Government Is Us: Public Administration in an Anti‐Government Era

Citation

Kramer, R. (1999), "Government Is Us: Public Administration in an Anti‐Government Era", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 12 No. 6, pp. 562-578. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.1999.12.6.562.4

For Darwin, Marx, and Freud, arguably the most influential social theorists of the last century, self‐interest is the essence of the human condition and conflict its tragic corollary. Deriding the notion that people could work together for mutual benefit, neither Darwin, Marx, nor Freud saw much hope for negotiating a political order through collaboration. The active powerful ones “naturally” give orders to the passive weaker ones, who accept, usually without question. Domination is built into the human system and can never be eradicated. History is a stuck phonograph record, repeating in every generation the same dismal song: the struggle for survival of the fittest, the clash of economic interests, the irreducibility of aggressive drives.

Preaching neither the necessity of harmony nor the end of self‐interest, the authors of Government Is Us build a strong case for the prospect that US citizens and US public managers can learn to build a new kind of connection, one in which both take orders, not from each other, but from the situation. “When you and I decide on a course of action together and do that thing”,wrote Mary Parker Follett, whose guiding spirit hovers over almost every page of this book, “you have no power over me nor I over you, but we have power over ourselves together” (Frost, Mitchell, and Nord, 1995, p. 17). In other words, “[o]ne person should not give orders to another person, but both should take orders from the situation (Frost et al., 1995). For this to happen, say the authors of Government Is Us, we need to rethink the current power imbalance between citizens and public administrators, redefining the meaning of knowledge to include both the expert professional knowledge of administrators and the human “personal knowledge” (Polanyi, 1962) of ordinary citizens.

Although collaboration implies the sharing of power with citizens it does not mean the giving up of power by administrators. “It is naíve to assume that one can simply turn over administrative control and power to citizens” advise King and Stivers (p. 74). The true interests of both public administrators and citizens are realized only through the process of “reciprocal relating” and “co‐ordinating”, as Follett never tired of repeating. Interaction promotes the discovery of interests. But this interweaving of wills “does not require sacrifice on the part of the individual”, according to Follett (Graham, 1995). “The fallacy that the individual must give up his/her individuality for the sake of the whole is one of the most pervasive, the most insidious, fallacies I know” (p. 218). Neither administrators nor citizens need compromise their deepest values, whether they be standards of quality, on the one hand, or visions of equity, on the other, to work toward the integration of their interests.

Offering no magic formulas or guarantees (p. 77), the authors of Government Is Us argue that trust between administrators and citizens can emerge only out of the process of building authentic relationships, blending the two wills together in the mutually stimulating pursuit of a larger whole. Resolving the problem of citizen disaffection with government requires nothing less than a return to the timeless recognition that “we are all much more simply human than otherwise”, as the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan once observed. Human beings learn to trust each other only by first developing a relationship. Restoring trust in government will demand building mutually respectful, genuine relationships, person‐to‐person, one at a time, between officials willing to share power with citizens wanting to participate more actively in public life. Such relationships are bound to raise the level of ethical aspiration of both parties, reinvigorating the public space between administrators and citizens.

Relationship building is a long‐term continuous project, not satisfied by experience‐distant “sound‐bite’ opinion polls or “managed” public hearings that leave citizens feeling manipulated and unheard. This is hollow participation. Instead, for truly democratic government, administrators and citizens need to engage directly with each other on a regular basis in full‐throated public dialogue, without each party holding back anything important:

Democratizing public administration means creating the conditions under which citizens and public servants can join in deliberating about, deciding, and implementing the work of public agencies. What we mean by Government Is Us, is a democratic public administration that involves active citizenship and active administration. By active administration we mean not an enhancement of administrative power, but the use of discretionary authority to foster collaborative work with citizens. The active administrator is one who acts creatively to direct administrative prerogatives toward active citizenship... Active citizenship is different from voting, paying taxes, or using government services... [I]n active citizenship, citizens rule and are ruled in turn ( pp. 195‐6).

If one party has the power to make unilateral decisions (for example, to define the nature of the problem or establish the negotiating agenda), collaboration is not recommended until the power imbalance is rectified. But building these partnerships with citizens requires administrators to abandon exclusive reliance on “professional expertise” and accept the “lived experiences” of citizens as legitimate bases for joint decision making. Administrators need to use their discretionary authority not to accumulate more power and influence but to reach out to the public, educate them on the complex issues, and invite them to join a bracing dialogue. “The public”, note the authors of Government Is Us, ‘is an intersubjective phenomenon: Public life is, simply, the talk that goes on in public about public concerns” (p. 40). Only by becoming active participants in civic life, rather than remaining passive spectators on the sidelines, can citizens regain trust in the democratic idea that government is us – regain trust, as it were, in their capacity to govern themselves. It is relationship that allows the wholeness of individuality to emerge, that spawns the self‐acceptance necessary for discovering – or, better, recovering or uncovering – one’s full creative potential as a citizen. Only by willing to be oneself within relationship, by accepting one’s own difference and having it accepted by another, can citizens recover the creativity and strength to bear responsibility for self‐governance.

Interaction is itself the most important site of learning, according to Follett, a site where self and other, I and thou, thou and I, are changed in the very process of encounter. “Through the circular response, we are creating each other all the time... I never react to you but to you‐plus‐me; or to be more accurate, it is I‐plus‐you reacting to you‐plus‐me...That is, in the very process of meeting, we both become different” (in Graham, 1995, p. 42). To be sure, the thoroughly pragmatic Follett recognized that integration is not possible in all cases and is, in any event, never permanent.

Government Is Us is organized into two parts, the first half written primarily by academics and the second primarily by practitioners. An especially attractive feature of the book is a spirited e‐mail conversation among the authors, conducted during the drafting of chapters and reproduced in sidebars throughout the text, about the elusive meanings of such words as “administrator discretion”, “professional expertise”, “community”, and “relationship”. Collaborating with their 11 co‐authors, King and Stivers were conscious of wanting to walk the talk, not just to stumble the mumble: “As Follett suggested, by continuing to talk, we achieved a sort of ‘integration’ in which the final product, we believe, is better than either of us or any of our collaborators could have come up with individually” (p. xv). Allowing the contributors to spring to life as flesh‐and‐blood persons, these remarkably intimate conversational sidebars are a refreshing way of demonstrating how dialogue and deep listening can promote unexpected learnings and build more trusting relationships, all the while permitting the full expression of difference. The word conversation derives from the Latin convertere, which means “to turn together” or “to change with” – suggesting that transformation and learning emerge from relationship not isolation. A model partnership between academics and practitioners, this feisty congress of 13 writers does not commit the fallacy that “the individual must give up his [or her] individuality for the sake of the whole”.

In Part I of Government Is Us (entitled “The anti‐government context”), the political, economic, and philosophic roots of citizen discontent with government are plumbed expertly by Cheryl Simrell King, Camilla Stivers, Renee Nank, and Ralph Hummel. “We suggest that beneath the surface of the decreasing confidence and trust in government lie factors that extend beyond interest group politics to more basic political‐economic arrangements” (p. 19). The American people’s disillusionment with the implicit but now shattered promises of US corporations to provide career‐long security, and the failure of the American dream to create increasing prosperity for all, has been displaced on to the federal government in Washington DC. “Given economic uncertainty and perceptions that government programs are not available to help those who are both in need and working hard to stay afloat, it makes sense that citizen anger and resentment are directed at government” (p. 24). Today, few Americans believe that elected representatives, especially at the national level, truly represent or understand them: “the feeling that ‘government isn’t us’ is widespread” (p. 29). Echoing the postmodern critique of Fox and Miller (1995), Hummel and Stivers argue that the American founders’ philosophy of representation is, itself, fundamentally undemocratic in the sense that it is necessarily an abstraction from the lived experience of citizens (p. 31). Also, “government isn’t us” because many modern administrators, unthinking hostages to the cult of objectivity, do not trust the subjectively lived and felt experience of citizens as a basis for agenda‐setting and decision making. But “[o]nly citizens have the direct knowledge that makes it possible to connect the abstractions of law with the real needs of people” (p. 48).

In Part II of Government Is Us (entitled “Strategies for collaboration”), Mary Timney, Lisa Zanetti, Walter Kovalick, Jr, Margaret Kelly, Dolores Foley, Richard Box, Deborah Sagen, Joseph Gray, and Linda Chapin offer compelling testimony that “citizens want the possibility of becoming more than passive observers, consumers, or customers of public services.... [and] are ready to bear some of the responsibility for joining with government workers and managers in weighing what particular government agencies ought to be doing, and how” (p. 73). Recognizing that established economic and political interests often work against public administrators who want to collaborate with citizens, these authors recount six juicy stories of how they struggled against the odds, and not always successfully, to nurture citizens in the never‐ending process of self‐governance.

Although each of the stories of citizen participation is illuminating, I found the chapter by Dolores Foley to be especially instructive on the predicaments administrators in the Hawaii State Department of Health faced in determining how to define “community” and “representation”. Required by the Federal government to include “community representatives” on a task force to help design an HIV‐prevention plan, administrators in Hawaii struggled with the surprisingly wicked problem of sifting through geographic subdivisions, suburbs, rural areas, and islands to nominate those that could be considered communities. Defining the word “representative” was even more problematic: “Members chosen for their ethnic background (Japanese, Filipino, etc.) or interest group (gay, substance abuse, etc.) were uncomfortable with the expectation that they were representing their group... Some members said that the design of public processes has a Western cultural bias and that residents of Asian or Hawaiian descent do not feel comfortable speaking up at meetings, especially when there are differences of opinion” (p. 144). Good intentions by administrators or citizens are necessary but not sufficient to build trusting relationships or sustainable organizational structures that promote “a culture of public participation” (p. 151).

Also eye‐opening is a chapter by Joseph Gray and Linda Chapin that tells the richly detailed story of how officials in Orange County, Florida learned to collaborate more creatively with residents of South Apopka, a poor community of 5,000 African American, Haitian, and Hispanic citizens, to reduce juvenile crime and solve other civic problems. “[W]e assumed that the existing community groups and their leaders represented the collective community leadership and that the groups would lay down their swords and forget about turf issues to work toward the general public good. Wrong... We had effectively become another competing faction in the community instead of a collaborative partner” (pp. 179‐80). That the project ended successfully, and was extended to other Orange County communities, is a tribute to the extraordinary commitment citizens and administrators made to listening to, empathizing with, and supporting each other – bringing out their differences and working hard, on all fronts, to integrate rather than absorb or destroy these differences. Alignment occurred only when citizens and administrators each found unique ways to express their true purposes as individuals within the context of a larger purpose, merging and blending each other’s strengths.

“Someone once said, half seriously”, writes David Mathews (1994) in Politics for People, “that the most significant moment in our history may have been when Americans stopped saying ‘We, the people’ and began saying ‘They, the government”’ (p. 65). In Government Is Us, King, Stivers and collaborators have tackled this festering problem head‐on and crafted a brilliant strategy to close the divide between “we” and “they”. With a host of tested, fruitful suggestions for reconnecting the government to its people, Government Is Us is essential reading for all those soberly optimistic about the possibilities of citizens collaborating – or interpenetrating, as Follett would say – with public administrators to create a more democratic political order.