Following Haridimos Tsoukas (1991) controversial account of metaphor, Larry Terry (1997) illustrates how critics and supporters of the American administrative state frequently use theater as a basis for extending and shaping our political discourse.[1] In so doing, he places his finger on an important problem that endures with its use: the theater metaphor – wherein public administrators are portrayed as villains, heroes or innocent victims provides an insufficient, and sometimes misleading, basis for conceptualizing responsible administrative action.
One of the principal difficulties in identifying appropriate metaphors for public administration has been the lack of serious scholarly attention. Certainly, a vast literature on metaphor has been produced in recent years (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Morgan, 1986; Behn, 1992; Smith & Huntsman, 1997; Morcol, 1997; Herzog & Claunch, 1997). In many instances, however, this literature has been erroneous and unphilosophical. More importantly, it has had little to say about how practitioners might use metaphors to help clarify, or better administer, the more delicate affairs of public administration. Evidence, for instance, the promisingly titled Metaphors We Live By, which offers only a few pages on the use of metaphor in politics (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 156-158, 236-237; cf. Turner, 1991: chap. 10). This is mostly unfortunate because it appears that the use of metaphor in political discourse has come to provide the most persuasive rebuttal to those who might find it difficult to believe that metaphor is all that crucial, and to those who would dismiss metaphor or other such figures of speech as "verbal ornament" without serious consequence.
Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth: to be clear, if administrators are at all selective in how they come up with ideas or metaphors about "responsible action," then the metaphors they use seem as necessarily bound up with relations of truth, power, agenda setting, inclusion and exclusion, selective attention, and neglect. If their understandings of responsible administrative action must make assumptions about causality and responsibility, about legitimacy and authority, and about interests, needs, values, and political governance, then the metaphors they choose not only depict, but also construct our views of public administration in the first place. And, if the preceding is at all accurate, then a broader understanding of the use of metaphor in public administration would seem well worth exploring.
Moreover, his findings, as they relate to the practice of public administration, raise central issues of truth and power. Second, there has been a tendency to lump all of the different things we refer to as figurative language together and to indiscriminately misrepresent their effect on our discourse or their appropriateness for theory development. From inattention to the figures, many have been led astray from the expressed meaning of some of the fields most enduring works. Several attacks on the legitimacy of the administrative state have their root and source either in figuratively explaining away that which should be taken literally or in taking literally that which has been thrown into a peculiar figure of speech thereby falling not only into error, but again, losing the expressed meaning and emphasis which the particular figure was designed to impart.
Terry, in response, simply finds it unreasonable to suppose that responsible conceptions of administrative action may be drawn from the limiting imagery of the theater metaphor. Evidence, for instance, that contrary to a more comprehensive discussion of the politics-administration dichotomy, Woodrow Wilson implicates the irreplaceable role of public administration in the process of political governance by his phrase “to run a Constitution" (Wilson, 1887; Rohr, 1986).
Evidence further, the rhetoric of the Brownlow Committee (1937), which unwittingly christened its offspring with a name redolent of illegitimacy by referencing independent regulatory commissions as a headless fourth branch of government” – “a haphazard deposit of irresponsible agencies and unco-ordinated powers” (Rohr, 1986: 152-53). The Committees limited intent was merely to challenge the independence of the regulatory commissions; history has lost sight of this, however, and the figurative faux pas has survived and flourished as a neutral description of fact and as a rallying call for those who would attack the legitimacy of the entire administrative state.
These are serious matters, if not blunders, that deserve our immediate attention. This paper reframes the use of figurative language in the discourse on public administration theory. Mainstream discourse on this subject holds that metaphor and other such figures of speech are non-language entities that inject literal language with nondeterminacy, leaving it open to charges of inaccuracy and incomplete meaning. This belief is flawed, owing to the contextual character of language. It almost goes without saying that no utterance (least of all, metaphor) is ever decontextualized it is merely moved from one context to another and that the "right" context can drive our understanding of a given utterance in almost any direction imaginable. By ignoring its contextual character, the literalist conception of language blinds one to the various degrees of resemblance intended by various figures of speech and, in the process, generates two vicious paradoxes regarding administrative authority and responsibility.
Author: Steven A. Maclin, Ph. D.
About the Author: Dr. Maclin has been a university professor since 1994, but from 1998 - 2004, he lived and worked with American military troops in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. He has previously edited and published dozens of articles in professional administrative journals and recently, in his ‘spare time,’ he’s been building websites for distributing materials to his graduate students. Hes now stateside, teaching graduate students online, writing articles and developing a small online business (see
http://buyfromart.com); he can be reached at info@buyfromart.com.