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H. George Frederickson, The Spirit of Public Administration (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1997) 272 pp.; $29.95 hard.
No government will be successful, no government will endure, which does not rest on the individual, and no government has yet found the individual.
Mary Parker Follett
I recently asked an incoming class of graduate students to define "public policy," sparking a discussion that prompted one student to comment tartly, "It is amazing how a bunch of people who are spending thousands to get a master's in public policy have trouble defining it." I was not amazed by the student's comment, as I still deliberate about defining "the public" and "public policy," even after many years of serving the former and teaching the latter. This class discussion returned to me when, in a textbook on public administration, I found the caption "a public administrator at work" under a photograph of Bruce McCandless II on a space walk (Shafritz and Russell, 1997, 24). Is our field not only so indefinable, I thought, but also so unattractive to students that it must be glamorized by placing it in outer space? The challenge for scholars and professional educators is to convey the excitement and importance of public service while not minimizing its inherent complexities, disappointments, and frustrations.
H. George Frederickson's The Spirit of Public Administration (1997), reviewed in this essay, probes these crucial definitional questions regarding the role of modern public administration in society. He provides a wide-ranging consideration of the public administration field, its core values, and the role of social theory in framing its work. I respond to his work from the perspective of a practitioner-turned-scholar who teaches both public policy and public administration. As such, I am interested primarily in understanding how teaching and scholarship inform practice in governance, broadly defined. The challenge is to develop what Lindblom and Cohen (1979) term "usable knowledge," that is, professional inquiry intended to contribute to social problem solving.
Frederickson's comprehensive and sensitive discussion of the professional role of public administrators highlights some of the most pressing issues in our field, including the scope and role of public administrators, alternatives for governance reform, and the importance of social equity. Frederickson celebrates the nobility of a life in public service and...