Search results

The work of David John Farmer has been recognized as critical to the Public Policy and Administration canon. Its impact has been far-reaching both geographically because of its international application and theoretically because of the vast array of public administration challenges it can help resolve. This paper uses the concepts of rhizomatic thinking and reflexive interpretation to describe Farmerʼs work. And because a critical piece of Farmerʼs work is a bridging of the gap between theory and practice, it formally introduces Farmerʼs research approach as Farmerʼs Method. This article is intended to serve as a useful tool for students, practitioners, and theorists in understanding the vast contributions of David John Farmer and the practical application of his work.

The purpose of this paper is to recommend that public administration (PA) theory and practice should become more sensitive to its sub-administration, and to suggest how this can be done.

This conceptual paper maintains that this sub-administration includes those ideologies, myths and metaphors that contribute like an unconscious in shaping (and misshaping) governmental policy and administration. Descriptions of the nature of ideologies, myths and metaphors are given, along with some examples of those that are harmful – such as the ideologies of the American Business Model and neo-liberalism.

PA should seek to engage and oppose such ideologies, myths and metaphors that are problematic – both those constructed within and without of PA itself. It is recommended that, for such analytical purposes, PA should turn toward post-traditional PA, including the insights of post-modernism and epistemic pluralism.

The concept of sub-administration is of significant utility both for PA theorists and practitioners in strengthening public administrative performance. The author has offered such and/or similar recommendations in earlier publications, including in the International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, 19 (1), 90-102: 2016.

When David Farmer began his career in purchasing education, “academic” was a word he fought shy of. Now he is recognised as the foremost purchasing “academic” in the UK today. In this article he talks about the transformation that has taken place in attitudes to purchasing education and looks to the future.

David Farmerʼs work is too often misunderstood, perhaps because of the truly imaginative metaphors that he employs for expressing it, and the seemingly paradoxical prescriptions that it leads to at the level of practical action. This problem is helped by elaborating the grounding in which his work is at least implicitly set (namely, Traditionalism in American public administration) and by considering its congruence and compatibilities with the best of such contemporary organization theory as Demingʼs approach to organizational and management practice. With such clarified understanding, it becomes obvious that his work opens the way to a truly new 21^st century model of public administration both in theory and in application.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of the public interest. The central question is whether the public interest is a usable concept in a time of social and political change. A historical overview of the public interest is provided. Two researchers are highlighted: David John Farmer and O.C. McSwite. The paper concludes by proposing the refusal of subjective identification with the public interest.

Discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis are discussed in this paper. The emphasis in both approaches is to examine ethical challenges in politics and administration through new epistemological lenses. A further use of these research strategies is to identify existing institutional practices and situate administrative decision-making within those practices.

The findings in this paper indicate that while institutional resistance is useful, it can also be co-opted or result in retribution. In both cases, power is asserted and maintained by those who hold institutional power. David John Farmer’s work on anti-administration and O.C. McSwite’s work on administrative refusal are effective strategies to address the abuse of institutional power.

This paper introduces the concept of subjective identification to the literature of public administration. Subjective identification offers administrators a new approach to the ethical dilemmas they face in the workplace.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

This paper explores the relevance of Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the remainder of his legacy for public management. The paper’s central claim is that, by approaching Adam Smith and his legacy, public managers can assist themselves to do what they should do - examine their latent assumptions. The first of three challenges in approaching Adam Smith’s ideas is to get Smith right, because he has been widely misunderstood. The second is to question Smith’s account of conceptual space; it is desirable to go beyond him. The third challenge is to explore in specific terms the potential for public management of an understanding of Smith and his legacy

David Farmer suggests that there are multiple ways of looking at social science concepts. No one perspective, or lens, is superior, but taken together, multiple lenses can be enriching and yield a clearer picture of complex ideas. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate Farmerʼs multiple lenses approach by looking at performance measurement in the public organizations that participate in the Tennessee Municipal Benchmarking Project (TMBP). Observations from the TMBP suggests that utilizing only one lens can be detrimental to the decision-making process, while employing multiple lenses acknowledges multiple factors in the decision-making process and aides decision makers in reaching a consensus.