I have so far written about issues in the practice of public administration as though the context of public service practices is generic and of universal meaning in all situations. This week I want to briefly deal with this aspect, the context most of these public service practices and permutations of its impact. I will base my views on an old theoretical premise that holds that for us to examine and understand public service practices such as ethical conduct, administrative roles, exercise of authority, power and relational interactions among others, we must necessarily contextualise the relationship all these practices have with the social and cultural framework within which they take place. This understanding is critical in our ability to adequately describe these practices and their impacts on citizens; they inform our decisions to dealing with their detail in so far as they provide coherence and rationality; and they also pattern our efforts to adapt to the characteristics of the overall context for relevance and stability of our practices in the public service.
The above referred context has been seen to be largely revolving around two global outlooks defining the socio-cultural perspectives of administrative practices, and these are the modern/modernization and postmodern/postmodernization concepts. At a general level some have argued that public administration practices are caught up in the transitional phase in which their modern heritage, as it were, is increasingly conflicting with what are believed to be the key features of the post modern world and its context. This is so because the formative or basic values of administrative practices are rooted in the modernizing world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but current societies are inherently postmodern. A brief explanation of what meaning I attach to modern and postmodern worlds.
Modern has globally been used to describe the social, cultural, and economic attributes associated mainly with urban industrial societies (presumably a model for countries like ours’ development paths). From a purely administrative perspective, the main basic components of modernity are technological production and bureaucracy as the institutional meaning and values of public service practices. In brief public servants’ modern consciousness is a function of their exposure to the interaction between bureaucratic organizational setups and the technologically based processes of production. These interactions defined and continue to define the thinking in public service practices. Postmodern is to encapsulates a world of new thinking, where modern foundational assumptions begin to be discredited as too limited and absolute. It questions public practices based on assumptions of objective reality and universal natural law and ultimate truths based on the rationality of science and de-emphasizes notions of generic ways of institutional structures, public agencies and their embedded professional ethical norms. Postmodern is the critic to the applicability of generic management practices as applied in the context of public services. But of what applicability are these to our public service?
The obvious issues that emerge in the above context are that modern public service practices are to be anchored on government centralization of service delivery systems whereas the postmodern ones are to extol the virtues of decentralized service delivery mechanisms. Recent centralisation of a number of services by government would then be seen as incompatible with postmodern practices in a society that is perceived to be fluid in terms of their more liberal thinking as opposed to the conservatism associated with modern societies. I can hear one argue that at a general level countries like ours are still more modern than they are postmodern and as such public service practices will inherently depict the entrenched values and norms of a modern public administration, largely the bureaucratic channeled practices. At the same time the reforms or aspects of reform measures we have been undertaking suggests that we embrace the postmodern values and want to address issues from a centrifugal rather than centripetal perspective and we also attach value to disintegrating problems instead of integrating them, purely because relativity of causes and impacts ought to be guiding our decision making processes.
I am going to argue that across our public service is a clear attachment to modern public administration practices anchored on bureaucratic practices. We may argue that various reforms are intended to move our public service practices away from this modern grip, but the practical reality of our decision making is based on values that must be in sync with the larger socio-cultural definition of what are our morals and obligations as a society. These morals and obligations if mutual and relatively common amongst us as citizens, will define the basis of our claims to moral rectitude in contextualising the extent of approval and appreciation of ethical conduct, exercise of authority and other public service practices as they give meaning to citizens’ expectations, on a daily basis.
The challenges we are facing today in our systems include our ability to craft for ourselves, through discourse and deliberation, conventions such as values, beliefs, and ethical norms that give meaning and order to our lives, as expressed in the functional reality of our interaction with a public service that is currently the focal point of our development processes. This is critical because the postmodern world argues for collective decision making in the governance process that includes public administration practices. Overall, the big question is whether our democratic governance today, is able to provide mechanisms and arenas where this social process can take place and allow citizens to define the context of their relationship with their public service, for it is this context, once socially sanctioned, that will provide a framework for ethical and morally acceptable public service practices, that as citizen’s we are proud to associate with. In the absence of this context, public administration practices tend to be a cinema where ‘anything goes’ because in that situation no one has a basis for claims to moral rectitude and obligation.
We are therefore challenged as a nation to define the socio-cultural context that provides public servants with parameters that encapsulates the core of the decision making processes. This will necessarily require a careful balancing act in adopting modern and postmodern values that speak to our desires and definition of ethical and moral rectitude.
