To attempt to understand postmodern public administration, one must begin
with the postmodern characterization of modernity or high modernity. Modernity
is the Enlightenment rejection of premodernity, of myths, mysteries, and
traditional powers based on heredity or ordination. The Age of Reason rejected
a natural order that subjugated many in the name of royalty or deity, and replaced
that natural order with systems of democratic self-determination, capitalism, socialism,
and Marxism. Equally importantly, the Age of Reason rejected knowledge
based on superstition or prophecy and replaced it with knowledge based
on science. All modern academic disciplines and fields of science are rooted in
the Enlightenment and in an epistemology based on the objective observation
of phenomena and the description, either quantitatively or qualitatively, of phenomena.
Modernist epistemology assumes discernible patterns of order in both
the physical and the social worlds, and in the social world it assumes a positivist
and rational association between means and ends. Modernism is the pursuit of
knowledge through reason, and knowledge thus derived is simply assumed to be
factual and therefore true.
To postmodernists, modern public administration based on Enlightenment
logic is simply misguided. In the first place, facts can neither speak nor write and
cannot, therefore, speak for themselves (Farmer). Facts represent propositions
or hypotheses derived from observation. In the telling of facts, therefore,
the observer is not only an active shaper of the message sent but also an active
shaper of the likely image received. In the second place, “the view that social science
is a matter of cumulative accretion of knowledge through the work of the
human subject neutrally observing the action and interaction of the objects—letting
the facts speak for themselves—is untenable. It is difficult to cling to the view
that the mind is some kind of possessive receptor of outside activities such as impressions
or ideas” (Farmer ).