Action Theory for Public Administration

Politics & Social Sciences

Harmon, Michael M.

Politics & Government

Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd

Action Theory for Public Administration (Longman Professional Studies in Public Administration)

Longman Publishing Group

Organization Theory for Public Administration

<p>Book is solid, tight binding, top corners are bumped, some cover wear, 15% of book have marking, writing and underlined pages</p>

Business & Money

Mayer, Richard T.

Management & Leadership

Scott, Foresman Co.

Responsibility as Paradox: A Critique of Rational Discourse on Government (Rethinking Public Administration)

Exploring the concept of responsible government and administration, this book creates a new paradigm for looking at the issue. Michael M Harmon rejects the current predominant `rationalist′ theory, which holds that responsibility involves an intractable conflict between the potential free will of an actor and the restrictions of the institution within which the actor operates. He suggests that public administration must undergo a paradigm shift in which institutional restrictions and individual free will create a healthy and dynamic tension and are not completely incompatible.

Sage Publications, Inc.

<p>Exploring the concept of responsible government and administration, this book creates a new paradigm for looking at the issue. Michael M Harmon rejects the current predominant `rationalist′ theory, which holds that responsibility involves an intractable conflict between the potential free will of an actor and the restrictions of the institution within which the actor operates. He suggests that public administration must undergo a paradigm shift in which institutional restrictions and individual free will create a healthy and dynamic tension and are not completely incompatible.</p>

Medical Books

Public Administration's Final Exam: A Pragmatist Restructuring of the Profession and the Discipline

<p>Examines why public administration’s literature has failed to justify the profession’s legitimacy as an instrument of governance.  Michael Harmon employs the literary conceit of a Final Exam, first “written” in the early 1930s, in a critique of the field’s answers to the legitimacy question. Because the assumptions that underwrite the question preclude the possibility of a coherent answer, the exam should be canceled and its question rewritten. Envisaging a public administration no longer hostage to the legitimacy question, Harmon explains how the study and practice of public administration might proceed from adolescence to maturity.  Drawing chiefly from pragmatist philosophy, he argues that despite the universal rejection of the “politics/administration” dichotomy on factual grounds, the pseudo-problem of legitimacy nonetheless persists in the guise of four related conceptual dualisms: 1) values and facts, 2) thinking and doing, 3) ends and means, and 4) theory and practice. Collectively, these dualisms demand an impossible answer to the practical question of how we might live, and govern, together in a world of radical uncertainty and interdependence. Only by dissolving them can the legitimacy question (Woodrow Wilson’s ghost) finally be banished, clearing away the theoretical debris that obscures a more vital and useful conception of governance. </p>

University Alabama Press

Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4This study of the critical role of ethics and moral responsibility in the field of public administration, Michael M. Harmon and O. C. McSwite posit that administrative ethics, as presently conceived and practiced, is largely a failure, incapable of delivering on its original promise of effectively regulating official conduct in order to promote the public interest. They argue that administrative ethics is compromised at its very foundations by two core assumptions: that human beings act rationally and that language is capable of conveying clear, stable, and unambiguous principles of ethical conduct. The result is the illusion that values, principles, and rules of ethical conduct can be specified in workably clear ways, in particular, through their formalization in official codes of ethics; that people are capable of comprehending and responding to them as they are intended; and that the rewards and punishments attached to them will be effective in structuring daily behavior. In a series of essays that draw on both fiction and film, as well as the disciplines of pragmatism, organizational theory, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and economics, Harmon and McSwite make their case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethics. “Exercising responsible ethical practice requires attaining a special kind of relationship with other people. Relationship is how the pure freedom that resides in the human psyche—for ethical choice, creativity, or original action of any type—can be brought into the structured world of human social relations without damaging or destroying it.” Furthermore, they make the case for dropping the term “ethics” in favor of the term “responsibility,” as “responsibility accentuates the social [relational] nature of moral action.”

Whenever Two or More Are Gathered: Relationship as the Heart of Ethical Discourse (Public Administration: Criticism and Creativity)

McSwite, O.C.

<p><div> <div><i><b>Examines why public administration's literature has failed to justify the profession's legitimacy as an instrument of governance</b></i></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Michael Harmon employs the literary conceit of a Final Exam, first "written" in the early 1930s, in a critique of the field's answers to the legitimacy question. Because the assumptions that underwrite the question preclude the possibility of a coherent answer, the exam should be canceled and its question rewritten.&nbsp;Envisaging a public administration no longer hostage to the legitimacy question, Harmon explains how the study and practice of public administration might proceed from adolescence to maturity.&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Drawing chiefly from pragmatist philosophy, he argues that despite the universal rejection of the "politics/administration" dichotomy on factual grounds, the pseudo-problem of legitimacy nonetheless persists in the guise of four related conceptual dualisms: 1) values and facts, 2) thinking and doing, 3) ends and means, and 4) theory and practice. Collectively, these dualisms demand an impossible answer to the practical question of how we might live, and govern, together in a world of radical uncertainty and interdependence. Only by dissolving them can the legitimacy question (Woodrow Wilson's ghost) finally be banished, clearing away the theoretical debris that obscures a more vital and useful conception of governance.</div> <div>&nbsp;<b>&nbsp;</b></div> <div>&nbsp;</div> </div></p>

Philosophy

Sociology

Chatelaine Pr

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Books by Harmon, Michael M.