Pub Date : 2020-07-24DOI: 10.4337/9781839100345.00015
E. Ongaro
This final chapter addresses the key issue of ‘what next?’ after having introduced and worked out a philosophical perspective to PA, and it tackles two key issues: first, how to advance the researching of philosophy for PA; second, how to introduce philosophy for PA into the teaching and learning of PA, that is, into teaching curricula at higher education level. The chapter then turns to briefly discuss the challenges posed by new technologies and the new media to PA and indicates how taking a broad philosophical perspective may be a vantage point to look at these challenges. Finally, the chapter wraps up on the journey made and returns to the main argument of this book: the enduring contribution that philosophical thought may provide to PA.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-24DOI: 10.4337/9781839100345.00009
E. Ongaro
In this chapter we revisit a range of key themes in public administration and management, in light of key philosophical ideas introduced in the previous chapters. Our thrust is making a contribution to bring fundamental issues of ontology, as arisen over the centuries in (Western) philosophical thought, into the PA discourse. Differently from other major books dealing with philosophical issues in PA (Raadschelders, 2011; Riccucci, 2010), this book takes as its starting point not the classification of strands of inquiry in PA to then delve into their philosophical foundations and premises, but rather it starts from philosophical approaches, themes and schools, to then delve into some of the implications for the study and practice of PA. In this sense it is quite deductive and ambitious in taking the broad perspective – and in many respects it embodies a very ‘European’ scholarly tradition and approach. This chapter deals with themes more pertinent to ontological issues, whilst political philosophical issues are discussed in Chapter 5 and epistemological ones in Chapter 6. The chapter is structured around key themes. They are listed here, with some captivating questions highlighting the gist and the significance of each theme for PA, to then be briefly introduced in the remainder of this section and discussed in depth throughout the chapter:
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Pub Date : 2020-07-24DOI: 10.4337/9781839100345.00006
E. Ongaro
{"title":"Introduction and rationale","authors":"E. Ongaro","doi":"10.4337/9781839100345.00006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/9781839100345.00006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":368761,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and Public Administration","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121219750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-24DOI: 10.4337/9781839100345.00013
E. Ongaro
We have concluded the previous chapter with More’s masterpiece which introduced the notion of utopia and utopian thinking as a way of practising teleological thinking in the study of public governance. In Aristotle’s framework of the four causes (introduced in Chapter 2 and examined for application to PA in Chapter 6), this approach entails starting the analysis from the final cause – that is, the goal or end, the reason why something is brought about – to then turn to the other causes, like the material cause (what enables a thing to be transformed from a potentiality into actuality) and the efficient cause (the forces that bring about change). A utopian approach also entails taking as incipit of the analysis the potentiality (what might be, but does not yet exist in actuality), rather than actuality (what exists here and now). At the opposite pole we can find the notion of a practice that works, a practice (too often and erroneously qualified as ‘best’ in much of the grey literature and consultancy papers) which exists in actuality and is predicated to produce certain effects, at least in the given context where it is operating. ‘Best practices’ or ‘good practices’, as they are often called, exist in actuality rather than in potentiality like utopias, and the starting point is the efficient cause: the causal mechanism which brings about the effect the practice produces. Conceptually, ‘practices’ can be seen to lie at the opposite pole than utopias: practices exist in actuality (here and now), utopias exist as potentials; practices are characterised primarily by a logic of efficient cause, utopias by a logic of final cause. We can also consider there are other conceptual tools that enjoy currency in PA that are located at intermediate points in-between utopias and practices (see Figure 8.1). These are the notions of: model, ideal-type, and paradigm (definitions are provided later in the chapter as the concepts are introduced and examined in turn). In this chapter, we revisit these five notions – utopias, paradigms,
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Pub Date : 2020-07-24DOI: 10.4337/9781839100345.00011
E. Ongaro
PA as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry draws from the social sciences and shares the common problems and quandaries of social scientific knowledge (Homans, 1967; Little, 1991). Importantly, the meaning of the term ‘explanation’ in the social sciences is always intended to refer both to the understanding of the causes of a given set of phenomena (causation) and the giving of meaning to a social phenomenon (Psillos, 2002; Platts, 1970; Salmon, 1998). Epistemological concerns have been the subject of many works in the PA field, and countless many more in the broader social sciences – it is here treated exclusively from the perspectives of the philosophical foundations, referring the reader to general works on the topic for the field of PA (Riccucci, 2010; van Thiel, 2013). The specific contribution this book aims to make lies in revisiting logics of inquiry in public administration from the perspective of some broad philosophical themes. We have already indirectly dealt with issues of epistemology in PA throughout the whole book by discussing key philosophical traditions, each having important implications for the philosophy of knowledge: from neo-positivism to post-modernism, from critical realism to phenomenology, from historicism to pragmatism, and so on. We have also already encountered Popper’s philosophy of the social sciences and Kuhn’s notion of the competition of scientific paradigms and the related distinction between ‘normal science’, cumulative in nature within a dominant paradigm, and paradigmatic revolutions (see Chapter 3). The notion of competing paradigms probably represents the terms in which more often epistemological discussions are framed within the social sciences. However, it has been strongly argued that when it comes to PA, the field is characterised by multiplicity of paradigms, and indeed a babel of paradigms, rather than dominance of one paradigm and knowledge accumulation (Bauer, 2018; Raadschelders, 2005). There is also a conventional wisdom that three approaches dominate the field: neo-positivism; social constructivism; and critical realism. In line with
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Pub Date : 2020-07-24DOI: 10.4337/9781839100345.00014
E. Ongaro
This book has reviewed (Western) philosophical thought in Chapters 2 and 3 and proposed a range of applications to the study and practice of PA, with an emphasis on ontological issues in Chapter 4 and on the political philosophy of PA, around the key issue of legitimacy, in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 revisited epistemological issues from a philosophical standpoint, while in Chapter 7 a number of key themes in PA have been delved into through an intellectual tour of three authors – Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas More – and their masterpieces, that elicit an enduring intellectual fascination and provide an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Chapter 8 then went on to discuss the usage of a range of conceptual tools – from ‘good enough’ practices to utopias, paradigms, ideal types and models – for PA. As we noticed in Chapter 1, this book has taken the opposite perspective than other reviews of the field of PA interested in a philosophical approach: rather than starting from the organisation of the field of PA and then pointing to how different philosophical streams might be employed to discuss one or the other sub-areas of the field, this book has taken as starting point the history of philosophical thought and the ‘big’ authors and schools in philosophy, to then revisit how these philosophical schools of thought might be applied to shed a different light on PA debates and streams of inquiry. In this chapter, we initially revert to a more conventional approach and we start from a mapping of the field of PA along four intellectual traditions, to then discuss how broad philosophical perspectives may be employed to further our understanding of these intellectual traditions in PA. In doing so, we work out a set of tentative propositions for sketching an initial draft of a ‘theory of PA change’, a reflection – inchoate and open to contributions and integrations from different intellectual standpoints – on the ideational basis of PA, on how revisiting the intellectual foundations of PA might lead to approaches on how to change public governance. Finally, in the next chapter we will pull the threads and
本书在第2章和第3章中回顾了(西方)哲学思想,并提出了一系列适用于公共政策研究和实践的应用,在第4章中强调了本体论问题,在第5章中强调了公共政策的政治哲学,围绕合法性的关键问题。第6章从哲学的角度重新审视了认识论问题,而在第7章中,PA的一些关键主题通过对三位作者的智力之旅进行了深入研究——Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas More——以及他们的杰作,这些作品引发了持久的智力魅力,并提供了取之不竭的灵感来源。第8章接着讨论了PA的一系列概念性工具的使用——从“足够好”的实践到乌托邦、范式、理想类型和模型。正如我们在第一章中注意到的,这本书采取了与其他对哲学方法感兴趣的私人关系领域的评论相反的观点:这本书不是从私人关系领域的组织开始,然后指出如何使用不同的哲学流派来讨论该领域的一个或其他子领域,而是以哲学思想史和哲学中的“大”作者和学派为起点,然后重新审视这些哲学流派如何应用于私人关系辩论和调查流。在本章中,我们首先回归到一种更传统的方法,我们从PA领域的四种知识传统的映射开始,然后讨论如何使用广泛的哲学观点来进一步理解PA中的这些知识传统。在这样做的过程中,我们制定了一套试探性的命题,以勾勒出“PA变革理论”的初步草案,这是一种反思——对来自不同知识分子立场的贡献和整合的早期和开放的反思——在PA的概念基础上,关于如何重新审视PA的知识基础可能导致如何改变公共治理的方法。最后,在下一章中,我们将拉线和
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.4337/9781839100345.00010
Following up on the previous chapter centred on issues of ontology, this chapter turns to explore political philosophical issues. We focus the issue of the legitimacy of public governance, which we consider to be a theme of central significance – a perennial issue, and yet possibly nowadays even further accentuated by the multiple ‘crises of legitimacy’ affecting various jurisdictions and redefining the relation between (public) administrators and those who are administered – and one distinctively philosophical (leaving to other books, by other authors, to explore other entry points for bridging political philosophy and PA – amongst these: the topic of comparative political regimes and PA, first introduced by Aristotle, the notion of regime change, whose initial conception may be ascribed to Polybius, and the relevance for PA of the political thought of key philosophers like Christian Wolff – see Chapter 2 – and Georg Hegel – Chapter 3). This chapter then tackles the key question of ‘justification’ – that is, what grounds the legitimacy of a political system1 – to then delve into how political philosophical thought may shed light on a number of contemporary debates in public governance and management about how the public sector and public services ‘ought to’ be organised. The puzzle of ‘justification’ – what justifies a political order and makes it ‘just’ – is a very old issue in philosophy and poses formidable questions to whichever set of doctrines is proposed to change PA (which is not the entirety of a political system, but an important part of it). Justification, roughly speaking, is concerned with ‘giving reasons to value something’, notably to value
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