition of bureaucracy and democracy, leadership and representation, policy making and implementation, centralization and decentralization, and the like—would allow administrators to determine if it is possible to reconcile tensions in particular instances. One element of contradiction in contemporary public administration is found in the debate concerning “modern” and “postmodern” perspectives of administrative practice, representing conflicting interpretations of substantive and normative aspects of institutional change. This study probes this issue at the intersection of the social and administrative sciences with administrative practice and also examines what the authors see as the paradoxical interplay of postmodernist theory, critical theory, and theories of political and economic development. An ancillary purpose is to assess the prospective value of critical-modern and postmodernist models for contemporary public administration.