A Cultural Analysis of Administrative Justice

In recent years we have seen rapid change in the organisation of public management. Various developments, sometimes captured in the notion of the ‘new public management’, have significantly altered the character of public administration. This presents quite a challenge for theorists of administrative justice. The values and processes which infuse new public management sit in some tension with traditional conceptions of administrative justice, particularly within legal theory. To what extent should the concept be extended to embrace these real-world developments? Further, is there more to be said about administrative justice than is not captured by existing theory, even including a focus on new public management? These questions form the background to this article in which we develop a typology of administrative justice – an analytical framework which captures the variations in how ‘administrative justice’ might be conceived. Our analysis re-works the typologies of Mashaw, Adler and Kagan and places them in a wider framework developed from grid-group cultural theory. The analysis also draws attention to conceptions of administrative justice not previously discussed in the literature: decision-making by lottery, and decision-making by consensus.