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Legitimacy in Public Administration: A Discourse Analysis. - Review - book review

Administrative Science Quarterly, March, 2000 by Ann Langley

O. C. McSwite. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997. 306 pp. $49.95, cloth; $21.50, paper.

It was a McSwite Christmas, as my husband Gilbert put it as we packed our bags to return home to Canada after our annual week-long Christmas break with my usually dispersed family in England. Between mince pies and organized amusement, I had been taking periodic trips into the world of public administration as seen by O.C. As I progressed through the book, my family was subjected to my shifting and sometimes vehement reactions. In this review, I will try to represent the flavor of the sequence of surprise, curiosity, interest, outrage, and amazement I experienced and imposed on others around me, before assessing this book's overall contribution to our understanding of organization theory and public administration.

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My excuse for taking such a very personal approach to this book is that this is exactly how the book itself is written. It is a highly personal analysis of the evolution of the field of public administration peppered with anecdotes about happenings at public administration conferences, the feelings they engendered, and reflections dating back to graduate school. All this is written in the first person singular, and yet (and here was the first talking point for my family) Legitimacy in Public Administration is the work of two people: Orion F. White and Cynthia J. McSwain, a pair who have a long history of joint publication on organizational development and public administration. They justify this creative device for solving the authorship ordering problem as follows: "This text is the product of the relationship of the two people who constitute the first-person singular speaking through it" (p. 22, original emphasis). This does make some sense, but it constantly set me wondering as I read the book, Who wrote t his bit? Whose personal experience am I reading about now? The illusion of a single author is not perfectly sustained as the chapters succeed one another. All in all, however, I forgive them this conceit. It sets this book apart from the run of the mill, it is fun, it stimulates curiosity, and it makes for an interesting answer to "What are you reading?"

The personal style of the book also befits its strong critical message. That message is that the field of public administration has been captured from its founding by a mistaken belief that the management of the state requires an elite corps of people with expert knowledge to enact decisions on its behalf-"Men of Reason," as McSwite calls them throughout the book. Yet given the imperfections of democratic control over administrators' actions and the impossibility of reducing administrative problems to purely technical calculations, this approach inevitably raises questions of legitimacy: by what right do these individuals exert such power? McSwite argues that more truly democratic modes of governance that would solve the legitimacy problem have existed as opportunities at various times in American history but have always been shunted aside by those whose interests are served by the men-of-reason model. The central part of the book consists of a documentation of these historical events. Not surprisingly, the a lternative modes of governance that McSwite favors are based on collaborative community involvement in practical problem solving, an approach that is also echoed in other calls for increased citizen participation and in the communitarian and civil society movements (Etzioni, 1993; Putnam, 1993).

Returning to my own reactions to the book, the first introductory chapter had left me intrigued but a little intimidated. I have studied public sector organizations throughout my academic career and have recently become interested in how local administrative bodies can acquire legitimacy through citizen participation. As a non-American and a teacher in a school of management rather than public administration, I felt I was something of an outsider to McSwite's world of intellectual intrigue. The author's perspective seemed somewhat parochial and his/her style slightly off the wall. I was uncertain whether this book had anything to offer me.

When I moved on to the next two chapters, I began to take the book more seriously. Chapter 2 serves to frame the arguments in the rest of the book. It is a sophisticated analysis of the 1940 debate between Carl Friedrich and Herman Finer on the nature of administrative responsibility, interwoven with anecdotes about Wernher Von Braun, an effective but unorthodox public servant at NASA. I emerged from this chapter largely convinced by McSwite's argument that Finer and Friedrich's differences hid an implicit agreement on the inevitability of relying on men of reason, setting up the ultimately unresolvable debate about legitimacy.

Chapter 3 is a fascinating alternative account of the political maneuvering that led to the negotiation and ratification of the U.S. Constitution. In McSwite's version of the story, documented by extensive references to original sources and recent historical scholarship, it is the Anti-Federalists who are the tragic heroes, unsuccessfully defending a form of mutually supportive community governance that had emerged in the early days of the colonies and was reflected in the initial Articles of Confederation. The Federalist founding fathers, in contrast, are portrayed as representing the interests of a wealthy elite seeking a stable centralized government to protect its investments and resorting to manipulation to impose its will. For McSwite, the roots of the men-of-reason perspective lie in these events.

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Legitimacy in Public Administration: A Discourse Analysis. - Review - book review

Administrative Science Quarterly, March, 2000 by Ann Langley

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