In their attention to contemporary phenomena in public administration,
the contributions in the left column may be called ‘postmodern’. As
far as the interpretativist contributions referred to in the right column
entail a change in the way in which public administration is usually
approached and studied, they can be called ‘postmodernist’. This change
particularly concerns the view that systematic testing of ideas is irrelevant.
The differentiation made is important, because interpretativism
38 IMPLEMENTING PUBLIC POLICY
TABLE 2.1 Scholarly attention to the ‘postmodern condition’
Epistemological stance
Stance on democracy Positivist Interpretative
Neutral ‘Infocracy’ ‘Verbal renewal’
Deliberative ‘Interactive policy ‘The listening
democracy making’ bureaucrat’
and postmodernism cannot be equated. Aiming at ‘telling stories’,
postmodernist scholars generally are interpretativists. On the contrary,
however, not all interpretativist scholars are postmodernists. Different
from the latter, mainstream interpretativists remain adherent to the standard
norms of social science, particularly as far as methodology is concerned