A PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION EXAMPLE
A clearing away of delusions in public administration thinking is an important benefit, but only one of the benefits, promised by deconstruction and the postmodern turn. Liberating public administration thinking from entrapment in the efficiency metaphor, with the binary opposition of efficient-inefficient, is the example of this kind of benefit that is discussed in this section. Many other examples could be added. For instance, another is release from the entrapment of public administration thinking in various capitalist metaphors, with such binary oppositions as productive-unproductive and private-public. The value of this example is that it speaks directly not only to the failure to conceptualize government as the focus of business and financial pressures but also to the misguided attempt to structure, to judge, and to manage governmental activity "on business lines." Yet another example is the liberating of public administration thinking from its entrapment in masculine metaphors, with such binary oppositions as autonomy-heteronomy. The value of this example is that it speaks to such issues as the masculine--feminine split in the development of public administration and social work (Stivers, 1993, 1994), a split yielding a bureaucracy providing for people in a way oddly at variance with, say, the Freudian and Jungian concepts of a person as possessing both masculine and feminine aspects. Yet another example (suggested to me by Charles Fox and Hugh Miller) is liberation from the entrapment of public administration thinking in the narratives of money, with such oppositions as solvency-insolvency and fundedunfunded The value of this example is that it speaks to the meaning of fiscal
responsibility and accountability, notions whose contexts have surely changed
in these days of Ml-M2-M3, and so on, since the era of Charles Dickens's Mr.
Micawber. (This is written at a time when the U.S. Congress is struggling to
regain Micawberian happiness. Exclaims Dickens's Micawber, "Annual income
twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and
six, result misery" {Dickens, 1986, p. 132].)