A New Era and New Concepts in the Study of Race in Public Administration
As Public Administration Review (PAR) Editors, we believe that the quest to provide a better understanding of the concept of race in public administration has begun in earnest, a quest that we hope will usher in a new era in the study of race in public administration. Each one of us—individually and collectively, in everyday matters and in big picture decisions, in service and in scholarship—has supported and continues to support this quest. For example, in association with Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES), we organized a panel with an eponymous title (more on this later; see Hall 2022). This editorial—in addition to introducing contents of this issue—offers reflection and theoretical provocation intended to invigorate the public administration scholarly community's approach to the concept of race.
The thrust of our theoretical provocation is that the concept of race in public administration remains woefully undertheorized, and there is an urgent need to address this trained incapacity, to use Merton's coinage. Looking back over PAR's history, we see notable attempts to engage with race in our scholarship. In 1974, Adam Herbert edited a PAR symposium on racial minorities in public administration. Based on articles in the symposium, Herbert (1974) highlighted, among other things, racial and cultural biases faced by minority public administrators and the absence of racial minority perspectives in public administration scholarship and teaching. Alas, there have been few sustained follow-up efforts in PAR and in the broader public administration literature on engaging race directly and in an in-depth manner (Alexander 1997; Witt 2011).
To be sure, the pedigree of public administration literatures points to some concern about matters of racial equity as part of other overarching theoretical concerns (Guy and McCandless 2012). Authoritative accounts (e.g., Bishu and Kennedy 2020; Gooden 2015) of these literatures reveal the dominance of the “race as a variable” approach (see Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). Despite numerous and persistent calls to develop and use more complex structural and historical conceptualizations of race, there has been limited progress. Thus, public administration as a discipline finds that it has an impoverished theoretical vocabulary, one that is inadequate for capturing nuances of racial formation and racialization, and for advancing the cause of racial justice and equity.
To support our goal of invigorating public administration's approach to the concept of race, we offer a framework of history, hierarchy, and heterodoxy (the 3 Hs) that may be used to look back to take stock and set the course for a meaningful, long-lasting study of race in public administration.
The 3-H Framework on the Concept of Race: History, Hierarchy, and Heterodoxy
With the 3-H framework, comprised of history, hierarchy, and heterodoxy, we offer three suggestions for advancing scholarship on race in public administration. First, we underscore the importance of recognizing history as a major force. Second, we point to the relative lack of attention to the idea of social hierarchy in public administration and how this may be remedied. Finally, we discuss the importance of drawing upon heterodox sources for shoring up the study of race. We discuss each in turn below.
History
W.E.B. Du Bois, in his 1935 classic Black Reconstruction in America, provided sage advice for the ages on history, “[Shall] we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” (Du Bois 1998). Although public administration—in contrast with many other disciplines—takes its history seriously with many doctoral programs offering courses on intellectual history, it is worth asking ourselves if we are measuring up to Du Bois's reasonable standard. Woodrow Wilson, Du Bois’s contemporary, is famous for his essay on the study of administration, in which he proposed the politics-administration dichotomy; it remains a staple in doctoral and masters curricula today. Although Wilson's dichotomy has been discredited by eminent scholars who have made the case that administration entails political and policy choices and is far from value-neutral, related ideas like neutral competence and race neutrality of administration continue to flourish.
In the Herbert symposium, Hunt (1974) makes a direct appeal for a black perspective on public management. Hunt highlights the tendency in the African American community to respond to government action in collective as opposed to individual terms. Although one can certainly challenge this idea in terms of particular policies, there is support when it comes to how African Americans react to specific issues like policing and public health. For example, there is a long history, dating back to reconstruction, of municipalities using the police force to keep the black population in line (Bearfield et al. 2018; Dulaney 1996; Myrdal 1944;). Education, manners, and wealth, characteristics that might result in better treatment for members of some communities, did not shield individual African Americans from horrors of police violence or brutality. In the Black community, this painful administrative history has been passed down for generations under the guise of “the talk”—a term used to describe the conversation in Black families where parents teach their children how to behave when confronted by a police officer. This worldview, this tradition and these stories are foreign to many Americans outside the Black community. Although there are people who view these actions as the acts of bad apples, or a bygone era, for many Black families, it has come to define their relationship to the state. As a result, the reaction to the murder of George Floyd reverberated throughout the Black community across class, gender, ethnic, and geographic boundaries. As Hunt implored us, if we want to understand how Blacks view public management, we must know more about this harrowing history and how it shapes our behavior moving forward.
One way to address this is to understand that part of our administrative history is explicitly or implicitly about managing the race. This particular part of administrative history has touched many minority groups as they have learned to navigate their own American experience. After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted Chinese immigration to America, it was the responsibility of public administrators to determine who did and did not belong (Lee 2015). Throughout the 20th century, Mexican Americans faced discrimination in schools, public employment, and public restrooms (de Krofcheck et al. 1974). The creation of Jim Crow segregation laws across the south created an entire managerial system dedicated to separating the races. Although some of this was enforced by norm, custom, and civilian violence, public employees were also used to implement the separation. Heather McGhee (2021) notes that a majority of Americans today remain unaware of the degree to which government throughout our history has actively participated in keeping the races separate. We argue that, as scholars, it is incumbent on us to include this history in our research, teaching, and conversations.
As we grapple with current issues of racial discrimination, we must look to the legal and managerial systems of the past to identify patterns, traditions, and entrenched behaviors. It is tempting to view the discriminatory behavior of the past as a relic of a previous era. Although we have made tremendous improvements as a nation, racial bias and discrimination continue to deprive citizens of dignity and opportunity. By engaging with the history of how America has managed race, we can gain insight into avoiding mistakes of our past.
Hierarchy
Public administration scholars are intimately familiar with ideas of administrative (or bureaucratic) hierarchy and political hierarchy. Indeed, over time public administration scholarship shows refinements in conceptualizing and modeling hierarchy. An example of this remarkable conceptual journey is apparent in the distance between Luther Gulick's (1937) simple notion of hierarchy enshrined in the principle of “one master,” and the idea of polyarchy proposed by Dahl and Lindblom (1953). Furthermore, the influence of hierarchy—particularly on public employees—has been modeled imaginatively. Pandey and Wright (2006, 525–526) use the concept of hierarchy to propose a theory about public manager's experience of role stress by “[connecting] the dots from political environment to organizational and then individual role stress.”
The idea of social hierarchy is missing from these models of organizational and political reality in public administration scholarship. Social hierarchy does not stop at the borders of public organizations; indeed, it interacts with and compounds the effects of administrative hierarchy and political hierarchy. Philosophers (e.g., Mills 1997) have provided insights into the social ontology of racial hierarchy and sociologists have developed and honed models of American racial hierarchy. Bonilla-Silva (2004) proposes that the bi-racial order in America has over time morphed into a tri-racial stratification system. Kim (1999) maps out a field of racial positions with racial stratification on one axis and nativism (foreigner versus insider) on the other. Applying this schema to Asian Americans, she notes that, “… Asian Americans have been triangulated vis-à-vis Blacks and Whites through simultaneous valorization and ostracism … The field of racial positions generally – and the location of Asian Americans specifically – continues to reinforce white racial power… (p. 129).” Just as networking, collaboration and coproduction have challenged historical understandings of hierarchy and accountability, it is high time to integrate social hierarchy as a construct in our models, and to do so in such a way that captures the dynamic complexity of the construct.
Literature searches of public administration scholarship using terms similar to the racial hierarchy (and cognate terms such as racial position, racial strata, racial inferiority) turn up limited results, confirming the dearth of theorizing and empirical research on racial hierarchy. We believe that a better understanding of racial hierarchy, and how it interacts with administrative hierarchy and political hierarchy can benefit public administration scholarship on a variety of core public administration themes such as leadership, collaboration, and citizen experiences with government entities.
Heterodoxy
Public administration scholarship has gone from strength to strength and this is due to an openness to knowledge and methods of inquiry from diverse disciplines. A telling sign of this heterodox orientation is that public administration scholarship is less severely afflicted with the “not invented here” syndrome. Our interdisciplinary commitments, however, are not perfect. These imperfections become manifest in our protective zeal for homegrown theories and sometimes in a relative lack of familiarity with other social science disciplines. To be sure, we draw often and deeply from the wellsprings of proximal disciplines such as political science and economics.
The intellectual resources needed for a more race-aware public administration, however, require us to take stock of homegrown theories in the public administration canon, and to explore boldly distant disciplines for insights and resources needed to fashion a race-aware public administration. Portillo, Humphrey, and Bearfield (Forthcoming) offer constructive advice on how representative bureaucracy research can become more race aware, an analysis that can also be applied to other hegemonic theoretical lenses or empirical approaches in public administration scholarship such as administrative burden and bureaucratic red tape, public service motivation, behavioral public administration, and so on. Like Nkomo (1992) who focused on generic organizational scholarship, we should ask why do our conceptualizations in public administration continue to remain race neutral and how might we address it?
Public administration scholars are doing more to draw upon other bodies of knowledge that put race at the center of theorizing (e.g., Breslin, Pandey, and Riccucci 2017; Humphrey 2021). We need to accelerate this trend and examine sociology, history, legal theory, and other domains where racial stratification and oppression have received prolonged and in-depth attention. The venerable history of theorizing about anti-racism has produced knowledge that remains to be appreciated and used in public administration scholarship. We provide a selective, succinct, and incomplete overview of some key contributors with the hope that it will inspire public administration scholars to learn more.
Derrick Bell, widely credited as one of the pioneering critical race theorists, provides an intellectual history of the concept of whiteness explaining its evolution from mere racial identity to an attribute that confers property rights (Bell 1995). Michael Omi and Howard Winant have provided a masterful and comprehensive account of racial formation in the US, tracing the dynamics of racialization over three editions of their book (Omi and Winant 2015). The path-breaking work of Kimberle Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins has inspired and informed generations of scholars on intersectionality theories to examine how multiple forms of marginalization interact (Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1989). Hurtado (1989) provides an insightful historical account of the contested relation between white feminist scholars and feminist scholars of color. For the methodologically inclined, the collection edited by Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva (2008) provides a deep understanding of how seemingly uncontroversial methodological choices are laden with controversial and questionable assumptions about race.
Summing up and Looking Forward
This editorial serves as a preamble to PAR's symposium on race and gender that we eagerly anticipate in a forthcoming issue. Spreading our voice over multiple issues, we think, will better stoke anticipation, deepen thought, and sustain attention to this topic.
We want to highlight that, although there is growing awareness about the need for more scholarship on race, institutional support for this research is uneven and structural barriers remain. As PAR Editors, we have encouraged dialogue on important normative questions on race. We convened a session titled “New Era and New Concepts in the Study of Race in Public Administration and Policy: Racializing, Whiteness, and More,” in association with CORGES on December 9, 2021. The session was moderated by two PAR editors (Hall and Pandey), featured another PAR editor (Bearfield), and included four other distinguished colleagues (Rachel Breslin, Nicole Humphrey, Sean McCandless, and Eiko Strader). Conversation in this session focused on, among other things, structural barriers within academia that prevent the meaningful study of race (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. 2012). We will continue to support these important conversations, and scholarly communities like CORGES that facilitate inclusive, important, and difficult conversations on race. We believe that the best way to make progress is by supporting everyday scholarly activities like dialogue, community building, and providing publication opportunities for scholarship on race.
These issues—and the associated constructs—are complex and potentially controversial, but critical for our discipline to advance beyond its historical constraints. Working together, the public administration community will lay the foundation for the next generation of scholarship and practice. Both management and its study will benefit from these changes in the context of our rapidly changing world.
Introduction to Articles in this Issue
This issue puts the focus on the frontline with several articles that address workers—and their experiences—delivering public services. Opening this foray into the field, Miller-Mor-Attias and Vigoda-Gadot (2022) utilize a three-wave longitudinal study to examine the factors shaping motivation among Israeli students entering the job market. They find that individuals with higher levels of intrinsic and collectivistic values, and an academic background in core public service studies demonstrate stronger PSM over time. Jensen and Thomsen (2022) investigate whether negative stereotypes and associated judgments pervade in settings where citizens help produce–rather than consume–public services. They use a priming experiment in which 817 nursing home professionals are asked to think of citizens volunteering in service production. Results were not found to be conditional on the type of tasks performed, so the judgments of competence seem to stem from preexisting stereotypes of volunteer incompetence. Continuing with the theme of stereotypes, Bertram, Bouwman and Tummers (2022) draw from a large representative survey in the Netherlands to study whether people's socioeconomic status is related to having more negative stereotypes about public sector workers. Contrary to expectation, education and income are unrelated to stereotypes; however, subjective income is pertinent: people with low subjective income have more negative stereotypes. Moreover, the sector people work in is highly relevant to reported negative stereotypes.
Masood and Nisar (2022) investigate how street-level bureaucrats overcome resource scarcity with creativity and improvisation to find contextual solutions for emergent local policy problems. The policy repair they observe permits organizations to be resilient and nimble in response to changing circumstances. Bentein et al. (2022), in a study of Canadian libraries, help to close a knowledge gap in our understanding of how servant leaders bring about service-oriented behaviors. Their findings suggest that servant leaders are associated with high service-oriented behaviors through their unique ability to strengthen individual customer orientation and service climate. Coulthart and Riccucci (2022) argue that wide-scale adoption of big data analytics in agencies where big data capabilities remain nascent, such as their case—the United States Border Patrol—will require trial-and-error processes coordinated by organizational leadership in collaboration with front-line employees who make the technology relevant to their needs on the front line. Finally, Mikkelsen et al. (2022) hypothesize that the process of bureaucratic professionalization is self-reinforcing through a process by which incumbent bureaucrats react to incentives to acquire greater expertise when educated entrants arrive. This enables them to remain competitive for organizational rewards (promotions, for example). Empirical support for these propositions comes from an experiment in which 3,000 bureaucrats in Chile's central government were primed about the professionalization of other bureaucrats. Professionalization, they find, is contagious.
The next article in this issue's line-up transitions from the focus on front-line bureaucrats toward the role of public management on sustainability and resilience under conditions of environmental uncertainty. Ryu and Kim (2022) examine the impacts of managing upward, downward, and outward on organizational performance. They further investigate the moderating effect of procedural stability on the negative relationship between environmental uncertainty and organizational performance in the context of Korean public corporations. Albalate et al. (2022) explore the factors that shape incumbency in public service contracts. Using a dataset of 215 public tenders held in Spain (2008–2019) they find that incumbent size does not play a role in the probability of alternation between service provider, while competition and transparency in managing public tenders both increase the likelihood of alternation between providers. Finally, their findings suggest that larger municipalities and discretionary power of entrenched political parties may also favor incumbency in contract renewal.
Damanpour, Sanchez-Henriquez and Avellaneda (2022) investigate environmental and organizational factors that stimulate plural sourcing of public services. They develop and test a theory of plural sourcing using a four-panel dataset constructed by merging data from three different sources covering the timeframe from 1992 to 2007. Xu and Li (2022) take up the idea of competition among public, nonprofit, and private organizations with the goal of elucidating how dimensional publicness influences individuals' perceptions and choices of organizations. They use evidence from two online experiments to understand the way people's perceptions of resource publicness (operationalized as government funding, donations, and service fees) shape their choice among elderly care centers in the United States They find that people perceive donative organizations to be the warmest and most competent, followed by government-funded and then commercial organizations.
The issue concludes with a series of three Viewpoint Articles that return our focus to leadership in public service. Stivers (2022) reflects on the performance of the public service during a crisis. Cohen and Fortune (2022) discuss the first 100 days' experience of a newly appointed police chief attempting to navigate through an already overwhelming transition into his new role with the added challenge of a public health crisis combined with social unrest. Finally, Kim, Andersen and Lee (2022) reflect on the real challenges technology poses for public management, including pressure for innovations like algorithmic bureaucracy and collaborative value creation. They suggest a need to reflect on the transformation of the managerial role and activities, including how the decision-making processes are re-institutionalized.
Other Resources
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