TESC MPA, Tacoma, spring 2022

Synthesis & Review

"Public Policy, Budgeting, and Finance for PA"

Build on our conversations from the year and reflecting on this quarter specifically.

PA comes from you.

As public servants, you are the sieve for PA.

What past, present, and future are you accepting or rejecting in PA?

What practices, systems, budgets, finance, and policies are you complicit in?

You are the translators of ideas, values, and priorities into reality.

(My Definition)
"Public Servants": teams of leaders who translate ideas into goods, services, systems, and policies by reconciling debates over expectations from the people and governments.

Sankofa:

Not enough to reflect.

Must act on those reflections.

This is what can make us "reflexive" practitioners when examining our histories.

Some of us have cultural traditions in our families that when a loved one passes on, we intentionally keep their memory alive by saying their name and telling stories about them. This helps us to never forget our loved ones.

(My definition)
"The Public": those whose stories are recognized as priorities in decision making.

The histories we believe as PAs, the histories we rely on as PAs, are our collectively "known" story. This is what we keep alive.

What story would you tell about this image?

Sacred site?
Black Hills?
National memorial?
Federally funded shrine to Democracy?
Non-profit partnerships: "Mount Rushmore Society"
Elected Officials?
Leaders?
Colonizers?
Yourself?

The stories you "see" or don't "see" here is similar to the histories you may or may not prioritize when recognizing the widely varied histories of PA.

The "histories" (plural) of PA are a main focus of this class for the entire quarter. I'm not going to go in depth to any one history tonight, but as you can see from the readings there are wide variety of histories to acknowledge as part of the backdrop for the practice and study of PA.

Histories are time bound. Where you "start" and "stop" in your historical account of PA may reveal what you are prioritizing to keep alive in PA.

-- Since the time before time? Time immemorial? We could begin with established governments, organizations, societies pre-colonial entanglements. Or emphasize post-contact: dominion, naming, Manifest Destiny, Discovery Doctrine, conquest, and colonial practices going on today.
-- Wars! So much of PA history in textbooks is about wars. WWI, WWII.
-- Constitutions --the writing of them, the governing of them, court cases about them. Tribal Constitutions? (Federally and non-Federally recognized) State constitutions?
-- peoples' stories or the science about them?
-- places (ecology), non-human centered stories of PA
-- partnerships in governing: non-profits came into being because government couldn't do it all.

Public Administrators? Public Servants? Do your stories change?

Whenever you are presented with the "canon" of PA (what is), please see what is missing. Look for doughnut holes! This is an important habit to develop so that when you are presented with "what is" in a policy, or budget, or program, you will pause and see what has been intentionally excluded.

“Canon” was meetings of religious leaders and scholars to decide which books of the bible were divinely inspired and which ones were not. (new testament). 15 books were omitted. = Apocrypha

The term “canon” is used in academia to acknowledge similar processes of “including” and “excluding” sources of meaning and knowledge.

What we do in PA today will be the histories of tomorrow.

What should PAs base decisions on? Thinking Critically and Creatively about Praxis: practice + theory.

Major Debates in Public Administration. You will be able to connect everything you read in the MPA program to at least one of these debates.

This slide is what your workshop will use here next.

Divide between the classical approach and the challenge approach.

Henry walks you through most of these in his discussion of the 5 paradigms of PA.

The classical approach is not "over". These practices in government are not in the past.

Classics: Efficiency, Facts, Objectivity, Administration (Experts), formal authority, sameness (rational model), Scientific/Quantitative/ Evidence ….. vs….

Challenge: Effectiveness, Values, Subjectivity and Politics, informal authority (the faces of power), otherness (difference), Qualitative/ Experiences

Defining the Classics: Public organizations should operate with power located at the top to maximize efficiency. Public administration should be about value free, neutral professionals who are experts that maintain bureaucracy. Army of experts. Made a clear distinction between politics (legislation that follows the public will and values) and administration (the execution of law by value free experts).

Defining the Challenge: The aim of the challenge is to show what is wrong with the world and as it is and to help improve it. They question whether an effect is morally or politically desirable. Recognize that social constructions exist= we cannot know “facts” separate from interests. Emphasize the imbrication of theory and practice. The goal of the challenge is to bring about social and political change.

Both the classical approach to PA & the challenge approach are simply management approaches to getting things done in public service….. make decisions based on what?

Which areas will you have to make your own choices about in the workplace the most? Which do you favor in decision making? What will you base your choices on? What will you let in or keep out?

What events brought about the challenge? Government of the classics had three major external forces acting on it: 1) WWI, 2) the depression/New Deal, and 3) WWII.

The New Deal got us out of the depression and placed public administration in the daily lives of citizens through hands on improvement projects to re-build this country. The aftermath of the war forced public administrators to be human. They could not ignore the gravity of the human atrocities in WWII and realized that it was humans with subjective values that would have to prevent a WWIII. The objective, rational, controlled bureaucracy would have to change. Normally, change in government is very slow. But in these situations, government had immediate and major needs of its citizenry to respond to . So tons of agencies and commissions started cropping up to respond to the real human issues at hand: jobs, hunger, polio, race relations. Government had to help government to help the people. Government still wanted to be efficient, but mainly they wanted to be effective.

What happened? Well the efforts and events of the 1940's through 1970's made bureaucracy and bureaucrats definitely change forever, but they also became completely overwhelmed and inefficient and ineffective. Bureaucracy grew so big, it became the 4th branch of government. There were so many rule making and regulatory agencies and commissions that the right hand did not know what the left was doing. Because government could no longer handle the work they had created for themselves, they looked outside of government for help. This is where privatization and non-profits came in to assist government in doing what was necessary to meet the needs of an ever growing citizenry.

Positionality:
Conditions under which a position arises, the factors that stabilize it, the implications, and what forces maintain it.

Identities as indicators of social positions are not fixed.

Positions act on the knowledge a person has about things.

Consequently, knowledge is the product of a specific position (self-location).

Issues of positionality challenge the notions of value-free decisions/governments that have dismissed human subjectivity from the processes that generate policy, programs, services, knowledge, and identities. Consequently, it is essential to take into account personal positions before engaging in governing.

http://www.unwrittenhistories.com/the-historical-is-personal-redux-position...

Here is one world view...

Theories, Ideologies, and Paradigms are based on epistemologies.

The knowledge (histories, stories) we accept/reject form the basis for dominant society and the ways we govern.

How do you come to know? Our actions as PAs are based on what we "know."

We frame our initial responses to issues based upon the world view we’ve formed over time (our epistemology). After that first reaction, we then reason through issues based upon where we deem "T"ruth or “t”ruths come from. Our frames of reference and our lines of reasoning inform each other in a continuous feedback loop.

“Knowing” comes from accepting or rejecting information filtered by your world view. Knowledge is the basis for ideas generating governing systems, policies, programs, services, and evaluations.

Think about all of the authors you've read so far. Their world
views shaped the "knowledge" they conveyed.

“Theory does not simply reflect life; it also projects life.”- Denhardt

Bureaucracy: Max Weber (1864-1920) was a sociologist who observed the division of labor in a pin factory and he developed his "ideal type" theory of work. In the post-industrial revolution world, he admired the manufacturing industry's top down hierarchy, formal authority, rational, efficiency, expertise/specialization, and accountability.
Result: he argued to impose the “one best way” procedure on the whole workforce, universally, in any organization or place. If there was one best way to accomplish a production task on an assembly line then there was one best way to accomplish the task of setting up organizations= bureaucracy.

Rational decision making ("Rational-Choice"): relies on concepts from economics and psychology. An individual makes a rational decision by assessing all of the alternatives known to them and selecting the one decision that will maximize his or her utility (value) and maximize the attainment of objectives. This assumes that perfect information is available to the decision maker, that all the alternatives available have one and only one clear meaning, and that all alternatives have a common denominator to be weighed against each other. Assumes an objective, market, model of society and a closed environment for decisions to keep chaos and politics out.---see classic PA theorists such as Herbert Simon, Frederick Taylor, Luther Gulick, Max Weber, Charles Goodnow.

Incremental decision making ("Incrementalism"): groups of decision makers formulate small goals and consider only a limited number of options. A decision is rarely, if ever, made from scratch. Start from current situation and small changes are more likely than dramatic or revolutionary changes. Favors status quo over radical change because small changes are always possible at the margin. Favors the power of communication through argumentation due to the intersubjective meanings and understandings of options available to decision makers. This practice entails "muddling through" issues in context. Consensus may only be reached through the better argument and clear understanding of meanings and consequences. ---see theorists such as Charles Lindbloom and Jurgen Habermas.

"democratic" means the ethics and ideals held.

"Democracy" is the political system resulting from the democratic ideology.

Bureau: drawers. A consistent way to keep things categorized, ordered, and controlled within specified files.