Books
Theories of Public Organization (7th ed.). Boston: Wadworth/Cengage, with Robert B. Denhardt.
A widely read, classic text used in graduate courses across the world, this book is critical overview of many of the essential theories of public administration, public organization, and governance. However the book has a strong normative component and advances its own very distinctive theoretical framework and argument about organizational life. Drawing on elements of critical theory, phenomenology, and post-strucutralism we argue for an account of public organization that combines organization and democratic-political theory. Organizational spaces are political spaces; we should manage them with an eye to creating a more democratic, participatory kind of polity. A more nuanced theoretical account of this argument appears in Fabricating the People.
In this book, I offer an innovative account of why trust in government has declined over the last several decades. I argue that in public administration we have been given two accounts: on based in the performance government, another rooted in the view that government fails to represent the values or preferences of the public. By contrast, I contend that this decline is the result of radically change in the ways in which American social order is created and the subject and sovereign of democracy, the people, is "fabricated." I show how the basic coordinates of our political order, "political ontology," have come undone. This ontology, what I call "representation," rests upon a logic of exclusion justified by asserting some kind of natural way of being, thinking, or doing. This logic has been contested, causing deep changes in social order and the processes through which people accept the assertions of government as representation of the people. I outline an alternative ways of thinking about and conducting politics, a "politics of the subject." The book was the focus of a special issue of Public Administration Quarterly and has been noted as one of the more important public administration works during the last twenty years. Regrettably, I think contemporary politics continues to support my argument and makes this book as relevant as ever.