Postmodernism in American public administration: a postmortem

Abstract

This article presents a critical “postmortem” on the debate between modernism and postmodernism in American public administration. It argues that postmodernism was simply an extension of modernism, one that revealed a set of repressed theoretical complications at the core of the modernist framework. The underlying similarity of the two schools of thought is described through analysis of the key issues: radical absurdity, self-referentiality, and nihilism. While depicted as essentially similar, modernism and post-modernism are shown as pointing in opposite directions for finding a basis for governance. The advent of globalism, however, renders the debate
moot and suggests that postmodernism served as a venue for moving toward the paradigm appropriate to this new era.