Justice and Public Administration

Justice and Public Administration

Justice and Public Administration

CHARLES F. ABEL and ARTHUR J. SEMENTELLI

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2007 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Typeface: ACaslon ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abel, Charles F. Justice and public administration / Charles F. Abel and Arthur J. Sementelli. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1584-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8173-1584-5 1. Justice. 2. Public administration. I. Sementelli, Arthur Jay, 1970– II. Title. JC578.A34 2007 351.01—dc22 2007007336

Contents

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Acknowledgments vii Précis 1 Epistemology 15 The Meaning of Justice within America’s Broad Social Context 32 Justice and Organizations 53 The Postmodern Condition and Semiotic Justice 64 Critiquing and Contextualizing Justice 91 Semiotic Justice and Public Administration 102 References 113 Index 125

Acknowledgments

This book is a truly joint effort, with each author contributing extensively to the creative, research, and development processes. It could not have been written without the guidance and direction of our colleagues and friends, to whom we are extremely grateful. Rick would like to acknowledge the provocative suggestions made by his wife, Carol, and to thank her for the interest she took in his ideas. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and their thoughtful comments. Finally, we owe a reluctant debt of gratitude to Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, which disrupted our writing processes by ravaging the Gulf Coast and the eastern coast of Florida. The delays that they occasioned enabled us to develop more fully the ideas presented here. Ironically, these three have contributed as well to contemporary discussions and debates regarding administrative justice, not just in academia but in the popular media as well.

Justice and Public Administration

1 Précis

It is an accepted though not an especially popular belief that Public Administration is, at bottom, a political endeavor. That the governmental policies actually experienced are those interpretations of law, executive orders, and judicial decisions that have been both made and put into practice by public administrators, is so obvious that professions of shock at the idea are hard to credit. It is no secret, in the circles where public administrators forgather, that the interpretation of any given charge requires administrators to not only identify and prioritize the social values that are at stake, but to make some very hard choices when those values come into conflict. Briefly, administrators fashion policy and make value choices. And in the process they set the precedents and compose implicitly the rationales for government intervention and practice (Yates, 1981). Now, in a democracy, “the first obligation of the appointive official or bureaucrat is to be explicit about the value premises and implications of public decisions” (Yates, 1981, p. 306). In our particular sort of democracy, public officials must sooner or later justify both the design and the implementation of their practices in moral terms. Unfortunately, scholars and practitioners seem to pay insufficient attention to the justification of both the administrator’s interpretations of policy and the value choices that he or she makes. Some suggest that this may be due to the fact that we, as a society, lack a firmly rooted public philosophy. As a consequence, virtually no constraints or normative principles exist to guide governmental action or inaction (Yates, 1981). Others discuss how neither theorists nor practitioners in Public Administration regularly examine the bothersome tension between what is beneficial contextually and what is good overall (Schon, 1983). As a result, administrators tend to choose interpretations and to prioritize values heuristically (Lind, Kulik, Ambrose, & Park, 1993), or impressionistically, or with regard to what is

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most expedient, or with regard to satisfying the demands of the most persistently vocal publics. In the process, they often fail to identify with any precision exactly what needs to be justified; nor do they consider in any depth exactly how competing values and claims might be either pursued in tandem, or balanced against one another, or defined acceptably to disparate individuals and groups.

The Need for an Administrative Concept of Justice So, in the end, we in the profession of Public Administration too often merely advocate the use of just practices (Pops & Pavlak, 1991) without having a truly developed, truly applicable understanding of what justice is within the sphere of our own endeavor. In this state of affairs, when impelled to justification, we as administrators and as theorists often rush to borrow concepts and principles from political, economic, and management theory. Sometimes we point to the studies of psychologists, sociologists, and the decision sciences to garner evidence for what we may at least claim works, even if it is not recognizably just. As these expedients seem to serve the moment, and as we gain some legitimacy from this practice (Myer & Rowan, 1977), administrative justice, though considered a good idea all around, remains an unknown ideal. Now, because it remains an unknown ideal, all of our pointing and borrowing is ultimately unsatisfactory. Perhaps the most important reason that justice remains an unknown ideal is that when it is considered abstractly, it is an essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1956, p. 169). It is a term, “the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about its proper uses on the part of its users” (p. 169). The disputes are inevitable and endless because the term is “appraisive, complex, open in meaning, [and] explicable in terms of its parts, so that selecting from among the mutually exclusive meanings of necessity entails the adoption of particular values and world views” (p. 169). The disputes, then, are about the essence or central meaning of the term itself. And people put up with this endless altercation because the contest over its meaning is both indispensable to the usefulness of the term, and inherent to the very ways that the concept is used. Anyone using the word justice, for example, who does not recognize why others use it differently, does not understand the full implications of the term. And as the diverging goals and values that are stressed by the different uses of the term remain important dimensions

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of the concept, the continual contesting of the term’s meaning ensures a continuing critical discourse over how justice is best attained. Consider, by way of example, the Platonic opinion that justice may only be realized in a republican community where harmony—by which he meant conformity and coercion—rids us of “the more warlike and cynical images of justice” (Solomon & Murphy, 2000, p. 11), among which he counted Thrasymachus’s image of justice as the interests of the strong (Plato, 1993, chap. 1). Well, as much as we might protest either definition, each simply represents an opinion about which parts of the concept are most important in the different contexts in which the term is used. And as the term is appraisive, they simply differ over which values, represented by the different parts, and should be stressed in order to use the term properly. Succinctly put, coercion, interest, and conformity are simply rearranged, assigned to different actors, and prioritized differently to define and to redefine the concept. These parts are not lost, but simply rearranged yet again, in the Rawlsian community of justice; where a veil of ignorance coerces conformity save only to the extent that it serves the interests of the weak (Rawls, 1971). Nor are they lost in the Nozickian community where a just starting position coerces conformity to any distribution of goods that is harmonized by the subsequent free exchanges of consenting adults (Nozick, 1977). Nor are they lost in either the endless number of bounded Walzerian communities that coerce conformity to their peculiar communitarian meanings of justice, or the complex justice that he supposes will harmonize the overall outcome as each of us receives benefits in one sphere that we are denied in another (Walzer, 1983). So, when current philosophers bemoan the fact that our understanding of justice has not evolved so very much beyond the notions of proffered by Rawls and Nozick, what they are really saying is that we have not progressed much beyond Plato. We are simply continuing the endless dispute over how the term ought to be used most properly in the abstract. And, for philosophers, this may be considered quite a jolly state of affairs. After all, pointing around at all of the different uses of the term is great fun, and it helps us to appreciate the complexity and nuance of the goals and values that are being sought when it comes to interpreting laws and choosing among values. However, all of this pointing and borrowing will not help us to discover what we administrators mean by the term just, since we don’t really know what it (the word just) means at this moment; we only know how it works in our current administrative practices. The

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meaning of the goals and values of justice in Pubic Administration will take on a definite sense only as we develop that meaning through living out the administrative discourses, administrative practices, and administrative power struggles into which we weave the term (Gallie, 1956; Wittgenstein, 1953). And it is important that we come to a definite sense of what we mean by justice in Public Administration if we are to take a meaningful role in the public discourse concerning justice. Justice is pursued in the public realm, not by an unswerving impulse to a visionary ideal, nor by a popular vote, but by pursuing all of the dimensions of all of the term’s varying uses, more or less simultaneously, through an intentional ambiguity structured into public institutions. This structured-in ambiguity insures an awareness of the achievement’s complexity among those with different values and goals; and the bureaucratic pressure of opposing interpretations insures that all dimensions of the concept are at least addressed. Structured-in ambiguity, then, is one very practical way of attaining as much of what we all can agree to as being just outcomes (e.g., justice as equality, justice as recognition of merit, justice as fulfilling needs) as is possible given our diversity. But if Public Administration has no concept of its own, it has nothing to add and so it has no voice reminding others of what its practitioners actually experience as they go about living with the results of interpreting and choosing on the bases of how others understand the concept.

Our Approach By now, it should be quite apparent to a reader that there is more happening here than simply confusion about what is just. The discourses and interchanges among groups in the public realm can best be understood as language-games (Wittgenstein, 1953) and symbolic behaviors signaling, not the disintegration of the concept (Baudrillard, 1994) but the growth of its nuance given the changing forms of social life into which it is woven. Unfortunately, in current administrative scholarship we are left most often with reflections, critiques, and transmutations of the Platonic (Dahl, 1991), which are then appended to conceptions of the proper roles of authority (Golembiewski, 1961), used to accessorize many different ideals of the good society, and conformed to some broad discussion of a public sphere. Rather than advancing the study of justice with our own voice, we

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find ourselves consistently returning to these well-traveled routes, these very abstract, but established views of justice. And because we have no voice of our own, we are simply left with the problem that everyone’s understanding of justice still falls short (Somers, 1995). This makes any sort of integrated development of justice, practice, and theory difficult if not impossible—given the manner in which scholars are currently developing theory. Even in the realm of critical theory, with its contemporary concerns about many of the missing dimensions among the classical and modern conceptions of justice, we find that our understanding of what is just remains woefully underdeveloped. For these reasons it is imperative that we develop our voice and thereby a more thorough understanding of justice that reflects both the modern artifacts and postmodern realities of our world. To this end, rather than continually bobbing about in the realm of pure theory, or simply reapplying existing conceptions, we hope to develop a different understanding of justice, one that might be more useful to administrative theory and practice. In this book we explore the conventional views and their underlying assumptions, and raise questions of the usefulness and workability of such conceptions in Public Administration. This, in turn, enables us to offer a more dynamic understanding of justice, moving toward something that is not simply a heuristic or an atheoretical function of some specific application of choices. Instead, we hope to enrich the understanding of justice, and offer mechanisms for understanding this essentially contested concept, its evolution, and its place in an emerging condition of postmodernity (Lyotard, 1999). Making justice function in light of a postmodern condition, where symbols, language, and politics often supersede action, intent, and belief, is important. When issues become formed and driven by images, where practices can evolve and become totally separate from reality, and where problems become recast continually in ever-changing language-games (Wittgenstein, 1953), there is a special need to understand how we can justify practices and choices in some practical way. Without some practical understanding of justice, we are often left with denatured solutions that only fit some contemporary political agenda, rather than the problem itself. Toward this end, we carefully explore, examine, and contextualize the abstract, normative, and pragmatic ideas of justice, arriving at a theoretical construct that can explain what justice is, or at least why the term is used in certain ways, in our contemporary society.

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We understand that any concept of justice will remain essentially contested. Nevertheless, we hope to provide the reader with a concept that is not only useful in Public Administration, but also achievable, fluid, and decidedly community-dependent. Toward this end, and as does Aristotle, we argue that justice can be understood only as emerging from a community of shared interests (Aristotle, 1948, pp. 20–21). Unlike Aristotle, we are not tied to the idea that there is, or needs to be, a single community of interests. Rather there are a number of prevailing communities of interests, each of whose members recognize the same parts of the justice concept, and each of whose members understand how and why each of the others is prioritizing the parts differently. This enables us to see justice not as a static concept derivative of the way things should be according to the dictates of nature, or God, or reason, but as a dynamic, conflicted, and changing phenomenon that is a function of ever-changing relationships in a society. More specifically, we will try to show that the concept of justice in all of our prevailing language-games, as constructed by the prevailing communities of shared interests in our society, involves a claim that one’s interests deserve attention when it comes to dividing up social goods and services. This being so, justice has meaning only in the public realm of speech and action. In that realm, different uses of the term may be presented and negotiated into the language-game of that realm. But to be successfully negotiated in, to constitute a legitimate use of the term, all such uses must be intelligible; and intelligibility rests upon family resemblances to the ways the term has been previously used. Thus, although there is not any single form (in the Platonic sense) that legitimizes any specific use of the word, there is nevertheless a genealogical relationship linking each intelligible use of justice with all other current and previous uses. In brief, although the scope of what justice means is undetermined, all uses, to be intelligible, must be linked through connections which may fade, but which still provide a distinguishable trail (Wittgenstein, 1953). Consequently, the meaning of justice in each of the prevailing communities of interests in our society is necessarily accessible to each of the others, as is an understanding of how the values of each community accord and conflict. We will attempt to show that as there is a shared vocabulary and grammar of justice among the prevailing communities of interests, there are necessarily shared interests and values, and that the only difference is the priority given to those interests and values by each community.

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If this is not the case, then the claims that each community is making and the standards that they are employing for evaluating the claims of others are unintelligible to one another, and although there is “legal sanction and superior power” (Aristotle, 1948, pp. 20–21), there is no justice. We will try to show what the prevailing communities of interests are, and why the ideas of justice they yield are those that must be attended to and are therefore superior to the most cogent philosophical alternatives. We also seek to develop the notion of why both the normative and essentially contested nature of justice are not defects. Instead, they point toward methods of use, application, and operationalization. Given such an operationalization, these conceptions of justice can further generate real questions that can be systematically evaluated, a feature allowing us to assess our progress and adjust our methods toward seeing that justice is done, especially in the context of an administrative state.

Our Method We begin with a brief epistemological exegesis, explaining both how we intend to arrive at our concept of justice in Public Administration and why it is necessarily dependent upon the prevailing communities of interests. We then place the issue in context, sketch the distinguishing features of each prevailing community’s argument for the proper way of understanding justice, discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses, and delineate how our view allows a deeper, more satisfactory understanding of justice in Pubic Administration than does any of the others. We begin with epistemological concerns primarily because administering social justice involves actually choosing just courses of action. Choosing, in turn, requires that we struggle immediately with epistemological uncertainty. A satisfying answer to the question of how we know whether the action we choose is just, for example, certainly requires some account of how we know anything at all. Once we understand how to comprehend the meaning of justice, we begin the process of doing so. To begin, as justice is a social achievement dependent upon a prevailing community of shared interests, the conceptualizations of distinguishable communities of interests that come into the pubic sphere must be examined first. The way a particular community is self-described, as well as the discourses, practices, relationships, and contexts upon which each is based, typically serve the particular com-

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munity’s interest, rather than the interests of all participating in the public sphere. And they accrue depth, complexity, and nuance not only as changes occur in the particular community, but also as the community’s context changes. Moving into the public sphere is just such a contextual change, and success in the public sphere requires that each community’s concept become intelligible to each of the others’. Thus the public sphere becomes a conforming space, a space wherein the term justice as used in language-games of each community of interests must conform to its use in a broader language-game developed from these shared interests. Some might be taken aback by the use of the term conforming space. Such a choice was made intentionally, and though some might consider it unfortunate, we found it essential for a number of reasons. Despite our best efforts, we found it difficult to reconcile the abstract egalitarian conceptions of justice forwarded Arendt and others within this contemporary sketch of justice. Even Ramos’s (1981) discussion of human associated life does not quite bridge the intellectual gap from the abstract to praxis. To his credit, Ramos rightly understood that groups can supersede individual interests (p. 28); he understood as well how these groups can and often do shape societies based on their relative orientation and involvement (chap. 7). This does not, however, take us to where we need to be—that is, it is still incapable of framing our discussion of justice in Public Administration adequately. If we instead turn our attention to the work of Foucault (1977), and applications of his work (Sementelli & Herzog, 2000), we then discover that the notion of a conforming space more appropriately represents the dayto-day, lived experiences of people generally, and their interactions with groups, governments, and political actors in particular. The reality of contemporary society is not that people come to these discussions, debates, and discourses as free individuals, as Rawls (1971), Habermas (1979), and others might argue. Instead it reflects the notion that alien, unpopular, or otherwise marginalized discourses can be punished (Foucault, 1977). Therefore, if one truly desires to understand, describe, or discuss justice in contemporary society, it becomes essential to disengage our academic and practical discussions from the Pollyannaish discussions that have preceded it. Once we have accomplished this, and have moved beyond this often veiled discourse about what is good, right, and proper, we can then begin to truly address justice, And, if there is ever to be a chance for this to happen, we must recognize that people operate in conforming spaces,

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not necessarily the open lifeworlds posited by Habermas (1984) and desired by Arendt and others. This conforming space, in turn leads us to a second step, one where we begin to describe, explain, and understand how this frames and affects society. An analysis of the images that justice propagates should help us make sense of the “blooming, buzzing, confusion” ( James, 1955, p. 488) of ideas that cohere around the term, should reveal many of the masks, mechanisms, and goals resulting from the essentially contested nature of the concept of justice. In addition, a semiotic approach to justice should help reveal the power relationships and their roles in the study of justice as well as the shifts in cultural norms and ideologies spawned from the application of justice. This can lead us toward an understanding of what a just society might be, not simply in theory, but also in practice, allowing us to craft a usable, practical meaning or set of meanings for the term justice. Consequently, as Wittgenstein (1953) demonstrated, though many meanings are possible not just any will do. Any new meaning must bear a reasonable family resemblance to previous usage of the term if anyone is to understand it at all. Just as the foundation of a building is connected to the structure erected upon it, so are social practices, prevailing communities of interests, and the meanings of justice linked to some aspect of a preexisting cultural base. Early discourses, practices, meanings, and relationships grew out of simple biological needs and of course took many forms depending upon exigency and situation. Nevertheless, current forms are built upon and still attached, however indirectly, to many of these foundations, if only symbolically or in some cases at the periphery of discussion. To understand what we are trying to do in choosing a just course of action properly, then, requires a sketch of the social, professional, institutional, and historical context in which the word is employed. Following an analytical technique developed by Wittgenstein, we achieve from this sketch a perspicuous overview of how the word justice is used currently and thus begin the process of understanding what it means in Public Administration today. Our process of understanding continues with a depth analysis of these different uses of justice beginning with the egalitarian view. Egalitarian understandings both embody a profound American value closely associated with our contextually developed understanding of justice and currently

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exert a great influence over what administrators are taught to understand as constituting justice in Public Administration. We then explore sequentially the understandings of justice as merit-based, liberty-enhancing, utility-driven, and needs-based, discussing their respective strengths and weaknesses. Gaining an overview of the uses of the term justice is an endeavor grounded in practice. However, in discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the different uses of the term, our analysis then becomes explicitly normative. This is inevitable as even the most rigorous science with the most well defined way of knowing (methodology) is premised upon beliefs about the value and meaning of what it is doing and how it is proceeding. These values define what is worth investigating, what counts as proof, and what constitutes a good methodology. Lacking such a set of values and beliefs, any science reduces to nothing more than a repetitive, meaningless collection of random data (Polanyi, 1969). Without meaning, we are then left with processes of justice that are simply hollow images, unbound heuristics, or ungrounded acts of some undefined faith. In brief, choice requires a standard of value that no amount of knowledge can adequately establish. Among these are choices of action or inaction. Before we can begin doing justice, for example, we must face the issues of whether there is a moral duty to act in the situation. In essence, we need to discover if there is there something we should be doing. We also need to determine whose duty it is, and how we should prioritize all that we should do. At the same time, regardless of how profoundly we might grasp the nuanced uses of the word justice and understand the proximate and distant consequences of our choices, we must still decide which practices and which consequences are good. Moreover, when the decisions involve consequences that are not simply matters of individual desire or personal visions of what the good life requires, we must also decide whether it is good to set aside private interests in pursuit of some larger social good. Only if action is incumbent, and only if we care about the right thing to do, are the empirical and epistemological concerns of more than academic interest. The effectiveness and social integrity of administrative institutions, too, rests ultimately upon a sustained public confidence that those institutions are in fact choosing the right things to do, at least more often than not. Consequently, we cannot and should not avoid the resolution of cer-

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tain moral uncertainties, which often exist here, both because we want to provide a normative account of justice and because questions of morality have this human priority. The resolution of such uncertainties, even if only temporary, can help to jell the symbols, practices, and beliefs of any particular prevailing community of interests. There is an additional advantage to resolving normative concerns explicitly. Once we know what our values are, the process of choosing is free of further issues of what we ought to do. The only reasonable definition of the words should or ought or must is that they are used to denote an action consistent with one’s values or the highest applicable value. Deciding which problems must be given full attention and solved using our full range of knowledge and abilities, and which can be relegated to habit, tradition, authority, or other simplifying heuristic, is purely a value judgment. We do not have the time or energy to tackle every problem with a complete, critical decision-making process; we must prioritize problems based on our understanding of their importance. Of course, taking our particular normative approach to justice tacitly advances three contentions. First, people are social beings seeking not only private benefit but also some goal of a common good and the better common life it promotes. This notion of understanding people as social beings is consistent with the work of Ramos (1981), most mainstream economics literature, and even mainstream sociology. Denying such a notion would imply that people can at best exist in the state of either isolate or anomy (Ramos, 1981, chap. 7). At such a point there is really no need for any sort of social justice, since the “isolated actor is overcommitted to a norm unique to himself ” (p. 133), and people existing in the state of anomy find that there is no social life (p. 128). If we instead work from the notion that people do tend to interact with others, then we find that social justice becomes a necessary element of any conception of a common good, and the normative standard for judging any public policy is whether it contributes more to social justice than alternative policies. The search for social justice and a better common life is by necessity and preference. That is, our very identities, the development of our personal capacities and our emotional well-being depend upon our interactions with others. In addition, the state of our culture and our technological advances, our survival and quality of life, depend upon our mutual accomplishments. Consequently, we form communities of interests and not simply interest

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groups to seek justice and some conception of a common good. The social justice secured from this process can enhance the common life and is shared by all. These contentions are not widely championed today. Discourses about social justice tend to be predominantly political in the individualist (i.e., non-Aristotelian) sense. They are carried on in individualist terms, have individualist ends, and are informed by models of individual behavior. Thus, for example, justice is generally talked about in terms of a value consensus among individuals that might be reached under the sort of veil of ignorance discussed by Rawls (1971). It is also spoken of in terms of a minimalist state that rectifies past injustices to specific individuals or groups and establishes proper procedures for acquiring, holding, and transferring individual or group holdings in the future (Nozick, 1977). Alternative discourses speak of justice as dependant upon the state of interest group competition (Simpson, 1980) or as having no meaning other than the interests of dominant groups that define the value systems, epistemologies, and practices of society as a whole (Belliotti, 1987). Still others argue that social justice involves the recognition and consultation of interests that might be forgotten or overlooked in the pressure of political combat (Levinas, 1969; Habermas, 1989). This individualist orientation understands justice only in terms of autonomous, primarily self-concerned individuals. It encourages each of us to seek justice by advancing personal interests for recognition and redress in the political arena. The political process can only do justice or establish just practices by transforming these personal interests into policy outcomes. This often results in a series of decisions, an array of outcomes, which become what is understood as our social justice. It is a contingent justice, of course, more or less satisfactory for the present to the particular political actors immediately involved. It is our contention, however, that the resulting individualist discourse is not talking about justice at all. Moreover, it makes any credible notion of justice impossible. There can be no notion of justice because no standard of community interest is addressed or at issue in this discourse other than in terms of an aggregation of individual interests and those of special interest groups. In fact, we find it self-contradictory to posit that the word justice, and indeed any utterance, has meaning while no community of interests exists to implicitly validate, shape, or use the symbols emerging from it. We will demonstrate most fully why this is so in later chapters.

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Here we will only state that to speak of justice as opposed to force or power involves claiming that something should be done or had. That, in turn, involves appealing to something other than personal or group interest. Thus to claim that justice is simply the will of the stronger, or a balance of wants and desires, or the wishes of a wise or superior interest (e.g., God, natural law), is to deny that there is justice at all. Justice becomes simply a mask for something else entirely. We do not claim, for example, that simply because we get everything we want that justice is done. Nor do we suppose that justice obtains in continuously giving others all they desire. In fact, as Socrates pointed out to Callicles, simply satisfying wants and desires often leads to escalating desires and insatiable appetites (Plato, 1971). It seems strange to suggest that justice requires the fulfillment of such demands. Our ending conception, therefore, should at the very least provide us with a series of insights into justice as well as how we can practically theorize and apply any conception of justice within the context of Public Administration. Such a conception of justice, as discussed earlier, will remain essentially contested, part of the language-games of our current lived existence. It remains subject to the evolution of our understanding as we begin to address some of the “wicked” problems (problems having multiple causes, multiple constituents, and complex solutions [Rittel & Webber, 1973]) that arise from the purely theoretical conceptions of justice concerned with the abstracts of equity, entitlement, and social order, but not the realities of them. Our brand of justice, though contested, provides some practical organization for the why and how of justice and just experiences. By framing justice in language-games, prevailing communities of interests, and the symbols used to communicate ideas, we have, ironically, uncovered a set of mechanisms that make justice more real at least in the sense that we can more easily apprehend why certain things happen, how they happen, and what happens in the name of justice. In this book, we have not solved the problems of justice, nor have we designed the end state or penultimate view of justice. What we hope to do throughout this book is to contextualize, embed, and frame justice in a manner that transforms it from some dead, fossilized, and reworked concept often used to gain some political advantage into a living, changing idea, that can meaningfully inform the theory and practices of Public Administration and Public Affairs. The endpoint of this book should set the stage for further research and

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discussion about justice in our postmodern world. We are certain that it will enamor some, repulse others, and raise the ire of many who have chosen to build their beliefs, judgments, and careers on some particular view of justice. At the very least, we hope that readers leave this work with some appreciation of the complexity that surrounds justice, some insights into the limitations of current theories of justice, and some questions about what is just, and what that means in a contemporary society.

2 Epistemology

Currently, we find that administrative understandings of justice are defined, shaped, and changed by communities of people with interests that, while they overlap and sometimes resemble each other, also are often at odds or quite mutually indifferent. The tension or indifference to one another among these communities results in elaborate and fluid networks of people struggling for power. This, in turn, results in a continuing drama of discursive and symbolic manipulation (Baudrillard, 1994) through profusion of language-games (Wittgenstein, 1953), each calculated to achieve some perceived desideratum. As Public Administration has no notion of justice peculiar to its own endeavors, this situation has proven most conducive to generating notions of justice within the profession that are disjointed, confusing, and self-contradictory. Now, in themselves, multiple language-games are not undesirable; nor are multiple, even contradictory, notions of what it means to be just. The complexity and indeterminate nature of existence requires not only that rigid notions of anything be avoided, but also that all notions about anything, though they appear quite settled, be understood as opinions held by some people on those points. Regarding justice in particular, contests over its meaning are both indispensable to the usefulness of the term and useful in the continuing critical discourse over how justice is best attained. So, Public Administration as a profession must necessarily pay attention to the profusion of language-games employing the term. However, Public Administration’s role in society is that of working out systematically, and applying professionally, the ways and means of good governance (Abel & Sementelli, 2003). What counts as good governance depends necessarily upon a consensus attitude toward governmental institutions and actors, a consensus that is worked out by the citizenry through continued dialogue over competing attitudes, values, and beliefs. So as an

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endeavor, Public Administration is responsible to society, to the public as a whole, for arriving at some consensus attitude toward what constitutes justice in the administration of public agencies. To be convincing in this endeavor, any argument concerning the meaning of justice in Public Administration must rest upon both a cogent epistemology and a cogent explanation of why the meaning of justice derives necessarily from certain interests that we all recognize as a community. In the process, we must explain why we find it self-contradictory to assert both that no shared interests exist and that justice has some meaning. Also, as we are claiming that justice can have some agreed upon commonly understood meaning when it comes to administering agencies, we must demonstrate how competing communities of interests tend to cohere around some fundamental precepts that can be employed to arrive at a consensus attitude regarding the meaning of justice in Public Administration.

Epistemological Uncertainty The requisite of a consensus attitude directs our attention once again to the empirical disconnect between the reworking of Plato by professional thinkers such as Rawls, Nozick, and Walzer, and actual practice in nearly all communities of shared interest. Under the press of circumstance, we find that most often decisions are made, and values are chosen and prioritized, by relying on some brief set of heuristics that work well regarding the particular interests of the group. We find a focus, then, almost entirely upon the development of pragmatic notions of justice, and pragmatic heuristics to employ them. Public Administration in such a context exists in a reactive mode to all communities of interests with sufficient voice, focuses practically on buzzwords gleaned from these communities; buzzwords like merit, need, transparency, efficiency, neutrality, equality, and participation (Pops & Pavlak, 1991). Administrators recognize that applying “these administrative justice criteria in actual decision situations is not an easy task” (p. 92), but they soldier on despite all redoubts (Pops & Pavlak, 1991). Consider, by way of a brief example, the plight of public administrators as they strive to meet the criterion of efficiency in their practice. What are they to take as a directive from this criterion? Are they to suppose that administrators should adopt the business sector’s focus on economic effi-

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ciency, a notion based largely upon a set of values and priorities that promote decisions advancing the private interests of investors (Smith, 1937) rather than the “consensus interests” of the public at large? Are we then to take comfort in the classical capitalist’s assurance that the invisible hand will work out the public interest through the pursuit of private interest? Are we also to suppose that the pursuit of economic efficiency will force the most rational, as opposed to the most expedient or the most politically correct, decisions upon administrators? Ten minutes with most administrators will dispel the grounds for the buzzword efficiency, as well as that of neutrality. Political praxis has evolved consensus attitudes regarding transparency (sunshine laws), equality (EEOC/AA), and participation (public hearings), and engineered them into the bureaucratic decisionmaking process. Once this occurred, administrators adjusted their notions of justice accordingly. What is still lacking in each of these cases is reflection and critique on why these heuristics are valued and how they fit into a broader understanding of administrative justice. Let us consider another, more abstract example. Consider the notion that the just, right, and moral thing to do is to divide things up according to the dictates of a certain rule as given by God, or natural law, or some sovereign. Very cynical people will suppose that far from being a verity concerning the nature of justice, such a rule is simply a claim that the wishes of a wise or superior interest (i.e., God) should be satisfied. Justice thus becomes a mask for something else. Nevertheless, to make our point about epistemological uncertainty, and to avoid circular argument and infinite regress (e.g., Why should I be just? Because it is a command of God. Why should I obey a supreme being? Because it is right and moral to do so. Why should I do the right and moral thing? Because it is a command of God.), let us also assume that we merely agree on a particular authority’s particular expertise in the particular sphere of inquiry. Now, we are still left in what has been called “Abraham’s quandary.” Abraham was directed by God (Genesis 22) to slit the throat and drain the blood of his beloved and only son as a sacrifice on a mountain some distance from Abraham’s home. It should be mentioned that Abraham was bothered by none of the problems we are about to raise, a point we will return to later. Faced with such a directive, several questions seem appropriate. As Sartre asked (1948, 28–32), was it indeed God telling him to do this? Could it have been some other entity (Satan, Kali, etc?)? Could Abraham

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have been either insane or projecting a subconscious fear of youth? Is it possible that the heat of the desert had made him delirious? If he were delirious, was he even Abraham? Assuming he was Abraham, was he the Abraham to whom the command was directed? Moreover, how could he be sure he heard correctly? How could he be sure that the message was precisely formulated and accurately transmitted (e.g., that there was no atmospheric or satanic interference)? In other words, could there have been some perceptual disconnect or confounding factor that was influencing Abraham’s decisions? If one assumes accuracy in all particulars of this situation, how might Abraham be certain about what both the individual words and the message as a whole meant? Assuming further that this was not the only command ever given by God, how does he know how to prioritize it among the others or make it consistent with them (e.g., Thou shall not kill, had that command not been given later with the coming of Moses)? How does he know which situations are meant to fall under this command? What if, for example things change significantly while he is on his way to complete this task? How does he know that this particular command itself is not a test of whether he will do the right thing and not kill his son despite the command? Parallel questions arise when trying to do justice in Public Administration. Again, assuming that justice happens when following some rule, how do we know that the rule actually commands us to make certain distributions of resources? For example, might the rule as communicated to us actually be formulated to promote the ideological agenda of a particular administrator, or particular consultant, or particular regulatory official? Might not it reflect the interests of particular interest groups? Even absent such an agenda, how can we be sure of the accuracy of the statements transmitting the law to us? Assuming accuracy in all particulars, how do we know what the message means? If we wait for court decisions interpreting the law, how do we know when we have a sufficient number of decisions to hazard a reasonably accurate guess? How can we be sure that the law is directed at us in our particular institution, in our particular circumstances? What if our situation does not seem to fit any of the facts considered in the courtroom or by the legislature when the law was formulated and interpreted? How do we know how to prioritize making the understood distribution while simultaneously maintaining our efforts in regards to other statutorily directed outcomes? After resolving all that,

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how do we know whether our perceptions of what is going on in our institution are accurate relative to the transmittal of this law? Levels of complexity are added to all of these questions should we determine that the just thing to do requires us to fulfill a standard even more abstract than that set down by rules. If justice demands equality, for example, do we mean along with Aristotle that we must treat equals in the same manner and unequals differently (Ostwald, 1962)? If so, how do we determine who are equals? Is it determined by need? Is equality a function of effort? Is it a function of intelligence? How do we know what makes people equal or unequal? Alternatively, does equality then entail allocating the same resources to everyone? If so, should everyone receive exactly the same amount of the same sort of resources? Perhaps it would be most effective if we simply left everyone equally alone. Then again, does equality entail the assurance of equal outcomes for everyone? If so, equal outcomes with respect to what? Is it access to services? To goods? To consideration for some task? Perhaps we should guarantee everyone the same opportunities. What does that entail? Perhaps starting everyone at the same point? How do we know? Epistemological uncertainty, of course, is not limited to situations where we seek to put our notion of justice into practice. Does justice require certain institutional structures? Does it require establishing certain processes for the allocation of goods and services? Also, what are the fundamental preconceptions, issues, values, and concepts that inform the justice we are attempting to apply in a given situation? Furthermore, how does one even know if it is consistent, useful, practical, or even acceptable given the prevailing views of the community of interests in power, the institutions, the theories, and the services of the administrative agency in question?

Resolving Epistemological Uncertainty Now, regardless of the level of complexity, whenever we seek to uncover the meaning of a word like justice, we find ourselves in the same quandary as Saint Augustine when he wondered, “What then is time? . . . If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it . . . I know not.” As he was a religious man and less concerned with this world than the next, he sought the answer, as did Plato before him, in all sorts of hints and intimations of a reality existing somewhere, as yet undisclosed and awaiting our discov-

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ery. Even today, many conceive the problem as largely one of ferreting out the necessary facts about biology, or history, or the universe and how each works (E. Wilson, 1975; Dawkins, 1976). Yet, from moment to moment we experience a palpable and immanent understanding of concepts like justice and time. We do not really seem to need an explication. What is worse, when some exposition is offered, it often has a fantastic ring about it (e.g., Platonic forms or altruistic genes). In fact, most such explications typically muddy or confuse our understanding where we once were certain. In our everyday activities, as changeable and contingent as they are, there is a moment-by-moment sensing of discrepancies, adapting our behavior, and getting it right. This sense flows out of an accord with the context in which the activity occurs. It is as if the context were “the witness and the judge” of what occurs (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 137). The contexts of our lives, in other words, have a form. The notion of “getting it right” simply means following that form. This form of life emerges from shared judgments, expectations, propensities, and dispositions, evoked from our moment-to-moment practice in context. It is expressed in our paradigmatic practices, or language-games, which refer to rule-following ways of doing and being that consist of interwoven languages and actions. It acts as a synergistic agent relating the language we use to our lived reality and drawing from our experience their characteristic profiles. The various, interactive, patterned and repetitive languagegames express our customs, are secured in a social life, and are constrained by the community’s shared commitments, inclinations, expectations, and judgments (i.e., by the community’s norms). However, these norms are by no means simply conventional. We do not apply external norms, revealed, discovered, or abstractly derived and independent of our life. Rather, the norms are shared sociopsychological constraints, acquired by training and living in a social practice. Because they derive from practice, from our form of life and language-games, they are dynamic. The social constraints defining normative experiences respond to the experiences themselves, reflecting a dynamic rather than a static pattern of life. In practice, we do not experience ourselves as simply adapting again and again to newly experienced situations by applying a certain fixed understanding of a rule. Instead, the meaning of our rules is determined by our judgments in practice. For example, when we try to determine whether a particular choice accords with our previous responses

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under a particular rule, the determination of what counts as an accord, or what counts as an extension of the rule, can only be answered within the ongoing social practice. Noticing all this, Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested an entirely different approach to understanding the meaning of words like time and justice. His philosophical investigations convinced him that instead of seeking new information, our inquiry into the meaning of such words ought to investigate what is plainly in view. As he said, “we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 109). Anything hypothetical, he thought, distracts us from seeing what is actual, what is right there in front of us. Wittgenstein’s method of focusing us on what is right before our eyes draws our attention to the connections among those physical, behavioral, historical, institutional, and verbal phenomena that are attendant to the actual uses of abstract terms within different particular contexts. Thus, “one must ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the ‘ language-game’ which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 116). For example, the traditional procedure for identifying and defining words like justice involves giving grounds. That is, when questioned as to the justice of a particular choice or activity, we traditionally begin specifying which of the countless features of a situation support our calling our decision “just” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 23). If we are then asked why those particular features were chosen, we begin presenting grounds in defense of some general definition (e.g., justice as strict equality). Those disagreeing with us then either specify which of the countless contextual details distinguish our choice or action from justice, or inquire as to our grounds for saying that our general definition is the real, or the essential, meaning of justice. Then, should we say that there are good hermeneutic or scientific grounds for our definition, our basis for accepting either of those two authorities may then be questioned. The grounds for the grounds are questioned in turn, and in this way giving grounds entangles us in either an infinite regress of defensive explanation or a geometrically expanding account of contextual detail. In either case the meaning of justice becomes more and more elusive.

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However, Wittgenstein noticed that at some point we quit giving grounds. We neither regress infinitely, nor discriminate ever more finely. The process ends, but we end it neither arbitrarily nor “in certain propositions striking us immediately as true.” Ending “is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is [founded instead upon] our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no. 204). “You must bear in mind,” says Wittgenstein, “that the language-game is . . . not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like our life” (no. 559).

Why Wittgenstein? Before we progress further, it is essential to explain why we choose to think in a Wittgensteinian fashion. Simply, it constrains us to “new habits of thought” (Pitkin, 1972, p. 1), habits that excite a distinct way of theorizing, a way most conducive to the engagement of administrators with particular people struggling in social environments. Because they live at the interstices of the general and the specific, the paradoxes, pluralities, and contradictions of daily living perforce ensnarl public administrators, impressing upon them either the need to seek asylum in procedure, or to think reflectively and/or in new directions. As everything not only changes on its own, and most often in quite curious ways, and as any attempt to keep things the same turns out to be itself a change, seeking asylum never really works. So, to remain sound and sensible, Wittgenstein’s way of thinking is particularly helpful because it does not seek to universalize, or to dissolve differences, or to stand aside from the social flux in hopes of gaining an “objective” perspective. The quest for objectivity as a mode of theorizing has been a plague upon our houses since before Aristotle, a plague still potent in the discourses on justice that are informed by no lesser lights than Rawls and Nozick. Wittgenstein’s way is a distinct break with this tradition, a break with the quest for certainty, a break that accepts and lives with “the illusionless human condition—relativity, doubt and the absence of God” (p. 337). It is a mode of thinking that is insistent upon the insight that paradox and contradiction in the application of our concepts to our reality are best understood not as flaws in our understanding, but instead as features of our discourse. Therefore, such paradoxes actually constitute resources that are useful in deciding how to go

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on, justly if we desire, in indeterminate and never completely understood circumstances (Shotter, 1994). Now, what are the features of this new way of thinking that make it so useful to Public Administration? As Wittgenstein styles it, how do we justify ourselves in saying “now I can go on . . . when I don’t know my way about?” (Wittgenstein, 1953, sec. 154). His answer, simply, is to follow or grasp the tendencies in each other’s conduct, to study those circumstances in which we can go on with each other in practice (Shotter, 1994). Toward this end, “It disperses the fog to study the phenomena of language in . . . application,” as how language actually works affords not only “a clear view of the aim and functioning of the words” (Wittgenstein, 1953, sec. 5), but a clear view of the values, attitudes, beliefs, and understandings shared among those using the words. The fog is dispersed because just in order to communicate “there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments” (sec. 242). As Wittgenstein explains, “Where [understandings] . . . cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and an heretic. I said I would ‘combat’ the other man,—but wouldn’t I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons come persuasion” (1969, p. 204). Any conception of justice, in other words, requires a particular ethos, a willingness to be persuaded in certain ways if we are to communicate any meaning at all or as Wittgenstein might say, if justice is to function properly among us and to maintain itself over time. Put alternatively, justice is not a free-floating phenomena; the term cannot mean just anything at all. It is grounded in the particular social practices of a people, in their culture, in their traditions, and in their religion, or lack thereof. And in our case, it is grounded in our form of capitalism, in our republican form of government, and in our experiences with particular forms of disrespect among classes, ethnicities, races, and genders. So, to disperse the fog of misunderstanding that sets conservative against liberal, egalitarian against libertarian, and the secular among us against the religious, as we speak of justice, we must look to the language-games that we have constructed just to go on with one another. To even consider all of these acceptably, given that perfection is an illusion created by universalism, public administrators, in particular, must dissolve the illusions emergent from the fog of idealism. As all of this implies, we cannot employ the concept of justice without

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a community of interests that imparts the necessary ethos. As Wittgensteinian thinking reveals, our notion of justice can derive only from the varied practices we maintain in order to proceed, and the assorted pragmatic proposals that we make to one another about how we should go on. These proposals and practices are aimed necessarily at persuading people to maintain, and very often to broaden, the range of their commitments to one another so that interests may be addressed. In the process we cannot help but either construct a community of interests, or go our separate ways. To understand a language is to understand a set of practices, a form of life, and a community of interests. Some may object, abstractly, that as there is no unique, definitive concept of justice, any conception of it is but one among many that is possible. But this is to fall into universalism. More correctly, we should say that it is one among many— one that is made possible by particular discourses within a particular form of life, complete with its particular ethos and community of interests. Within the particular discourses, and there are many, that any form of life may generate, each discrete discourse must strive for acceptance among all the others. It is as though a discourse-space were available amongst those conversing, an agora, a social space created by directing the focus of attention to certain phenomena and controlling the boundaries of acceptable description and explanation. The space is maintained and expanded through the elaboration of concepts, principles, epistemologies, and trajectories of discourse. An open discourse-space provides a communicative environment that enables highly dynamic, ongoing negotiation of both what is included in the focus of attention and what constitutes acceptable description and explanation. A closed discourse-space does not. An open discourse-space ensures both unlimited discussion, free of all constraints and domination, and a substantive equality of opportunity to initiate and perpetuate discourse, to put forward thoughts, to call claims and proposition into question, and to support or oppose statements, explanations, interpretations, and justifications with reasoned argument (Habermas, 1984). A closed theory-space is dominated by particular ideologies, epistemologies, and discourses; excludes certain claims, propositions and interpretations; and offers limited opportunities to speak, perhaps excluding some from speaking altogether. Both open and closed discourse-spaces are made sound and accessible through an organized discursive core whose concepts and principles are

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valued historically, culturally, and morally, though they may be more or less coherent, correctable, empirically testable, or even useful. This discursive core includes a core complex of purposes, values, practices, and behaviors, and it grounds a periphery of related discursive complexes identifiable by their “family resemblances” to the core (Wittgenstein, 1953, sec. 47). In both open and closed discourse-spaces, both the core and the periphery are negotiable and regularly challenged, the difference being that open spaces allow radical renegotiations of the core while closed spaces do not. Nevertheless, both closed no less than open discoursespaces may be transformed. There are always ways and means available to refocus attention and to gain validity for proposed concepts, principles, epistemologies, and trajectories of discourse, to constrain open spaces and loosen closed spaces (Foucault, 1980). Closed spaces may be expanded and open spaces cut back, as attention is refocused on new or different phenomena, as a single ideology becomes predominate, or as new concepts, principles, epistemologies, and trajectories of discourse gain access to the discourse-space. The real problem, then, is not to discover a concept of justice acceptable to every reasonable person, but only to look at our discourses and see what uses of justice we find constitutive of a form of life that we find sufficiently agreeable to continue the conversation. Within the discoursespace created by that form of life will be found not only our community of interests, but our indeterminate idea of justice, and the ways and means of working with it, for better or for worse. Public administrators are particularly well placed to constrain or loosen the discourse-space of public policy. They may, for example, regulate the time, place, and manner of exercise for specific rights; they may determine the expenditures that will be dedicated to any policy practice or goal; and they may balance and protect competing interests, rights and duties, more or less well, as they pursue the policies of particular administrations in particular situations (e.g., concerning medical marijuana, gay marriage, assisted suicide). In the mere process of exercising these powers, carrying out their sworn duties, and pursuing the policies mandated by legislative bodies, they may focus attention on neglected issues (e.g., administrative duties with regard to gay marriages under state constitutions or privacy rights as affected by security cameras), stress ideology over pragmatics (e.g., the federal supremacy issue in medical marijuana use), or introduce

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new concepts and principles through innovative administrative strategies and tactics that stretch traditional boundaries of practice (e.g., scheduling in “spontaneous” student prayer at public school–sponsored events). Such a mode of thinking represents an alternative to the current models of doing justice, with their rationalism and misguided search for a consensus that would be fully inclusive. At the same time, it does not exclude a community of interests from which we may evoke agreeable decisions, practices, and ways of going on with one another. In other words, the meaning of justice is not grounded in anything beyond or outside of exactly how we go about doing things with each other on a moment-to-moment basis. We need not look to a special transcendental, metaphysical, or biological reality supposedly underlying our behavior and constituting grounds for what we do. The meaning of justice is right in front of our eyes, just there in the context, the activity, and the practical relationships we establish historically, institutionally, and behaviorally (Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 39). As Wittgenstein stated elsewhere, “philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain” (1953, sec. 126). Consequently, “the work of the philosopher consists [first] in assembling reminders for a particular purpose” (sec. 127). He next offers us reminders of how we use a term for the purposes of any particular practice. Then, reminders of more uses for more purposes are assembled in order to avoid that “main cause of philosophical disease . . . a one-sided diet: [a disease whereby] one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of an example (sec. 593). To understand what justice means, then, we must attend to its many uses for our academic, institutional, professional, and social purposes, at least. This method of discovering meaning has three important implications. First, the recurrently popular idea that personal, relativistic notions of justice exist, the idea that your justice is not my justice, is both logically and epistemologically untenable. This radical isolationism is founded upon the idea that as we cannot know whether another person’s experiences are like our own, even in similar circumstances, I cannot know what you mean by justice when you employ the word. So, for all we know, each of us means a completely different sort of thing. By implication, of course, if we are to do justice to one another we must address each person individually and meet his or her definition. In a sense, this idea obliterates the concept of justice by reducing it to impossibility. If my understanding of your

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justice depends upon my having precisely your experiences, your notion of the term is forever lost to me. Those who occupy this position never really think about why they are speaking, or to whom. In order for their word to have meaning, even to them let alone to others, it must allow for a correct and incorrect means of using it. These means are learned in some social context (language-games) within which we go about doing things with each other on a momentto-moment basis. To know the meaning of justice is to know how and in what kinds of situations or states of affairs this word is used effectively for shared purposes. Once these ways of using the terms are known, they become routinized and standardized by those within the community of interests shared by the speaker. Suppose, for example, that I associate the word justice with a sensation or mental picture that I derive by concentrating on an instance of either. In this way I show myself what I mean by justice. Now, if justice is going to be used to refer to this private sensation or picture, and not something that can be publicly understood and communicated, then “whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means here that we can’t talk about right” (Wittgenstein, 1953, sec. 258). The problem I will encounter is that in order to show that the use of the word justice on a given occasion is correct or incorrect, I must be able to appeal to something independent of the self. I may compare the sensation or mental picture I am having now with an image that I take to be a memory that I have of the sensation or picture constituting the standard. But the supposed memory is itself incapable of being independently tested for correctness. Hence, absent shared, situational indicators, I have no means of telling whether I am using the word correctly; nothing is going to count as a consistent use of the word justice, and the word thereby becomes meaningless. The second implication of this method of discovering meaning is that although we may invent all kinds of theories as to what justice is (e.g., egalitarianism, utilitarianism, libertarianism, merit-based, needs-based, or whatever), no theory can ever be a final account of justice. The theories are derived by us and live only within the dynamic context of social life from within which they arise and within which they have their application. They cannot be turned around to depict or portray the dynamics themselves. Consequently, the meaning of justice depends upon our form of life, and as that changes so does the nature (the meaning) of justice. The meaning or nature of justice is in this sense indeterminate; and

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while its meaning is neither a matter of strict logic nor practical necessity, it is not arbitrary either. It is socially and humanly coherent. It isn’t essentially any particular thing, but it can’t be just anything at all. The meaning of justice is coherent exactly to the extent that our form of life and its transformations are coherent. From this flows the third important implication. We are accountable, moment to moment, for the meaning of justice. Although we may formulate theories, laws, moral principles, or rules, any claim that justice is done by acting in accord with any of these is an abdication of our social responsibility. The meaning of justice is dependent upon our practices and how we choose to continue and modify them. Justifying our choices as logical implications or practical necessities given rules, principles, theories, or laws, begs certain questions. This was what we understand to be Abraham’s failure. As mentioned earlier, Abraham was bothered by none of the issues raised earlier. He decided that it wasn’t right for him to decide all these things about whether the received command accorded with what it meant to do the right thing, or about how he knew that he was choosing the proper course of action. He was just Abraham, and did not fancy himself to be a proper authority at these depths. It was certainly wrong, for example, to ask why he should obey God, whether he had a duty to do so, or whether this was even God talking. It may even have been blasphemous to wonder such things (though Job later questions God in a fairly heated manner and receives, not damnation, but a very sophisticated answer we still don’t understand). He felt no responsibility to puzzle these things out; he felt only a responsibility to follow the command. Perhaps he was correct to do so if he was actually in direct, clear communication with God. However, unless we are lucky enough to find ourselves in the same place, we cannot simply deduce a proper choice from a received theory or rule with any assurance that we are doing justice. Should justice happen when we act in that way, it is more or less a happy accident. Of course, we may use examples of our practice to remind ourselves of how we act, and we should choose justly in situations bearing family resemblances to those in which we are trying to identify justice. This is essentially the practice of courts presented with questions of the just thing to do, whether under a statute or under common law. Precedents are employed as reminders of how we regularly proceed justly in similar situations. Examining the family resemblances among those situations and the

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current context of the case provides some sense of how to go about getting it right. Attaining a perspicuous overview of the uses of justice in administrative practice is, therefore, how we know what justice means in Public Administration; it is the same process.

Justice and the Communities of Shared Interests If the above analysis is correct, justice can have meaning only so long as there are right and a wrong ways of using it; and the right and wrong ways cannot be privately determined. Rather, they must be developed in social contexts and language-games by means of which we go about doing things with each other on a moment-to-moment basis. To know the meaning of justice is to know how and in what kinds of situations or states of affairs it is used effectively for shared purposes in our community. Thus the meaning of justice must be must be socially coherent; and without shared purposes, without a community of interests, justice is meaningless. Moreover, the simple fact that we speak coherently to each other about anything at all, and about justice in particular, reveals that certain communities of interests exist. Forms of life and the interwoven, normalized patterns of practice and discourses that these forms and patterns involve would not emerge otherwise. What, then, is our prevailing community of interests with respect to justice? To throw it into sharp relief, we must explore our form of life as it continues to emerge from the shared judgments, expectations, propensities, and dispositions as evoked from our moment-to-moment practice in contexts relevant to Public Administration. We must look to the various, interactive, patterned, and repetitive language-games expressing our customs, secured in our social life, and constrained by the community’s shared commitments, inclinations, expectations, and judgments (i.e., by the community’s norms). Thus, we begin by assembling reminders (examples) of the many ways the word justice is used within the established systems of shared meaning, within the structures of attitudes, values, beliefs, purposes, worldviews, understandings, and ways of getting things done as they are now already in place. The encountered form of life or culture that people construct, negotiate, institutionalize, unrelentingly press, and persistently renegotiate and reengineer is what ultimately leads to that intuition of getting it right as we seek to identify and do justice. As we go about this process, however, we must keep in mind that while

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the meaning of justice is constrained by the community’s shared commitments, inclinations, expectations, and judgments, they do not determine it. Change in the meaning is possible. The meaning of justice is dependent ultimately upon our practices and how we choose to continue and modify them. That is, while community norms may under certain circumstances inhibit change and stabilize patterns of injustice, they also reveal truths about the community and its norms; and once these truths are grasped we may choose to reconstruct the meaning of justice. As Foucault argues, “Truth is not the reward of free spirits . . . [it is] a thing of this world . . . produced only by virtue of multiple constraints” (Foucault, 1980, p. 131). For example, we neither know how imprisonment works nor understand its effects until we imprison. Thus we do not know how we will evaluate it prior to our experience with it. Similarly, we don’t know the nature or extent of the emancipation or oppression a set of community norms may provide until we establish and live with them. Though we may analogize and employ metaphor prior to experience in order to imagine what our evaluations might be, nothing substitutes for experience. Hence, the truths we know depend upon the patterns of practices constituting our society’s regime of truth (Foucault, 1980, p. 131); and what we mean by justice is similarly dependent. Veblen expresses this same complex of ideas within his discussions of endogenous evolution. Social evolution according to Veblen does not proceed through a selection of traits by the external environment. Change emerges from internal variation through endogenous forces, from drift, resulting in the cumulative emulation, habituation, and institutionalization of certain practices. External influences do impact the system but they must be included in the system to matter to the people in it; and the understanding of those external influences is mediated by the dominant ideology, practices, and discourses of the system (Veblen, 1932). Thus, change in the meaning of justice is the result of endogenous forces. Perhaps they are the reactions to the truths revealed to us by the multiple constraints of our norms and institutions. Perhaps they follow from internalized exogenous forces. In all cases, however, they are the result of how we go about practicing our form of life. Our next step, then, is to engage those established systems of shared meaning most directly relevant to understanding the meaning of justice in Public Administration, all the while remaining sensitive to the manner in which things drift and in which endogenous forces of change emerge.

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Public Administration is composed of individuals in a profession functioning according to certain agreed upon professional and social norms. Individuals, institutions, professions, and societies each constitute established communities of interests, leading to systems for getting things done according to shared meanings within the system. Consequently to understand justice in the institutional context we must remind ourselves of how justice is used in each of these systems. To do justice in Public Administration, what we do must be perceived as bearing some family resemblance to the usage of justice within some if not many of these systems.

3 The Meaning of Justice within America’s Broad Social Context

To begin, it will be helpful to simplify our exploration of how the term justice is used by suggesting that a prevailing community of interests (and hence concept of justice) can be found in three interdependent, societywide language-games. The first is a language-game emergent from a distinctive brand of classical liberalism, the second from an evolving form of capitalism, and the third from a uniquely American form of democratic egalitarianism. These language-games are the ground, infrastructure, and basis for our discussion. The use of the word justice in each game carries great weight, as does the rendition offered by each of our communities of interests. Each is embedded in and to some extent derivative of the others, and all are synergistic amongst themselves. As all citizens are typically involved with each other in each of these language-games on a moment-to-moment basis, the different uses of justice, and the different renditions of our communities of interests that they offer, inform one another. That is, everyone is familiar with the uses of justice in each game, everyone is aware of the differences in its use, and to a great degree everyone respects and understands why the differences obtain (Gallie, 1956). The diversity of uses arises largely from a tension among these games regarding which uses are the most important, or have priority over which other uses in expressing the prevailing community of interests. Thus each renders our community of interests in slightly different terms. Consequently, to understand what justice means to citizens within our broad social context, we must gain a perspicuous overview of its uses in these three language-games and how they interrelate and grow into and out of one another. There are, of course, other language-games at work in our society. Certain racial and ethnic language-games, as well as the language-games of marginal social groups, including neo-Nazis, and various religious

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fundamentalists, for example, reflect different cultures, different communities of interests, and different ideas of justice. Consequently, each offers different renditions of what can be understood as a shared community of interests as well. But, unlike the language-games discussed earlier (language-games that intersect through commonly understood if not mutually accepted meanings, values, and practices), many of these groups have concepts, values, and practices understood as having a negligible impact on our form of life. Their practices have not become embedded in everyone’s daily discourse and activity. Our relationships and patterns of thought are not typically conditioned by these activities. We are not involved with each other in these language-games, and the meanings of their terms are not as easily understood or as convincing as those of classical liberalism, capitalism, and democratic egalitarianism. Hence these marginal groups tend to operate outside the prevailing community of interests and play little part in lending meaning to justice in our society. Of course, this could change as our society changes. Minority communities of interests act as endogenous forces whose practices and discourses often vie for acceptance within the dominant regime of meaning, practice, and truth. As such they have, for example, historically adopted the dominant vocabularies, with subtle variations in the meanings of key terms, in order to advance a variety of causes within American legal institutions (Abel & Marsh, 1993). For the moment, however, the currently dominant discourses and language-games are more useful for the task at hand.

The Classical Rendition Early in American history, it became apparent that American culture defined its society’s prevailing community of interests in terms of individual liberties, egalitarianism, and a certain form of natural aristocracy, the members of which were revealed by how they employed their liberty. In the 1830s, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville described America as: “a society formed of all the nations of the world . . . people having different languages, beliefs, opinions: in a word, a society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without common ideas, without a national character, yet a hundred times happier than our own” (de Tocqueville, 1963, p. 51). De Tocqueville attributed this happiness to America’s emphasis upon respect for the individual and equality of opportunity (p. 51). As de Tocqueville saw it, America’s prevailing commu-

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nity of interests in middle-class and democratic freedom flourished from the outset because comparatively equal and open economic and social conditions combined with an ideological legacy conducive to personal liberties. At the same time, this prevailing community of interests did not allow for equal social standing or equal treatment for everyone. De Tocqueville noted, for example, “tangents to my subject, being American, but not democratic.” Those tangents were the “Indians and the Negroes,” whose positions were distinct as they were considered unable to participate in the community of interests on the same terms as everyone else (de Tocqueville, 1963, p. 312). Similarly, while de Tocqueville perceived a tendency to make women “more nearly equal to men,” Americans still “traced clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes” (p. 314). He noted this as a reassurance that America was not making the mistake of assuming that men and women were “not equal only, but actually similar.” In his view, nature “created such great differences between the physical and moral constitution of men and women” that any other approaches would be unenlightened. America, then, understood its prevailing community of interests to involve equality, not in the sense of treating everyone the same, or even in the sense of providing everyone with equal opportunities, but in the sense of treating everyone with decorum appropriate to their individual natures and capabilities. De Tocqueville also noted that the egalitarian aspects of America’s prevailing community of interests were reinforced by religious commitments to locally organized Protestant sects that emphasized voluntarism with respect to the state, and a personal or individual relationship to God not mediated by a church (de Tocqueville, 1963, p. 316). However, at the same time, and prior to the Constitution, some colonies and states attempted to establish state religions and to legislate doctrine. Citizens were taxed against their will for the support of religion, and sometimes for the support of particular sects to whose tenets they did not subscribe. Punishments were prescribed for a failure to attend services and sometimes for entertaining heretical opinions ( Jefferson, 1964, p. 156; McLoughlin, 1959; Billington, 1938). Such incidents reflected the fact that many Americans treated religion as an inherited condition, and regarded Protestants as inherently superior to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and others. Racist readings of the Bible were widespread (Fredrickson, 1971; Horsman, 1981), and from early on, many

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American intellectuals and politicians believed that “like the Chain of Being,” the races of man consisted of an ordered hierarchy (Haller, 1971; Russett, 1989). Some believed in a natural order or rank among the races, some believed that cultures fell into higher and lower levels of civilization, and many thought that race and culture were linked (Williamson, 1980). The Chinese, for example, were considered to be “cruel, cunning and savage,” posing “a constant and terrible menace to society” (Riis, 1890, pp. 97–102). Jews were believed to be “moral cripples with dwarfed souls” (Ross, 1913, p. 101). Italians were viewed as “gross little aliens” who lacked the power to take rational care of them (pp. 113, 154). Benjamin Franklin complained about Dutch “disagreeableness” and “dissonant manners” (Franklin, 1752, p. 43), while Chief Justice John Jay, upon becoming governor of New York, led an unsuccessful movement to banish Catholics (Curry, 1986, p. 162). As these examples and the attempts to establish state religions indicate, certain beliefs were widely acted upon publicly, and the power of the state was often called to their support. For an especially clear example consider the Supreme Court’s opinion in Reynolds v. United States (1878): “Polygamy has always been odious among the Northern and Western Nations of Europe and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and African people. At common law, the second marriage was always void, and from the earliest history of England polygamy has been treated as an offense against society.” Clearly, the court was enforcing a cultural hierarchy and was convinced that it was just to do so. No enquiry was made into the empirical or pragmatic effects of polygamy. The court in this case was simply convinced that as polygamy was the practice of inferior cultures, allowing polygamy would bring our advanced form of civilization to ruin. From early in our nation’s history, then, a prevailing dedication to moral, material, and political egalitarianism occupied the same psychological space as an array of values, attitudes, and beliefs exalting hierarchical, fixed, ascriptive systems (Lipset, 1990, p. 25). American Indians, for example, were systematically displaced and sequestered. White males had disproportionate access to and ownership of the means of production, African Americans disproportionately worked plantations, and many Chinese typically provided the labor to build railroads and work mines. Both the prevailing community of interests in these patterns of benefits and burdens, and the justice of them, were elaborated in both

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scriptural and scientific terms (e.g., the American school of ethnology, Social Darwinism, the romantic cult of Anglo-Saxonism in American historiography) (Pessen, 1967, pp. 183–189; Merton, 1957, p. 169). The expression of a prevailing community of interests in both egalitarian and hierarchical terms still persists. A century after de Tocqueville, for example, Gunner Myrdal wrote that “Americans of all national origins, regions, creeds, and colors” hold in common an “explicitly expressed system of general ideals . . . the ideals of the essential dignity and equality of all human beings, of inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity” (Myrdal, 1962, pp. 462–466). The schools teach the principles of this Creed, Myrdal said, “The churches preach them and the courts hand down judgments in their terms.” Yet, Myrdal also recognized that many Americans always had imputed racial inferiority to African Americans, to lower classes of whites, and to non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants— and still do; and these views were held as reasoned conclusions supported by the biological sciences in the years around the First World War (pp. 37–38, 91–92, 99, 1189, nn. 10, 12). Here again was a description of a belief in equal freedoms that revealed a support for natural aristocracy in practice. Similarly, following the Second World War, Louis Hartz agreed with de Tocqueville that Americans shared an interest in the free, egalitarian economic and social conditions that resulted from their experience of atomistic social freedom. He disagreed, however, with Myrdal’s contention that this interest resulted from any explicit, conscious system of ideals. Instead, Americans were instinctive or irrational Lockeans, considering as self-evident the natural morality of individual rights, liberty, equality, and the inevitable progress of well-being through economic mobility (Hartz, 1955, pp. 167–169). Yet Hartz also noted that a conviction of Anglo-Saxon superiority contributed to a shared interest in both late nineteenth-century American imperialism and Jim Crow segregation (pp. 291–292). Thus, although the shared interest in moral, political, and material egalitarianism persists, as evidenced by these and other scholars (Bercovitch, 1978; Huntington, 1981; Katznelson, 1996), it persists in a form that simultaneously accommodates a shared interest in the development of class and status differentiation along a broad spectrum of dimensions. Consequently, the conclusion of these thinkers that such hierarchical ideas were ultimately doomed as fundamentally incompatible with the more fundamental, egalitarian thrust of the American Creed has proven to be inaccurate.

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One reason that these seemingly incompatible interests in hierarchy and egalitarianism persist is that proponents of both embrace an idea of liberty as a fundamental value. This is possible because in practice liberty requires both structure and a lack of constraint. Isaiah Berlin (1969), for example, argues that the heart of liberty is the absence of coercion by others. Consequently, the classical liberal state’s shared interest in protecting liberty involves insuring that citizens do not coerce each other without compelling justification. This use of liberty is certainly employed in much of our discourse on justice. It is a staple in our conversations about everything from ideas including due process and human rights to how long our children may stay out at night. On the other hand, it is apparent that without some structure that limits and directs our freedom to choose, “the burden of choice would become so overwhelming that choice itself would lose its meaning” (Fuller, 1955, pp. 1305, 1310; Fuller, 1964, pp. 33–94). For example, our language clearly bends our thoughts in certain ways, limiting what we can say and how we can say it. Though we might free ourselves from these limitations by disregarding vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, this would clearly frustrate our attempts to get what we want by coordinating interpersonal activities. More broadly, “in all significant areas of human action formal arrangements are required to make choice effective” (Fuller, 1955, p. 1311). Thus hierarchy, structure, and constraint are significant aspects of our community of interests. In fact, “the original meaning of liberty and freedom was not absence of constraint, but enfranchisement. To be free, to enjoy liberty, was . . . to be admitted to effective participation in the affairs of the family, tribe, or nation. And meaningful participation . . . requires that one accept, and act through, the forms of procedure that make possible a functioning whole” (Fuller, 1968, p. 103). Our use of liberty to describe this second facet of freedom as in our community of interests is, in fact, very old. For example, in 1639, John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, wrote about what he called “natural liberty:” “This notion of liberty is ‘common to man, with beasts and other creatures,’ consisting in a ‘liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority.’ Winthrop implied that this sort of liberty fosters anarchy, depicting it as ‘the great enemy of truth and peace’ ” (Winthrop, 1989, p. 28). Opposed to this evil liberty is civil or federal liberty;

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“a liberty . . . maintained and exercised by way of subjection to authority,” and “termed moral . . . in the moral law and the politic covenants and constitutions among men” (p. 28). And he goes on to write, “If you will be satisfied to enjoy such civil and lawful liberties, such as Christ allows you, then will you quietly and cheerfully submit unto that authority which is set over you, in all the administrations of it, for your good” (p. 28). A continuing problem for both political theory and the realization of our community of interests in practice is whether these two facets of freedom can somehow coexist, or whether they are, as Berlin argues, fundamentally at odds (Benn, 1988). In fact, both hierarchical and egalitarian language-games are included within and depend upon the classical language-game to proceed. They derive their uses of liberty from that game, and use liberty in the context of values, attitudes, and beliefs established by it. That classical language-game provides the foundation and context for political, social, and economic discourse in America that makes the most sense to Americans. It is not that Americans cannot understand other discourses and language-games; it is just that they are less likely to buy into them. They do not make as much sense in our moment-tomoment activities because they were not fitted to them in practice. Consequently, hierarchical and egalitarian language-games adapt to and coexist in practice within the context of the classical language-game, and the competition among them produces positive results for our community of interests by ensuring that liberty is preserved against both oppression and disorder. A closer look at the paradigmatic classical language-game grounding American discourse about justice illustrates how this occurs.

Egalitarianism, Hierarchy, and Locke’s Classical Rendition As Hartz demonstrates, Locke’s thinking dominates America’s understanding of its prevailing community of interests. Locke’s thought, for example, elucidates the basic definitions of individual freedom, equality, and justice underlying our political and economic institutions and popular discourse. His concepts of popular sovereignty, social contract, natural human rights, individuality, and autonomous personhood enjoy an immediate intelligibility and validity in American society. The plausibility of these notions to Americans reinforces their adherence to the norms and ideals proper to American civic life. As we will demonstrate below, Locke’s thought is not only at the foundation of our political and le-

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gal system, but fundamental to our acceptance of capitalism as well. The United States Constitution lifted many of Locke’s philosophical theories directly from the Second Treatise on Civil Government, and the resulting government reflects Locke’s ideas in everyday practice (Locke, 1980). Thus Locke is the philosopher whose thought best captures the classical instincts grounding American uses of the word justice, and especially the persistence in American thinking of the apparently contradictory inclusion of both egalitarianism and hierarchy within our community of interests. Of course, Hartz’s account of America’s prevailing community of interests has opponents. Basically, opposition reduces to claims that Hartz imprecisely defines America’s Lockean traditions, that the extent of any liberal consensus in America is exaggerated (R. Smith, 1992; Thelen & Hoxie, 1994; Fox & Lears, 1993; Foner, 1990) and that Hartz makes unsustainable and untestable causal claims (Skocpol, 1992; Greenstone, 1993). For our purposes, the first charge is largely irrelevant. We are only interested in the fact that Americans share a broad agreement on three basic values: individualism, private property, and government by consent. This point is well documented, and further refinements are unnecessary (Hartz & Greenstone, 1993; Huntington, 1981). Regarding the second charge, Hartz does not overlook American class conflict or deny the presence of non-liberal voices. Rather, he is speaking of a consensus relative to Europe. Compared to Europe, American class conflict is dampened and America’s non-liberal practice is limited. Moreover, many social scientists insist that an American consensus on even the details of Locke is rather strong. Americans, they argue, remain deeply committed to their core beliefs including individualism, equal opportunity, political rights, and government bashing (Hartz & Greenstone, 1993; Huntington, 1981). Furthermore, we are not arguing that classical liberalism is a static consensus. Instead, we argue that American culture is almost constantly contested and continuously evolving. Each influx of immigrants, for example, brings new perspectives; so do marginal groups struggling for recognition, power, and legitimacy. Our only claim is that Locke sets the terms of discourse and the framework within which the claims and alternatives struggle. This point overlaps the response to the third charge. The consensus thesis does not specify a relationship between variable features of American politics, a relationship in which the observable changes in one feature are related to observable changes in some other feature. Instead,

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it identifies a stable feature of American politics, a feature that has culturally conditioned the causal relationships of its more variable features (Hartz, 1991; Greenstone, 1986). In a nutshell, then, one currently dominant American discourse tends to follow Locke and ascribes one’s place in the order of things to the fact that individuals are differentially endowed with talents, abilities, skills, and the industriousness to make the most of what they have. Liberty is thought of in terms of minimal interference in order to accommodate the need for both hierarchy and freedom, and is understood as central to our community of interests so that people may employ their endowments most effectively. And once this liberty is realized, mature people of ordinary intelligence deserve to be where we find them because that is where their industriousness reveals they should be. Equality obtains in according everyone an equal human dignity by treating everyone differently with respect to his or her peculiar talents, abilities, and skills. These ideas remain bulwarks of the American understanding regarding both justice and the prevailing community of shared interests. In theory, these ideas constitute a prevailing community of interests because many benefit materially and intellectually from the free exercise of the talents, abilities, skills, and industriousness of others. Regularly securing this prevailing community of interests in practice, however, has been difficult. To understand how theory and practice often diverge, a more elaborate understanding of certain tenets of the dominant ideology and discourse is helpful. Locke maintained, for example, that natural law expressed God’s will. As people were rational and capable of moral judgment, God’s will regarding human beings could be divined through knowledge of human nature and how that nature interacted with the world. Locke’s understanding of that interaction emphasized people as makers of things, and from this aspect of their nature people derived the natural right to own property. Property rights implied other rights, such as the right to privacy, the right to accumulate property without waste, and the right to selfdetermination. This last right was superior even to the powers and rights of the state. Locke (1980) stressed repeatedly the dependency of legitimate rule on the protection of the natural right of each individual to life, liberty, and property. Though people by virtue of their very nature possessed these natural rights equally, egalitarianism was not the natural state of things. MacPher-

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son (1962), for example, points out that as self-determination was Locke’s central premise, and as individuals were self-owners or proprietors of themselves and their powers, they possessed equally the natural right to accumulate unlimited property (money) based upon their industriousness (so long as they wasted none of it). This meant that as some people acted more rationally and industriously than others, they were more deserving of both property and a voice in government. Locke believed, for example, that some groups lacked the education, or the inclination, to make rational political judgments. They would not, therefore, be able to accumulate great amounts of property and, moreover, should not be permitted to have a voice in government (MacPherson, 1962). This, of course, implied that some people were properly denied access to some of the political and economic structures that enhanced freedom. Equality was not a problem because the distinctions drawn in restricting access were based on natural talents, abilities, and skills and so involved no denial of dignity. From these Lockean premises of equal human rights and liberties, but unequal access, developed a strongly non-egalitarian economic and political practice that condemned as unjust any state effort to remedy socioeconomic inequality that was broadly considered faultless. American Constitutional law during the so-called Lochner era (1890 to 1937), for example, was dominated by a conception of freedom and equality that was, in this sense, strongly non-egalitarian. For an especially clear example, consider Coppage v. Kansas (1915). That case involved a railroad employee (Hedges) who was fired from his position by Coppage, a railroad superintendent, for refusing to sign an agreement obligating Hedges to resign his union membership. Requiring such agreements was at that time contrary to the laws of Kansas. Hedges brought suit, and when the case came to court in Kansas, Coppage was found guilty of violating the Act. Coppage then challenged the Act’s constitutionality, claiming that it violated the due process clause of the 14th amendment. The Supreme Court found the statute unconstitutional. According to the court, the liberty of making contracts did not include the liberty to procure employment from an unwilling employer. Nor might the employer be denied the freedom of making whatever employment contracts he likes. The result was to deny state governments the power to act constitutionally in protecting trade-union membership, regardless of the unequal bargaining positions between employers and workers. Moreover, as there were many

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workers and few employers, the liberty accorded both parties to a contract denied some any recourse to legislatures and courts to secure freedom of association and freedom of contract in practice. While the contradictions between shared community interests in both equality and hierarchy are reflected in the courts, they develop more regularly through the system of government established under the Lockean understanding of our shared community interests. As the right to selfdetermination is central to that understanding, government must be based on popular sovereignty. There are three general approaches to the constitutional expression of popular sovereignty. The first is frequently labeled “populist” or “participatory democracy.” The second is labeled “representative government” and is based on multiparty competition. The third is labeled “Madisonian democracy,” a representative government based on checks, balances, and the control of factions. As the American prevailing community of interests involves both hierarchy and freedom from interference, populism is not widely understood to advance that interest. Because of the diversity of talents, abilities, skills, and levels of industriousness, the general population is considered factionalized and not sufficiently focused on shared community interests to be completely entrusted with their care (Hamilton, Madison, & Jay, 1987, no. 10). A set of devices for both restricting access and frustrating the factional effects of whatever access obtains, is therefore thought to constitute part of our shared community interests as well. Consequently, Madisonian democracy, and the limited access to the political structures that enhance certain kinds of freedom, takes precedence over both multiparty competition and populism in our thinking about our community of interests. Of course, in practice these constraints revealed certain patterns of advantage and disadvantage that we came to understand as not in our shared interest. This, in turn, lead to numerous attempts at closing the gaps between theory about the prevailing community interest and the results of theory implementation. And these attempts proceeded, on a step-by-step basis, to reassert egalitarianism as a community interest (e.g., woman’s suffrage, laws regulating child labor, civil rights legislation, antitrust legislation, constitutional amendments allowing the direct election of senators). But, while this led to greater individual freedom and egalitarianism in certain respects, the compensating development of an administrative state kept the prevailing community of interests in hierarchy and constraint in play.

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Individual freedom, then, is the normative foundation of classical thinking on the prevailing community of shared interests; from this norm follows both the shared interest in negative liberty (liberty as the absence of interference) and the shared interest in hierarchy based on meritorious industry. Consequently, it is presumptively considered unjust for political authority to limit liberty; and the onus of rebutting the presumption is upon those who would limit freedom in order to advance our shared interests (Gaus, 1996, pp.162–166). At the same time, the self-determination implied by the shared interest in liberty conflicts with the interest in recognizing natural law as the source of inalienable rights. The interest in self-determination is expressed politically as the idea of popular sovereignty, the political/legal principle that legitimate political authority derives ultimately from either the will, or the generalized consent, of the people as a whole. The principle of natural rights, on the other hand, holds that certain things are beyond popular determination. So a tension develops that is only resolved theoretically, and not in practice, by claiming that it is the people as a whole that can perceive what constitutes the content of natural law.

The Capitalist Rendition The classical rendition of our contemporary prevailing community of interests antedates capitalism. Still, the context capitalism requires, its productivity, the industriousness it claims to reward, and the freedom it promises (via both the market and the accumulation of wealth and property), proves an easy fit with both the structural and the normative foundation of the classical rendition. Structurally, certain facets of the social and political context that were established according to the classical understanding of prevailing community interests are clearly associated with capitalist values, practices, discourses, and ends. For example, a strictly egalitarian context would express itself politically in an absolute, all-inclusive, participatory democracy embracing unlimited majority rule. This would be inimical to capitalism, and its concept of justice, as they prioritize both freedom and merit. In an absolute democracy, the right to be free of interference in pursuing one’s concept of the good life, and the right to keep the gain earned, really has no legitimate meaning because they may always be voted away. Such individual rights must be consistently upheld to secure capitalism;

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and if the majority may do whatever it wants regardless of the impact on individuals and minorities, capitalism cannot exist, even in principle. In a proper capitalist nation, a constitution based upon guaranteeing individual rights to (negative) liberty, property, and the fruits of one’s labor in the pursuit of happiness is necessary to limit the actions of its citizens and the government. In capitalist discourse it is fundamentally unjust for the majority to be able to vote violations of such rights of the minority, no matter how large the majority or how small the minority. Justice consequently necessitates a shared community interest in securing individual rights against the popular vote. The principles of property and contract are the functioning norms of capitalism, based as it is on private property and contract without any special obligation to advance the interests of others or to abridge one’s own interests for the benefit of society. Nevertheless, in theory such rules unintentionally further the general well-being and growth of wealth for all. As we have seen, the classical rendition excludes both absolute democracy and majority rule from our community of interests. Thus our democracy is constructed classically as a constitutionally limited government guaranteeing individual and minority rights. While voting and public opinion to some extent decide who holds political power, and how that power is specifically exercised, both the popular will and the power of majorities are strictly defined and limited. Specifically, the classical structure and processes of the federal government is republican, and the republican form is constitutionally guaranteed to the states. Republican forms are hierarchical in nature, authority being delegated upward. Thus majorities elect members to the house, state legislators elect both the senate (classically) and the Electoral College. The Electoral College elects the president, and the president appoints judges. In this way, the shared interests in both equality (one man, one vote) and hierarchy are operationalized in practice and the context for capitalism is secured. The context is made still more conducive to capitalism by constitutionally guaranteed rights to contract, to own and transfer property, and to the recognition by each state of contracts and property rights established in every other state. More important to capitalism than our conducive political structures and processes is the fit between the classical rendition of our shared interests and capitalist practice. Most important to this fit are the ideas that market success and failure are attributable to one’s free choice and personal behavior, and that a natural aristocracy (a hierarchy) of produc-

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tive entrepreneurs arises from these free choices made in open, responsive markets. Proper markets, then, are perceived as just, in the sense of giving everyone a fair chance and providing merited rewards (McClosky & Zaller, 1985; Hochschild, 1981). These values continue to be central and most highly valued within our community of interests (Lane, 1982). Consequently, social practice reconstructed our shared community interests to hold this new economically purposive social practice in high esteem. That is, as open, responsive markets came to be understood as quite effective mechanisms for giving full authority to the central values of free choice, rewarding merit, and fostering industriousness, we began to think that our community interest was not generally well served by governmental interference with such markets. The resultantly more peripheral (but nonetheless recognizably important) community interest in equality, providing collective necessities (e.g., national defense, public health and safety, an educated citizenry, a common infrastructure of roads), and addressing the situations of those in need (e.g., the handicapped, the poor, the bankrupt) was therefore relegated to government. Capitalist and republican practice together, then, is understood to enhance our community interests in both the simultaneous pursuit of both egalitarianism and hierarchy, and our historical preference for justice understood as rewarding merit over pursuing equality of condition, is maintained (Potter, 1954; Rainwater, 1974; De Tocqueville, 1963, p. 51). Succinctly put, as to questions of justice, Americans support political equality strongly but are relatively unconcerned over “such questions as the redistribution of wealth or an effective re-examination of the criteria by which economic rewards are allocated” (Pole, 1978, p. xi). Put another way, it is considered to be within our community interest to separate political justice and economic justice; and while we do not always keep them distinct, and while they may overlap in certain instances, they are not commensurate concepts in our discourse regarding our shared community interests. In capitalist discourses, for example, justice is more process oriented than outcome oriented, and not only economic but social and political justice obtains when what each gains or loses results from a set of voluntary associations with others. Markets (in ideas, goods, services, or friendships) are expected to be as free and responsive as possible, parties are expected to both bargain in good faith (though sharply) and live up to the resulting agreements. Unjust results, as they are the fruits of individual choice, are not really a concern, except to the extent that they may be ex-

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ploited for market purposes. The process is forgiving in the sense that the competition of markets and the laws of supply and demand are understood to drive those in markets into acting in ways that would be recognizably unjust in other contexts. Thus it is not considered an injustice for even highly meritorious employees to lose their jobs, or to experience significant wage decreases. Similarly, better goods, services, and ideas may be withheld (e.g., by purchasing the patent or publication rights) or structured out of the market (e.g., by cornering). To preclude immediate losses or to defend a company’s market position, overly abundant goods may be withheld to keep prices up and competitors out. Similarly, the availability of services may be kept artificially low through unnecessarily stringent admission standards to particular occupations, professions, or trades (e.g., medicine). In brief, we perceive it to be in our community interest, under its capitalist rendition, to condone many more otherwise unjust self-interested behaviors in market contexts than we do in, say, religious or political contexts. Equality in capitalist discourse is largely restricted to legal and political contexts such as “all individuals are considered equal under the law,” and the pursuit of equality outside such contexts (and especially in the market) is among the lowest of priorities (Rainwater, 1974; Lane, 1993). Freedom is used in its negative sense of absence of constraint, and in this sense freedom retains its central position as the first priority in America’s shared interests. Justice in capitalist discourse stresses the morality of each person keeping what is earned and the injustice of any attempt to claim any rights regarding another’s property. Merit, then, has a nearly equal priority with freedom. Thus, justice is achieved under capitalism when what a person receives is directly proportional to what others in the market freely choose to give. Since each person has the right to the product of his or her labor as determined by the market, it is just for wide disparities in income to exist. Consequently, there is always a degree of injustice involved when the government takes property for either utilitarian purposes (e.g., when the benefit overall is positive) or for purposes of relieving those based on some conception of need (Rainwater, 1974; Lane, 1993). In political discourse, however, justice is concerned with both process and outcome. It is considered unjust for political processes (unlike market processes) to favor certain interests over others (Lipset & Schneider, 1983, p. 17). Consequently, the government must adhere to a general norm of equality in outcomes (Verba & Oren, 1985a). Self-interested behavior

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by politicians is considered corrupt, and any unjust results of the political process are perceived as resulting from political muscle and not from the proper functioning of the system. Freedom includes both an absence of unnecessary constraints and a meaningful access to political institutions and mechanisms. Our political discourse also includes the egalitarian notion of natural rights; rights endowed by God or nature and so unearned and held (initially at least) regardless of merit. While it is considered in our community of interests to hold political justice and economic justice conceptually distinct, and while some theorists argue that such spheres of justice should be recognized and kept distinct to prevent them from overlapping and contaminating each other (Walzer, 1983), they clash in practice. Generally, even when everyone is perceived to have what his or her merits warrant, the system-wide distribution may be judged unfair (Brickman, Folger, Goode, & Schul, 1981). There is a recognized injustice when the poor, handicapped, and unemployed, for example, must live in poverty; yet transfer payments to relieve poverty receive tepid support at best, largely because people are unsure of how, or whether, to attribute blame (Rainwater, 1974, p. 180). More specifically, governmental policies promoting income stability and growth are greatly favored (Inglehart, 1981), and some studies indicate that a significant majority supports guaranteed jobs (Verba & Oren, 1985a, p. 81). Yet despite this and a general view that the market pursues profit at the expense of the public interest (Lipset & Schneider, 1983, p. 183), intervention by government is unjust in the sense that it unduly burdens the market (reduces freedom) and threatens its survival (Katona & Strumpel, 1978, p. 43). Moreover, as mentioned above, to the extent that government redistributes anything it punishes some and rewards others, yet no member of either group has done anything to deserve such treatment. These and other contradictions in the capitalist/classical rendition of our prevailing community of interests keep the egalitarianism and utilitarian facets of the community interest in play. Theoretically, for example, a successful market serves everyone in the sense of raising all ships along with the tide. Policies favoring business interests, then, are in fact a result, though it violates our basic principle of political egalitarianism. Theoretically, markets satisfy individual tastes and desires, increase freedom and open opportunities; but in practice, markets generate enormous and widening inequalities of income and thus more and more satisfactions and freedom for some and less and less for others. Theoretically, markets

48 / Chapter 3.

overturn hierarchies based on privilege and status. In practice, those doing well early on have more opportunities (more money to invest and employ) and hence a distinct advantage in maintaining their position (Veblen, 1934). “Those who are successful in the market,” for example, “can use their new wealth to protect their gains . . . and success is converted into privilege through laws that favor the accumulation of wealth, such as tax programs that are generous in their treatment of capital gains and inheritances” (Verba & Oren, 1985b, p. 379). Moreover, “wealth buys education [and connections] which foster [competence and] motivation that leads to acquiring information” and more effective political and economic behavior (p. 381). Consequently, income distribution and its concomitant advantages and disadvantages remain “remarkably stable for a long time” (p. 376). Overall, then, the condition of roughly equal material circumstances, which de Tocqueville noted as a condition of middle-class and democratic freedom, eroded in capitalist/classical practice and is no longer understood to be generally in America’s community of interests. That egalitarianism, once constituting a distinct element of our community interest, is reconstructed through capitalist/classical practice into egalitarianism in the realm of politics and an equal opportunity in the realm of economics. The idea behind this reconstruction is that our prevailing community of interests lies in the enhanced productivity born of earned deserts in the market and not in roughly equal material well-being. Nevertheless the continuing contradictions, constituting failures of the classical/capitalist rendition in practice, are bothersome and keep the egalitarian discourse alive.

The Egalitarian Rendition Egalitarians tend to see society as an organic whole. For example, knowledge, imagination, drive, ambition, innovation, and other grounds for claiming merit are arguably social products in two respects. First, personal identity and capabilities are to some important extent socially constructed. Important abilities and capacities may be fostered or inhibited by one’s cultural identity. As “historical, embodied, traditional, and culturally embedded creatures,” people experience the dominant practices and discourses of their society as profoundly anchored somatic realities constituting the deep structure of the individual’s identity and experience of

The Meaning of Justice / 49

self (Fay, 1987). Of course, people are individuals in the sense that “every person is born a bundle of potentialities . . . [and delights] at the maturing of these potentialities into powers” (May, 1972, pp. 121–122). As Veblen puts it, “as a matter of necessity . . . man is an agent . . . a center of unfolding, impulsive activity” (1934, p. 15). As our existence inevitably embraces a stream of others within this unfolding of our potentialities, we both become known and know ourselves through the trail of experiences this unfolding and its multiple effects engender through our lives. We react and adjust to the effects, to the feedback of reactions by those around us, and this both affects who we become and affirms our individual selves. We define our boundaries, capacities, and identities synergistically with others, as we engender an identity in and through the lives of others. Throughout the “Introductory” to The Theory Of The Leisure Class, for example, Veblen describes the many forms of this unfolding that everyone experiences; the power of our being, and the being of others affirming and denying who and what we are (1934, pp. 1–21). Simply put, if there is no baseball there is no Babe Ruth. Society constructs The Babe by constructing first the game and then the value placed upon it. Without the game the potential to hit home runs is not realized; and unless society values the game, there are no heroes who play it. The second respect in which knowledge, imagination, drive, ambition, innovation, and other grounds for claiming merit are arguably social products has to do with the time and opportunity afforded by those around us to learn, develop, and employ our abilities. One must have the time and supportive context to gain an education. Strict egalitarianism, for example, places equality and need above liberty and merit. This approach argues that every student should receive the same level of material goods and services because such a distribution best results in the principle of equal respect for individuals. Taking this idea most seriously, some of the workingmen’s parties that were politically active during the first half of the nineteenth century advocated the nationalization of their children. Thinking the common schools insufficient to foster egalitarianism, they sought to send children away to boarding school from the age of six on. They contended that the only way to eliminate the advantage that family and neighborhood give the affluent is to require that all students spend twenty-four hours a day in the same place, under identical conditions, with identical resources, in a state-financed boarding school. The workingmen clearly linked economically based cultural and resource

50 / Chapter 3.

differentials to the perpetuation of inequality. Their solution was to take all children away from their parents and provide identical goods and services to each of them; an approach earlier proposed by Plato (Hugins, 1960, pp. 13, 18–20, 132–134). To make headway in our prevailing notions of our shared community of interests, egalitarians adapt the classical language-game in the same subtle manner as do capitalists, but with different purposes and toward different ends. And their arguments enjoy some success at being recognized as within our community of interests. This is so especially when the equality sought involves removing certain kinds of obstacles to social mobility. As the classical/capitalist rendition links individualism and freedom with meritocracy, a stress on achievement, and an emphasis on bettering one’s social and economic position, it is not particularly difficult to convince us that it is within our community of interests to provide meaningful opportunities for social mobility. Consequently, these egalitarian goals are recognized through the persistent emphasis on extending public education to everyone and through police addressing campaign financing, voter qualifications (e.g., property ownership, literacy, and poll taxes), equal employment opportunity, civil service reform, and provisions for legal aid. Neither good capitalists nor good Lockeans need disagree with either the norms or the policies. They follow from the logic of the discourse in their own language-game. But words are only part of the language-game; the practices with which they are interwoven may give them an entirely different meaning, coopting them for entirely different purposes. Hence, achieving acceptance of egalitarian goals beyond these is more difficult. Egalitarians argue, for example, that advantages distributed on the basis of wealth must be unjust, as justice in both the classical and capitalist renditions rejects preferences toward distribution based on social status, family, and all other sources of hierarchy and ascription. Consequently, advantages in access to education, to legal and political institutions, to nutrition, to information, to employment opportunities, and to opportunities to voice opinions, must be unjust. Another form of distribution based on the equality of individuals must, therefore, be devised. Similarly, egalitarians argue that as our community of interests values individualism and equality of opportunity most highly, they must do everything reasonable to provide a social context conducive to these values. In order to develop their distinct capabilities, then, people must be accorded the equal respect

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and the equal opportunities denied them by the inequalities arising from the contradictions of a capitalist/classical society. This is particularly true of those contradictions rendering the opportunities available to a child born in urban poverty distinctly less than to others born in an affluent suburb. A shared community of interests in the equal moral worth of each person should provide the cultural and economic necessities for the development of human individuality (decent education, healthcare, childcare, and so on). Again, if competition in free and open markets is in our shared interest, then the competition must be fair. Fairness, in turn, may only be guaranteed if certain prerequisites, such as a good education, basic nutrition, decent housing, and access to healthcare are provided to everyone equally (Katznelson, 1996). Achieving this level of egalitarianism necessitates a fundamental restructuring of our classical/capitalist rendition of the community of interests in practice if not in theory. While freedom, prosperity, and the rewarding of merit are to be cherished as among our shared community of interests, the egalitarianism just outlined can only be fulfilled when the economy as well as the state is more highly controlled than contemplated in either the classical or capitalist rendition. We could not, for example, accept capitalism’s conception of economic relations as free and private because contracts are not made among economic equals and because they give rise to social structures conferring power upon some over others. Such relationships are non-egalitarian in that the citizens involved have not freely deliberated upon the structure of those institutions and how social roles should be distributed within them (e.g., the relationship between capital and labor in the workplace).

Summary The moral, material, and political egalitarianism experienced early in our nation’s history struggles persistently with an array of convictions extolling hierarchical, fixed, ascriptive systems. Both sets of values derive from the same Lockean tradition of natural rights and social responsibilities, and each stresses different aspects of Lockean theory as the most important. Luckily, the more extreme Lockean derivations—such as those that northern Europeans were considered to be culturally superior to other races and civilizations; that the genders were suited biologically for different social, political, and economic roles; and that religion was an inherited

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condition placing Protestants morally, politically, and theologically above Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and all others—have always been heavily conditioned and constrained by value formulations and institutions generating a social homeostasis by counterpoising merit, equality, liberty, utility, and need as values pursued more or less equally depending upon context and popular will. This was accomplished in archetypical American fashion, allowing the free interplay of factions in competition for a coalition significant enough (though temporary) to advance their rendition of the community’s shared interests.

4 Justice and Organizations

So far we have examined a number of conceptions of justice from the perspective of a prevailing community of interests and the context of what most would identify as political theory. To arrive at a more complete picture of justice in Public Administration, it becomes necessary to examine conceptions of justice within studies that are understood as analogous to it or at least tangentially related to Public Administration theory, practices, or scholarship. In the first several chapters, we have examined justice broadly from the perspective of political theory. In this chapter, however, we turn our attention toward studies of management and how the management literature generally approaches justice, as a way to better understand the multiple facets of how justice can operate in Public Administration. This, in turn, forces us to consider a perspective of justice that is typically an anathema to most scholars that study justice from within the context of political theory, that of justice in organizations. Often scholars of political theory discover that when faced with the body of literature on justice in organizations and management, it forces them to face justice in an uncomfortable light. Justice, as it is broadly conceived in the management and organizational literature, is not in fact operating as the sort of political idea they are most comfortable with. Rather, it is truly operating, for the most part, as a mechanism to foster order. In essence, the literature on justice in organizations functions to promote what one might call fair processes. Unlike other views of justice (unless they are quite divergent from the mainstream body of literature), these fair processes are simply contextual processes used in some given situation, since organizations/bureaus are most often concerned with implementing, maintaining, and otherwise ordering these fair practices, rather than functioning as the sort of essentially contested concepts seen by political

54 / Chapter 4.

theorists. To this end, we seek to create a conscious interrupt in these processes, to create an opportunity to step back and both examine and consider the underlying assumptions, beliefs, and ideas that surround the literature on organizational justice. Some might be loath to consider such a moment, which they might see as an abomination, something that could interrupt the goal-oriented, results-driven mores of organizations. However, if we consider that the word “organization” does not simply refer to businesses as some political theorists might subconsciously imply, but instead refers to all organizations public and private, we then might place value on this conscious interrupt. The goals of this chapter then become to provide the opportunity for this interrupt, to integrate, contextualize, and critique organizational justice within justice broadly, and to provide the next logical step for understanding justice in Public Administration. To achieve this, we will examine both the implications of organizational justice in practice and the extent to which this particular concept is, in fact, operative in organizations. In the process of these examinations, this chapter will elucidate how our concept of justice can help broadly inform the study of organizations. The reader might pose the question, why organizations? Considering once more that the core structures of society, both public and private, are understood as organizations and institutions, it makes sense to provide at least a cursory examination of how justice generally and our conception of justice in particular can fit in with, if not better explain, organizational actions. To do this convincingly, of course, we must shed some light on the limitations that emerge from the currently most popular conceptions of justice in the organizational justice literature, often grounded in the work of Rawls, Nozick, and sometimes the earlier work of Walzer. As we have discussed in previous chapters, both the broader society and the profession comprehend justice as a complex concept encompassing a tense relationship among considerations of merit, equality, liberty, utility, and need, reflecting at its core the values of some prevailing community of interests. In the practices of most organizations, however, we find that there are often attempts to routinize the structures and their processes as a means of creating a “just” organization or at least to foster processes of something that looks like organizational justice (often understood as fairness). “Just” organizations in this sense take the form of things that are procedurally consistent, with broadly understood norms

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(Selznick, 1957) and consistently employed systems of rewards and punishments (Belohlav, 1985) based on outstanding performance or specific violations of the organizational norms (Barnard, 1938; Greenberg, 1988; Selznick, 1957). In addition, the manner in which these processes become broadly understood happens through the application of formalized rules that are communicated and socialized into the day-to-day processes of organizational life. This being the case, we must recognize that any concept of justice whose practice disrupts either the structure or processes of the prevailing communities of interests’s view of justice will likely meet with significant resistance (Marcuse, 1969, 1972). However, if a set of language-games (Wittgenstein, 1953), rules, or concepts reinforce existing structures (Foucault, 1977, 1980), processes, and values, then justice as we understand it in Public Administration becomes more likely to be adopted and routinized in multiple structures, forms, and practices, sometimes even at the street level. Broadly understood, the adoption, routinization, and internalization of these rules (Selznick, 1957) or language-games (Wittgenstein, 1953) and their associated consequences become an organizational and societal mechanism for not only the normalization and conformity (Sementelli & Herzog, 2000) to justice within a society, but also for the resistance by the organization of particular interests, whose discourse on justice is not necessarily in the broader public interest. The development of certain routinized mechanisms to foster different concepts of justice in organizations is often a function of socialization and structure (Selznick, 1957). Certain organizational forms are more adept at diffusing certain mores rather than others throughout their membership. One of the most efficient, albeit archaic structures for delivering mores is the Weberian (Roth & Wittich, 1978) style pyramid, which remains common despite multiple shifts in managerial thought. It is an efficient delivery system of mores, because the beliefs tend to be orchestrated by an intellectual core of its leadership (Downs, 1967; Selznick, 1957; Terry, 1995) and disseminated through the organization to the line workers, most often responsible for the delivery of goods and services. Intermediate-level administrators in such a scenario become most concerned with the enforcement of these mores throughout the organization through the distribution of rewards and punishments to cultivate desirable behaviors and mitigate undesirable ones through the processes of sanctioning.

56 / Chapter 4.

Clients play an unusual role in this process, given that many tend to assume erroneously that they have the least amount of power in these organizational processes. It is most often client concerns and concerns about client satisfaction (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1984) that bring forth changes to organizations, their mores, and their cultures, typically as a means to retain them and cultivate new ones. From such a position, the clients tend to have ultimate power in certain organizational processes, as long as exercise of this power is consistent with the prevailing communities of interests and ultimately moves the organization toward its broadly defined goals in ways consonant with those interests. Regarding the substance of the mores, we discover that most organizations tend to be rule driven. Whenever rules are made, interpreted, or applied to organizational activities and practices, concerns about fairness (Greenberg, 1990) arise, whether with regard to the fairness of the rules themselves, or due to some lack of conformity with the existing rules and associated remedies. These disparities then can lead to certain micro or macro level changes in processes, arguably to ensure that established rules accord with broader notions of justice. When considering justice as fairness, however, one discovers quickly that there is a heavy reliance on the work of Rawls, either explicitly or implicitly with all of its attendant intellectual baggage. Consequently, these remedies in practice tend to mirror the issues that scholars typically have with Rawls, including issues of gender (Lee, Pillutla, & Law, 2000), issues of utility, issues of performance ( Judge & Colquitt, 2004), and issues of conformity (Aquino, Lewis, & Bradfield, 1999). Additionally, some of these remedies may not have their intended effect because a response at one level of the organization may have unanticipated repercussions at another. Attendant to a Rawlsian discourse on organizational justice is a focus on the procedural and the distributionary aspects of organizational behavior (McDowall & Fletcher, 2004; Ang, Van Dyne, & Begley, 2003; Viswesvaran & Ones, 2002). However, research indicates that when considering issues of distributive justice (Bierhoff, Cohen, & Greenberg, 1986; Cohen, 1987), people most often evaluate distributions of resources, rewards, and outcomes according to some equity-based rule, one that is also typically grounded in some idea of merit (Martin, Bartol, & Kehoe, 2000), i.e., is the distribution deserved. While research on equity theory constitutes the bulk of investigation into distributive justice in organizations (Greenberg, 1987), Deutsch (1975) found that rules of equality based on the idea

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that all individuals should be rewarded equally regardless of inputs, as well as based on considerations of need (including rewards based on relative needs), are also operating. These findings are supported by research in social psychology (Cohen, 1987), with data suggesting that while the dominant distribution rule is equity (merit), equality and needs rules may become more salient when individuals are exposed to rule violations (Bierhoff, Cohen, & Greenberg, 1986). The next step would be to examine issues of procedural justice, which is a common way to apprehend how organizations address justice in practice. Theorists of procedural justice often are concerned with the perceived fairness (Rawls, 1971, 1991, 2001) of procedures used in making decisions (Folger & Greenberg, 1985). For example, Thibaut and Walker (1975) approached procedural justice from a legal perspective and emphasized the role of process control or voice of the individual in perceptions of fairness. Their basic finding is that procedures are perceived to be fairer when affected individuals have an opportunity to either influence the decision process or offer input. This leads us to the conclusion that participation by stakeholders is an essential clue to determine if things are just or fair. At the core of the argument, the fundamental assumption that justice implies fairness remains, making the concept of procedural justice inherently Rawlsian in nature. Leventhal (1980) extended the discussion of justice as fairness by identifying structural components thought to exist in individuals’ cognitive processes for determining the allocation of rewards. Procedural justice was suggested to be a function of the extent to which a number of procedural rules are satisfied or violated. Specifically, procedural rules suggested that decisions should be made consistently, without personal biases, with as much accurate information as possible, with interests of affected individuals represented in a way that is compatible with their ethical values, and with an outcome that can be modified. Other justice researchers have found similar rules in the domains of managerial fairness (Sheppard & Lewicki, 1987) and performance appraisal (Greenberg, 1986), and even targeted benefits (Feinberg, Krishna, & Zhang, 2002). This created a need to add rules for issues such as the importance of two-way communication, thereby reinforcing the notion of participation in discussions of fairness. Leventhal (1980) also makes the point that not all rules are created equal in the sense that they are not equally applicable at all times. In some situations different rules may be emphasized given some specific set of

58 / Chapter 4.

circumstances. Leventhal unfortunately did not elucidate the nature of such decision making and its influences. This leaves us without guidance regarding what factors might influence these weightings or preferences, much like Thibaut and Walker (1975) did with their Rawlsian conception of justice. More recently, Bies and Moag (1986) offered a more recent perspective of procedural justice that illustrated concerns about the fairness of decision makers’ behavior during the enactment of procedures. This perspective was labeled “interactional justice.” Interactional justice refers to both what is said to individuals during the decision process and how it is said (Tyler & Bies, 1990). One aspect of interactional justice has received recent attention. Specifically, the aspect of providing an explanation for a decision has moved to the forefront of discussions. Researchers have demonstrated that providing justification for an adverse decision can help lessen negative consequences associated with that decision (Bies & Shapiro, 1988; Greenberg, 1990). A second aspect of interactional justice moving to the forefront of discussions concerns the interpersonal treatment an individual receives during decision processes. This aspect reflects issues of respect, rudeness, and the propriety of questions asked and statements made (Bies & Moag, 1986). Thus, procedural justice can be summarized as being composed of three components: (a) formal characteristics of procedures, (b) explanation of procedures and decision making, and (c) interpersonal treatment (Greenberg, 1990). Much like the others, this line of argumentation makes no new claims regarding the concept of fairness, only claims regarding implementation of it. Furthermore, many believe that administrative agencies function at least partially as some sort of rationally driven entity. However, this is not the entirety of their corpus, as such a conception reduces the complexity of organizational actions to a simple, rather incomplete metaphor. Agencies have multiple goals, which include the definition and solution of often loosely defined and always complex wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973; Pacanowsky, 1995), meeting social needs (Osborne & Kaposvari, 1998), and developing individual talents, abilities, and skills (Tannenbaum & Yukl, 1992). In addition, agencies must also address and relieve the effects of internal or external stressors (Yukl, 1994; Lin & Carley, 2003) on the organization, which can threaten or overwhelm the capacity of normal channels. In many cases, their approach is not a completely systematic evaluation of means and ends to produce an optimum response.

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Instead, one discovers that organizations often “satisfice,” i.e., pursue a course of action that satisfies certain minimum requirements for success (Simon, 1967), or choose options through trial-and-error applications of standard operating procedures (G. Allison, 1971). In addition to their structural and functional elements, administrative agencies also have certain normative functions (Scott, 1995). Most obviously, agencies can be both actors and venues for the performance of significant shifts in social mores and policy. For example, public entities in particular have institutionalized successive notions of separate-andunequal (D. King, 1995), separate-but-equal (Rueda & Chan, 1979), equal resources for all (Hodas, 1993), and, most recently, unequal resources for unequal needs as reifications of our shifting cultural conceptions of fairness. Because administrative agencies are the ubiquitous intersection between the public and the private spheres of life, feelings about what values should and should not be represented by their practices and procedures run deep among Americans. When thinking about values, however, it is crucial to remember that administrative agencies generally do not seek this contentious role for themselves. More often than not it is imposed upon them by some set of legislation, often to address a social, economic, or wicked problem (Pacanowsky, 1995). The context, basic strategy, and scope of effort are often established by legislators, the courts, community activists, and others whose agenda may or may not overlap with the preexisting goals of the agencies charged with the authority to act. Beyond issues of authority and responsibility we also find that certain norms, values (Gawthrop, 1999), and beliefs emerge over time. Most often, these values, once institutionalized within some culture, some prevailing community of interests, or at least some work group, become profoundly conservative (Scott & Hart, 1989) in the sense that the values, norms, and beliefs tend to become more resistant to change over time, as they become internalized by a cadre of leadership (Selznick, 1957). Specifically in public agencies we discover that this profoundly conservative behavior tends to act as a repository of certain broad social mores (Terry, 1995), which can inform the processes of governance from the context of their roles in such processes. In this sense, organizations and institutions are often charged with the conservation and transmission of preexisting, predefined categories of knowledge and being, especially to their employees (Barnard, 1938),

60 / Chapter 4.

through socialization (Selznick, 1957) and training. In this sense the values that predominate in organizations, those that are inculcated into the dayto-day work existence of people, are less a set of moral and social precepts, but instead reflect the values by which the organization or institution was founded. Depending upon the sphere in which they operate, such values might include respect for chains of command, competitive individualization, a receptivity to being ranked and judged, and even the division of knowledge into discreet units and categories for consumption, application, and eventual mastery. Despite often having clear sets of values, mores, and beliefs that are unique to the organization or institution being examined, we find there are certain commonalities that tend to exist in most if not all organizations. Most often in the case of justice, these commonalities tend to reflect some interest in the perception of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice as we have discussed above. The desired outcomes that emerge from studies of these applications of justice tend to focus on how they affect citizenship behavior in organizations (Organ, 1988), job attitudes (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978), and performance (Konovsky & Cropanzano, 1991). Much of the literature, including some approaches to how employees understand organizational justice (Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobcel, & Rupp, 2001) tends, as alluded to above, to focus on an exclusively Rawlsian view of justice. What this means, in our case, is that the entirety of research on organizational justice, a growing field of study within the literature on organizations and institutions, is functionally tied to a unitary view of justice as a concept. Consequently, despite breadth and substance of the studies currently undertaken over the past ten to fifteen years, there has not been any systematic appraisal or critique of the foundations of organizational justice itself. In this sense, the body of knowledge on organizational justice, despite the methodologically rigorous approaches to it, is conceptually further removed from a contemporary understanding of justice than its counterparts in philosophy and other related fields, which have at least begun to wrestle with issues of gender, utilitarianism, and communitarianism. Why is it that such issues have not become part of the research or debate on organizational justice? One might argue that organizational justice is not burdened with the issues of the state of nature, which bothered Nozick and his critics (Ladenson, 1978) since there is a fundamental

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inequality when a person enters into an organization for the purpose of work. He or she is, in effect, trading off the certain freedoms, decisionmaking capacities, and other notions for the opportunity to create wealth in an organized setting. Additionally, issues of injustice regarding pay differentials and gender (Okin, 1991) tend to be handled exclusively from a distributive stance (Major, Bylsma, & Cozzarelli, 1989), leaving us in the genre of justice as fairness. Similarly, issues of ethnic differences (Mellor, Barnes-Farrell, & Stanton, 1999) tend to be handled from a distributive stance, though Walzer (1983) touches on this in Spheres of Justice. In essence what we are left with when examining the body of literature on organizational justice is a truncated set of ideas that often only apply in the broader conceptions of the public sphere and society writ large. By considering the notion of organizational justice at this point, we have revealed a number of issues regarding its ontology, its use of certain a priori assumptions, and certain fundamental incompatibilities which exist as a result of superimposing a doctrine of fairness onto a structure that by its nature wields power and influence in a manner consistent with issues raised by Grafstein (1983), as well as Walzer’s (2004) conception of involuntary associations, which remains rather different from Nozick’s (1977, p. 25) view of what private firms should do, that is, act as a foil against coercion. Nozick’s assertion that private enterprises and associations should be foils against coercion flies in the face of most modern and contemporary views on the nature of organizations, including the classical works by Barnard (1938), Selznick (1957), and others as well as common texts by Daft and Hiatt (1983), Weick (1995), Morgan (1996), and more recent studies by established scholars of justice including Walzer (2004) and others. This reflects a more general shift away from the totalizing goal of complete egalitarianism as anything more than a utopian belief. Given what we understand about the manner in which people enter into organizations, public or private, we find most often that the power differential which exists tends to lead members in general and elites in particular toward acquiring certain procedures, guidelines, and rules to create justice resulting from the symptomatic inequality which emerges from the nature of the organization itself (Walzer, 2004). It is this symptomatic, sign-based, or semiotic character of justice that makes our approach so intriguing. Rather than forcing organizational justice into some ill-fitting psychological, philosophical, or sociological

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construct we instead can address the epistemological uncertainties that might emerge from these incompatibilities through our use of symbol and language-game, which better map the practice of organizational justice, better represent the actions of prevailing communities of interests, and better adapt to broad changes in beliefs, mores, and the common understanding of what is considered to be good, right, and proper. As an example to help clarify the differences between our conception of justice and the conceptions forwarded by Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, and others, we offer this example. There was a time when sexual harassment was not considered unjust, it simply happened without much reflection or consideration. It was a tolerated practice that was part of the norms of the working environment. Is it fair? Well, in the contemporary understanding, sexual harassment does not discriminate against race, ethnicity, religion, etc., so by certain standard operating procedures it is procedurally fair. Is it moral? No. Is it right? No. These last two questions, however, became part of the consciousness of some prevailing community of interests, which arrived at the conclusion that the answers to these two questions were no. Furthermore, despite certain procedural uniformities in its conduct, it is commonly understood as a detriment to the workplace, even if the only detriment comes from a loss of productivity—all because harassment became a defined concept that was considered a problem from the perspective of some prevailing community of interests. The notion of what constitutes harassment both procedurally and conceptually also has changed, shifting and growing into broader conceptions, which include nonsexual forms of harassment. Such variations in form were not even seen, considered, or accepted as a problem in the earliest discussions of sexual harassment. Currently, harassment has changed to also include discomfort based on exposure to music, to offending religious materials, to email, and even to conversations that do not directly involve the persons affected. This makes harassment, in this sense, a contemporary problem in our postmodern condition (Lyotard, 1999). As such, harassment often eludes explanation within many other conceptions of justice. Our conception of justice provides a mechanism to understand these postmodern phenomena, including harassment and the changes it brings to both organizations and society. First, it helps explain why it was not always considered to be a problem of justice. It was not understood as a problem within the prevailing community of interests, or it was at least

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not understood as a problem of note within that same community of interests. Second, it explains why things changed. A new community of interests, with certain priorities regarding harassment, gained influence in American society, leading to the systematic consideration of harassment. Third, it helps explain the change from sexual harassment to harassment. The symbols, signs, and actions, which tended to cohere around issues of sexual harassment, were found to exist in other areas, enabling the prevailing community of interests to explore whether or not such symbols, signs, and actions were influencing what is considered just within an organization. At this point we have hopefully whetted the appetite of the reader for a systematic critique of the primary schools of thought in the study of justice, more broadly than from the context of organizations. To this end, the following chapter discusses Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, and others in their broadest conceptions, with their strongest critiques, as a means for us to understand this emerging notion of semiotic justice being presented throughout this book.

5 The Postmodern Condition and Semiotic Justice

In the first four chapters we have considered many common perspectives on justice and how they fit or do not fit within the broad scope of society generally and American society in particular. Many of the limitations— practical, epistemological, or even theoretical—come as a result of what Lyotard (1999) identified as a “postmodern condition,” referring to the notion that certain aspects of lived existence— of social life, of culture, of politics and economics—have changed, resulting in the fragmentation of authority, commodification of knowledge, and the emergence of relativism (Best & Kellner, 1991) and its discourses, symbols, and action. Best and Kellner (1991) attempted to make sense of this issue and were met with critique, and some limited support, arguably due to their labeling of specific theorists as either “critical” or “postmodern” as a means to organize their thoughts. Unlike Best and Kellner, who were unable to reconcile the continued presence of modern elements in the advent of this postmodern condition, we instead understand and accept that certain institutional structures of governance, justice, control, and even domination continue to exist. What has changed, in general, and concerning justice specifically, is the inclusion of symbols (Baudrillard, 1994), memes (Dawkins, 1976), and symbolic actions (Fox, 1996) as part of the day-today mechanisms employed by these institutions, societies, governments, and prevailing communities of interests. It is a fatally flawed assumption that the emergence of a postmodern condition immediately and completely overwhelms, supplants, or destroys all elements of modernity that existed before it. Furthermore, as postmodern conditions do not emerge fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, one must also consider that a number of contemporary theorists (specifically Frankfurt scholars and following) might also have been aware that certain elements of what Lyotard identified as a postmodern condition had

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already begun to emerge. Consider further that it is Lyotard (1999, p.9) who adopts Wittgenstein’s (1953) approach to language (language-games) along with the examination of symbol as a means to wrestle with this postmodern condition. One might then argue that a number of the problems and debates that have emerged about which scholar “fits” into which camp instead reflect the slow identification and emergence of the postmodern elements identified by Lyotard. Consequently, scholars including Habermas and Foucault (who also both employ discussions of languagegames and symbolism), would both have been touched/influenced by elements of critical theory as well as elements of this emergent “postmodern condition.” Though they might not have enjoyed the same opportunities to contextualize, debate, and explore the nuances of these issues as we do now given their backgrounds, context, and focus there is evidence that they were at least aware of them. Foucault, for example, has written on the issues of subjectivity and identity (Rabinow, 1994), imagery and the panopticon (Foucault, 1977), and power and communication (Faubion, 1994). All of these are at least informing issues in contemporary postmodern discussions. Habermas (1984) devoted a great deal of his writing to studies of language, of symbols, and of imagery while remaining concerned about modernity and its limits (1979, ch. 5). Even Adorno (1989) was at least tangentially concerned with symbolism and aesthetics in his writing. In the end, we find that Agger (2002) constructs the most compelling organization of critical theory and postmodern theory, casting it in light of narratives (albeit from his perspective with a heavily Marxist focus). At this point, we have presented an argument for why one might consider aspects of critical theory and postmodernism in a discussion of justice. It was never, however, the intent of this chapter to plunge headlong into a debate regarding which philosophical “brand” works best within the broadest discussions of social theory. Nor was it to determine whether or not universalism still holds, or if postmodern scholars can move beyond deconstruction, or function in lieu of philosophical reason, or even if they adequately address issues of intersubjectivity. To proceed it became imperative to at least raise certain questions about the labels so many of us hold dear. By interrupting the thoughts, predispositions, and assumptions of the reader, for an instant at least, we hope to have created an opportunity to demonstrate how justice fits within our contemporary society. Contextually, there is enough evidence of a postmodern condition, especially in Public Administration (Fox, 1996; Fox & Miller 1994; Miller

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2002; Farmer, 1995), to warrant consideration for how this might influence our understanding of justice. Rather than taking a passing glance, we instead offer a systematic approach, based on the assertion that the relativism, symbols, and actions discussed by postmodern scholars are both apparent and part of current existence. As they are part of current existence, and as we have discovered that at least some of the influential scholars also share certain methods, certain concerns, and certain context, it becomes clearer that one might, for example, effectively use Wittgenstein. In addition, this helps to guide us about how we might effectively use relevant elements of scholarship on modernity, and how we might use relevant elements of postmodern literature to understand this “postmodern condition.” In turn, this discussion helps us to clarify how a postmodern condition influences discussions of justice, and more generally how it can reveal that much of the confusion, debate, and resistance are functions of labeling rather than of the scholarship (making this a postmodern sort of problem). Consequently, it now becomes imperative to examine justice through the lens of this postmodern condition, for simply ignoring the evidence, the symbols, and the symbolic action will not make it go away. Contemporary society adorns a number of actions with meanings, symbols, and strategies all assumed to be part of justice. If we do not systematically examine what this contemporary justice is, then it becomes far more likely that without reflection and debate, justice could foreseeably track through Baudrillard’s (1994) phases of the image, and most disturbingly simply become a denatured simulacra or husk bearing little resemblance to any conception of justice existing before it. The end result might be that justice then would reflect the concerns of both postmodern scholars and critical theorists. Why this is such an issue cuts to the heart of many philosophical debates such as those between modern and postmodern, between critical theory and postmodernity, and even between objective social science and relativism. If one works from a single a priori assumption, that is, that the elements of this “postmodern condition” posited by Lyotard and others have always existed, then this contemporary conception of justice simply reflects current societal issues. Typically, people understand that the postmodern condition began to emerge in the late twentieth century. Consider, however, that Immanuel Kant’s work was current in the nineteenth century, and that there are postmodern links to theology ( Johnson, 1997). It becomes more apparent that a postmodern condition did not simply

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“happen,” but instead that the changes in lived existence, in social life, in culture, in politics and in economics are what make these postmodern conditions apparent. Furthermore, the constants throughout these changes are language-games, symbolism, and their roles in society. As discussed earlier, we do not intend to burden ourselves or the reader with ad nauseam discussions of whether or not Foucault, Habermas, Wittgenstein, or others can or cannot be classified as critical theorists or postmodern scholars for the purposes of this argument regarding justice. Instead, we are operating from the position that symbolism and language-games are one of the few if not the only constant threads in society. We further assert that the issues of power and control exist in every society, even if only as issues, or imagined phantoms, and that at some basic human level there is a need or a want to become a part of society, crafting a basis for issues of conformity, as well as a prevailing community of interests. In earlier chapters we have considered the three interdependent, societywide language-games that dominate the American discourse on justice. All three discourses are entirely about how much each person should get when it comes to dividing things up, and when it comes to talking about how to divide things up, each discourse recognizes how and why the others would divide things up differently. This is because each discourse is grounded in different perspectives on the form of life Americans share. And as a result, each discourse understands why each of the others takes the word justice to mean different things because each recognizes that the others simply differ with them, and with each other, over which parts of the concept (e.g., merit, equality, liberty, utility, and need) are most important, and therefore which parts should be the most, and the least, valued in any attempt to define the term. Nevertheless, it is also true that those engaged in each discourse are so impressed with their usage of the term that they fear for the downfall of civilization if it is not recognized as the only proper use. Now, anthropologists understand this belief thoroughly. It follows simply from the fact that different tribes, in different circumstances, attend to different experiences in their lives. Moreover, because they attend to different experiences, they quite naturally divide the universe up differently, and they quite naturally give different values to the different parts. In addition, because their divisions and evaluations seem quite natural to them, they quite naturally project them out onto the universe and so end up portraying the constitution of the cosmos as a system that is iso-

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morphic with the constitution of their own discourse. In this way, the values they hold, and the reality that they construct, become a metaphysic that is received back from the universe to become the rational foundation of their values. Each discourse, then, projects a closed universe into the ether, and that closed universe then absorbs the cosmos. And justice, as it is a term appraisive of the way things are divided up according to their values, becomes a metaphysical given, part of a holistic understanding of the world, an understanding that cannot be refuted as it is understood to derive from the underlying reality of all things. The term justice, in other words, is hortatory. It does not work to accurately describe or explain anything, nor does anything done in its name offer a pragmatic roadmap for rational planning or political reform. Rather, it is a visionary ideal, in many ways unique to each discourse, and for this reason, its use among those of differing discourses provokes endless disputes. Moreover, each can only understand the other because they have not had radically different experiences, and are not ignorant, intellectually at least, of the experiences that the others have had.

Justice as a Mask of Power Some people have taken notice of this dynamic, particularly people we call philosophers and critical theorists. They have argued, quite convincingly, that those of us who are participating in each discourse must clear our minds of the fancy that our discursively constructed notions, including our notions of how we should divide things up, are natural. Instead, we must be honest with ourselves about the fact that this dynamic reveals the bias of particular group interests that is inherent to any metaphysic, and so in any use of the term justice. The upshot is what philosophers and critical theorists call the postmodern condition (Lyotard, 1984), a discourse exhibiting a radical disinclination for metaphysics matched with an immoderate proclivity for deconstruction. By way of metaphysical demystification, postmodernists deny that signifier and signified have any permanent relationship. Therefore, the word justice may signify practically anything at all. And by way of deconstruction, postmodernists seek “to ‘take apart’ those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought,” including not only the meaning of justice, but any idea of a community that might be sharing interests as well (D. Allison, 1973, p. xxxii, n. 1). We are left, then, with three dominant discourses about jus-

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tice that seem unhinged from anything other than the particular group interests they were constructed to serve. Justice is now recast as simply a symbol without any real link to anything other than the language-games of particular interests (Baudrillard, 1994). In practice, the term becomes analogous to a set of masks whose features must bear family resemblances to one another, otherwise we could not recognize the claims expressed by the wearer; in fact these masks are merely disguises employed to legitimate the exercise of naked power over commodity distributions. Many serious thinkers in Public Administration are troubled greatly by this postmodern condition and have asked whether we really believe that the intersubjective experience of good governance is advanced because of it. These sage individuals think it appropriate for administrative scholars and practitioners to attend closely to the theories of justice reasoned out among philosophers and theorists within the social sciences. They generally assume that administrative theory and practice should concern itself necessarily with issues of distributive, retributive, and commutative justice (Yates, 1981), and that operating according to grounded theories of justice enables administrative agencies to impress a just order on society. Some go so far as to suggest that justice is an attribute of a society’s institutions alone, and that entire societies should be assessed as just or unjust based on their institutional character (Rawls, 1971, 2001). At a minimum, they suppose, administrative practice should cohere with the prevailing theories of justice and that by such coherence administrative theory should enable us to identify just policies and practices as well as unjust ones, so that we know which actions to favor and which to oppose. Postmodernists, in fact, argue this is a great mistake. Even the briefest look at such theories through postmodern spectacles reveals them to be little more than ideological claims, made on behalf of the needy, or the wise, or the capable, or the propertied, that something should be done, retained, or distributed differently. Accordingly, appeals to justice are in fact attempts to define the parameters of our personal behaviors, our institutional practices, our societal purposes, our political decisions, and our economic choices, to favor some to the detriment of others. Every notion of justice currently championed by philosophers and critical thinkers is therefore inherently and inescapably a pretence for the oppressive exercise of power. As if this was not sufficiently disturbing, many postmodernists continue by pointing out that these pretenses are an especially good kind of

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pretense. They are the kind of pretenses that, once accepted, tend to cut off critical inquiry. This is because, as normative theories, they tend to be ahistorical and do not emerge directly from the particulars of any situation. At most, they are abstracted from specifics, though as often as not, they are deduced or inferred from presumptions regarding human nature, the nature of society, or possibly even the will of God. Regardless of the process, they are detached from circumstance and context in order to become as broad as possible in their reach, and to instruct us on what we should do regardless of how difficult, or even undesirable, that might prove to be under the exigencies of circumstance (Kramer, 1992, p. 51). Because of this detachment, no criterion of justice can be confirmed, disconfirmed, or immanently critiqued successfully by specifics in context. Its cogency has nothing to do with anything extant. It rests solely upon the partiality toward it exhibited by those involved in the process of devising, and acting within, the parameters of particular abstract ideologies. Ironically, insist the postmodernists, the very imperviousness to confirmation and critique renders all of the current criteria of justice relevant to the scholarship and practice of Public Administration. As it turns out, these particular kinds of pretense, as detached from any particulars as they might be, nevertheless confer identity, status, and meaning upon whatever particulars fall within their ambit. Hence, the particular claims upon society that are made by whatever theories of justice gain purchase in political and moral discourse are set to work as grounding norms that must be referred to, reasoned from, and interpreted, if one is to engage in any justified practice or discourse at all. For these reasons, conclude postmodernists, theories of justice are not just ordinary sorts of pretense, or mere conceptual voids thoroughly unhinged from praxis. They become masks of power that must be worn by anyone hoping to advance any agenda, and so certainly by administrators hoping to arouse the intersubjective judgment that they are effecting good governance. True to the postmodern idea that signifier and signified have no permanent relationship, and that the terms like justice are therefore but social constructs that may be employed as symbols masking whatever agenda a particular group might construct in its interest, the classical, capitalist, and egalitarian discourses have mutated into postmodern-conservative, postmodern-liberal, and postmodern-capitalist mythic disquisitions, each justifying claims to power by whatever interests find them conducive at any particular time. Justification and by extension justice, then, involves

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employing context-independent criteria in order to reason out which claims, which way of dividing things up, will be satisfied. And those criteria are essentially empty linguistic forms that gain content and meaning, not from our historically shared experiences and the discourses arising from them, but from different sets of personal—and, as it turns out, authoritarian—predilections about the way life is or should be. Let us take each of these in turn and see why this is so.

Postmodern Conservative Mythos Conservative discourse describes people as “voracious and sanguinary” creatures (Kirk, 1969, p. 209). Consequently, to live well individually and collectively, both individuals and the polis must be instructed in moral virtue above all else (Strauss, 1972, p. 233). Broadly speaking, this discourse echoes the proposition from antiquity that in order to achieve a just society, government must focus upon the formation of a good character within the citizenry (Aristotle, 1948, 1252a1–1260b20). From such an understanding, a postmodern-conservative discourse might declare governmental responsibility for the moral and intellectual education of the people, or what Foucault (1977) would loosely describe as creating conformity. The content of this moral education would most likely be drawn from the “collective and immemorial wisdom we call prejudice, tradition, [and] customary morality” (Kirk, 1978, p. 39), as the “moral precepts and the social conventions we obey represent the considered judgments and filtered experience of many generations of prudent and dutiful human beings—the most sagacious of our species” (1969, p. 209). Among the moral principles that postmodern approaches to conservative discourses could draw from are those asserting that both the individual and the society are subject to a transcendent order (natural law). This order includes the natural (and therefore just) division of people into categories or classes, a division that must be replicated by a society if it is to flourish (Kirk, 1978). Another revealed principle is that social life and social institutions are intricate and complex, developing slowly through processes that are beyond the rational comprehension of any individual or group. Consequently, though change in traditional institutions and practices is not necessarily bad, it must occur within a context of opposition to hasty or overzealous reform that casts a heavy burden of proof upon anyone advocating change (1978). Without this commitment, we would

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be thrown back upon our “meagre resources of private judgment, having run recklessly through the bank and capital that is the wisdom of our ancestors” (1962, p. 298) Finally, among the principles of the traditional wisdom of a prevailing community of interests is one to the effect that private ownership of property is good for both individuals and society, and that government should therefore preserve it and refrain from interfering with its distribution (O’Sullivan, 1976). What distinguishes postmodern discourse from traditional conservative discourse is its radical and assertive form, a form combining languagegames steeped in traditional conservative principles, values, attitudes, and beliefs with an authoritarian morality and bellicosity toward domestic and foreign opposition (Hoover & Plant, 1989). In traditional conservative discourse, while justice is a matter of collective and immemorial wisdom, reason is not precluded in favor of prejudice. While a whiff of reason might pervade the postmodern-conservative position, suggesting that justice may be to some small extent a matter of thoughtful and reasoned consensus built up over time, this trace of reason, compromise, and consent dissipates as any such consensus is dismissed as “interest group accommodation,” and heralded as the end of legitimate authority (Schaar, 1970, pp. 285–288, 297–301, 311–315). Conjoined with the priority given to the wise as the proper loci of authority, this relegation of compromise and consent to a derivative status reveals not only the antidemocratic potential of the postmodern-conservative discourse, but the ease with which it can lead to moral and political philosophies maintaining that repression is just. It is important to remember, in this regard, that traditional conservative discourse values self-discipline and considers external constraint an unnecessary evil, except in the case of children. In brief, this postmodern discourse reduces to little more than an authoritarian demand for a disciplinary order, social control, and the demise of democracy, as the spirit of democracy may pose an intrinsic threat and undermine forms of association, potentially weakening the social bonds holding families, enterprises, and communities together (Crozier, Huntington, & Watanuki, 1975). More specifically, as the postmodern approach to conservative discourse pictures the individual and the society as subject to a transcendent order, and as this order includes the natural, and therefore just, division of people into categories or classes (Kirk, 1978), justice for the individual is determined according to his or her place in that structure. Freedoms, rights, and responsibilities are located differentially in the different social

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roles defining that structure, and the maintenance of this differential defines what constitutes justice, politically, socially, and economically. While this appears to provide a role for a form of freedom (the freedom to make proper choices as religiously, historically, and communally defined for one’s class), individual or personal freedom in fact disappears necessarily from the freedom calculus and thus from both the concept of freedom and the concept of justice. As Winthrop says, personal freedom becomes natural liberty, a freedom “common to man, with beasts and other creatures,” that is incompatible with both “the least restraint of the most just authority” and the freedom that “Christ allows . . . [when] you quietly and cheerfully submit unto that authority which is set over you, in all the administrations of it, for your good” (1989, p. 28). Consequently, the exercise of personal freedom is unjust because it is a violation of the natural order and the distributions of benefits and burdens which that order defines. The vast reticulation of dependencies upon formal and informal organizations, institutions, social structures, and social roles that defines justice is thus opposed necessarily to both the freely chosen action of others and the freely chosen action of those so intricately arranged.

Postmodern Liberal Mythos Liberal discourses typically describe people as good, sympathetic, social, cooperative, and rationally self-interested. While people are often motivated by passion and irrational conviction, they are nevertheless sufficiently rational to understand that attaining and securing what they long for requires cooperation, tolerance, and self-regulation (Bramsted & Melhuish, 1978; Gray, 1986; Merquior, 1991). This assertion of rationality, selfinterest, and sympathy for others leads to the conviction that each of us is the only proper arbiter of our own best interests, and to the conclusion that each of us should be free to pursue our interests, subject only to the principle that such a pursuit do no harm to others (Bramsted & Melhuish, 1978; Gray, 1986; Merquior, 1991). This, in turn, suggests that no person or class of persons can claim that its interests, values, or beliefs are morally superior to anyone else’s. In a postmodern liberal discourse, then, it is the individual, not the society or its institutions, that becomes the proper focus of concern when deciding what is just. Justice is inherently bound “[to] the development of the inherent capacities of individuals made possible through liberty, and

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[to the] the central role of free intelligence in inquiry, discussion, and expression” (Dewey, 1935, p. 32). Moreover, although societies and their institutions are complex, they are not beyond comprehension and should be subject to rigorous processes of critical reasoning in order to ensure that they actually serve the interests and needs of the people living under them. In addition, to the extent that traditional institutions, laws, policies, and practices unreasonably preclude the maximum freedom attainable under the circumstances, they are unjust and should be changed or replaced. Consequently, postmodern liberalism, with similar language and symbols as its non-postmodern counterpart would then be “committed to the principle that a just society is one that uses its powers to establish the conditions under which the mass of individuals can possess actual as distinct from merely legal liberty” (p. 27). Hence, there are situations under which liberalism’s “laissez faire creed” must be modified to include “governmental action for aid to of those at economic disadvantage, and for the alleviation of their conditions” (p. 21). In accordance with these guidelines, governments then should regulate the marketplace, require the accommodation of diversity, and actively define and protect a sphere of privacy wherein consenting adults may engage in whatever they wish, no matter how dissolute. Here is where the postmodern approach to liberal discourse diverges from the traditional liberal discourse. It divorces itself from context by including no principle by which to define the limits of freedom, and no principle defining the responsibilities individuals share for either the security of their rights or the establishment of their equality. Typically, liberal discourse relies upon principles such as “fair social cooperation” (Rawls, 1988, p. 263) arrived at by citizens, while its postmodern counterpart might simultaneously live a decontextualized existence behind a “veil of ignorance” (1971, p. 253). Nevertheless, this postmodern approach often fails in practice. First, it proves very difficult to locate such a place; and second, it is difficult for us to abandon our values, or our self-concern, or our religious beliefs, and to allow others to behave in ways that we are sure would turn civilization upside down. In the end, we fear that our children might be led astray by the lifestyles and corruption of others if we were to allow them free play. So in a postmodern liberal discourse people must be forced, by the images and language-games accompanying a plethora of civil rights legislation and politically correct social practices, to allow all values, attitudes, and beliefs to flourish indiscriminately. This is the

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paradox of the postmodern approach to liberal discourse: It imposes constraints upon us by the very social and political regulations it champions to set us free. In the end, it is no less apodictic than a postmodern approach to conservative discourse with its revealed laws of nature, or nature’s god. As an ameliorative, some postmodern scholars who favor liberal ideas argue that a common understanding of what is just can develop, without either coercion or the development of good character, when individuals are drawn out of the private realm by participating in public (political) life (Barber, 1984). The idea is that a just society involves the development of a thoroughgoing and highly inclusive participatory democracy as a check on governmental power and to prevent both the tyranny of majorities and the tyranny of individual interest groups that might gain control of governmental power and thereby seek to extend their concepts of the just society into areas of personal choice. However, such approaches prove unsatisfactory. First, most of us are rather busy and thoroughly uninterested in many of the decisions that a government must make. Therefore, we would have to be forced into the public realm. Second, people who study participatory democracy have discovered that it tends to result not in a shared idea of what constitutes a just society but in little more than “the . . . combining of preferences, all of which are counted equally” (Kymlicka, 1990, p. 206). Moreover, any claim that a single legitimate set of values, attitudes, and beliefs will result from participation in public life implies that any society currently valuing personal choice in such matters ought to be replaced by the rule of some authority embodying the revealed truth (p. 206). In addition to these realities, the postmodern approach to liberal philosophy relies on an overemphasis on individual freedom and it struggles with two negative results. First, maximizing individual freedom actually leads to the domination of the many by the few who, understanding the nature of power in a republic, subsume their independence to organize a voting bloc or vocal interest group. Second, it neglects to account sufficiently for the fact that people are who and what they are because they are socially and culturally embedded, to some extent, even though not as thoroughly as postmodern-conservatives would have it. This neglect of the social realities tends to dehumanize and depersonalize people, allowing both theorists as well as those in power to speak of them as abstract beings. Hence, another approach to resolving the dilemma is suggested by

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those postmodern scholars of liberal philosophy who insist that, “we cannot conceive our personhood without reference to our role as participants in a common life” (Sandel, 1984, p. 5). To them, individuals do not choose their values, attitudes, beliefs, and lifestyles as unencumbered selves but as selves constituted at least in part by shared conceptions of the good (1982, p. 258). As there is no unencumbered self, there are no purely individual values and interests, and there is always some irreducible minimum set of interests and values that are shared despite the character of the individuals involved. Under this approach, the pursuit of this minimum alone might be pursued legitimately through public institutions. All of this would render such postmodern approaches to liberal philosophy indistinguishable from postmodern approaches to conservative philosophy save for the fact that postmodern liberal thinkers tend to reject the idea that the self is as radically situated as the postmodern conservatives insist (p. 21). Overall, as much as postmodern approaches to liberal philosophy insist that they are all about freedom, they nevertheless still rely on negative, external, structural checks against human nature, ostensibly to establish both limited government and a large sphere of privacy where our freedom might flourish. As a result they are no less authoritarian in their approach than are those pursuing a postmodern approach to conservatism.

Postmodern-Market Mythos: Commodified Justice According to the postmodern approach to market discourse, “it’s the economy, stupid,” that counts. People have a hierarchy of needs, and the priority is always economic security, once people feel relatively safe physically. In this discourse, it is considered an important fact that Americans generally display a positive attitude toward the unbridled accumulation of wealth, the principle of employment at will, the protection of private property, and the conviction that anyone, regardless of current economic status or of life’s vicissitudes, can ascend to prodigious wealth by dint of sheer will, hard work, and determination, and then leave it all to his or her children, no matter how dissolute they may be. Market function is attributed to the individual’s free choice and personal behavior, and it is assumed that productive entrepreneurs arise from these choices and behaviors, which are of course made in open, responsive markets (Lane, 1982). Hence, free markets are perceived as just, in the sense of giving everyone a fair chance at accumulating merited rewards (McClosky & Zaller,

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1985; Hochschild, 1981). More broadly, within the context of a postmodern market-based discourse, justice, mutated from the classical and capitalist criterion of rendering unto each his or her due, becomes a question of whether each is rendered that to which he or she holds title or right by virtue of his or her status and role (mask) with respect to different kinds and forms of property. He or she, therefore, who acts according to the rights attendant to his or her property status acts justly (i.e., from title), and, what is most important, is empowered then to act. There are three important consequences of giving this particular market- and commodity-oriented content to justice. First, the term is properly employed (the justice mask is properly worn) only in those contexts where titles (proper or just claims) to commodities are already decided by the market, and where the effects of both acting justly and receiving justice amount to exercising power to preserve this distribution and enforce these claims. Second, it becomes ultimately the function of the state to preserve both this distribution and the relationship between one’s power and one’s status or role as it is transformed by the mask of property ownership. In cases where commodities are stolen, for example, the exercise of coercive power to regain the property is separated from the person in whom the property rights reside. That power is vested rather in the state, as is the power to resolve civil disputes over property and to establish or recognize the practices and procedures for justly acquiring and transferring property. Therefore, it is that all crucial features of justice in postmodern approaches to market discourses tend to be legalistic in nature. Rights (claims) belong to individuals as legal actors only, and demarcate the sphere within which each is free to move (to act upon their claims) without interference. Hence, the power to privately dispose of and acquire property, the power to employ market and price mechanisms, and the power to seek profit and utility maximization through economic activity, all flow from a range of legal and constitutional rights (Koslowski, 1983, p. 33). Finally, as the market discourse exerts a strong influence on the substantive content of all justice criteria in our society, it pressures politicians, administrative scholars, and administrative practitioners to adopt market-based models of governance that involve a downsized public sector, the use of private-sector performance-management and motivation techniques, treating citizens like customers, separating public administrators from the public policy process, and operating government as noth-

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ing more than a business within the public sector (Terry, 1998). In brief, a market-based discourse depicts governance as properly an instrumental means of replicating in the political and social spheres whatever practices and patterns of advantage and disadvantage are established by the market in the economic sphere. Under these conditions, the idea of free choice in open, responsive markets takes on a rather narrow and restricted meaning. When we think about it honestly, the freedom accorded is an imaginary state into which we are not born and to which we cannot aspire. This unfortunate realization follows from the simple recognition that the market, and the laws protecting it, is a great tyrant. It ordains inexorably that we shall perish if we do not behave in certain ways, many of these being distinctly at odds with our natural, as well as our acquired, preferences. When we consider ways of avoiding these edicts, say by promoting non-market sectors in our economy through social security legislation, or guaranteed minimum healthcare, or free public education unto whatever level we are capable of attaining, we come to the realization that we are not free to make these choices since they interfere with the invisible hand of the market and the property rights of others as fabricated by the laws we put in place to protect title. In addition, it occurs to us that markets, far from freeing us from the tyranny of nature, are nothing more than an invention for meeting nature’s obligations. This makes a market an invention that must be regulated both to avoid corruption and to preclude boom and bust cycles. Such markets then impose still other obligations through pubic agencies that seek their own survival leading to still more demands. So, thinking pragmatically rather than mythically, it seems only natural that we resign ourselves to multiple layers of subjugation. Therefore, the postmodern market mythos imposes a limit to what counts as freedom and democratic choice, and by extension justice, in society. First, the emphasis that market discourses place on possessive individualism, private interest, and private enterprise tends to incline us toward thinking it just to seek the private good over the public interest, to bargain rather than deliberate over the right thing to do, to manipulate rather than to seek mutual gain, and to exploit rather than to treat others fairly (Tussman, 1974, p. 80). Of course, it is immediately apparent that even if one accepts all this as just, employing it as a thoroughgoing ethic has certain deleterious side effects. In brief, a society with such an ethic quickly approaches the radically individualistic war of all against all

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that Hobbes suggested characterized the state of nature. Consequently, justice is reconstructed to include those state-created and state-enforced norms that are the minimum necessary to restrain individuals from harming each other in the pursuit of their self-interest. Justice is in this way reified into a set of side constraints (Nozick, 1977, ch. 3), or “rational theories for making choices . . . that constrain the actor pursuing his own interest” (Gauthier, 1986, p. 3). Hence, we are encouraged to think of justice as a means rather than as an end; as a set of legal restraints upon how we attain our freely chosen ends and as a means of enforcing our claims against others (limiting their behavior). Justice thus, “proscribes rather than prescribes, negates rather than affirms” ( Jiwei, 1999, p. 414).

How We Know They Are Myths Briefly, we know that the postmodern liberal, conservative, and market approaches to discourse are of mythic stature because none of them attempt to discern what is out there, as expressed in the classical, capitalist, and egalitarian discourses. Instead, each assumes that because there is no transcendental standard, and no essence to any signifier, justice may be employed as a mask for whatever they wish. And, as with all myths, by converting individuals, organizations, and societies to “the ends of makebelieve and wish-fulfillment” (Swabey, 1939, p. 170), postmodern liberal, conservative, and market discourses supplant reflective, pragmatic deliberation and practice, attempt to rectify political and social practice through myth alone, and abandon rationality as though it were an obstacle to be overcome. For these reasons, as we have seen, attempting to employ either postmodern liberalism or postmodern conservatism as problem-solving or ethical discourses promotes “the opposite of reason” and “precludes deliberative institutions and practices” (Cohen, 1969, p. 340). Further, these discourses are recognizable as mythic, not only given what is championed out there, but because their preclusion of reason and deliberation leads postmodern liberal, conservative, and market discourses to authoritarianism, a position avidly rejected by classical, capitalist, and egalitarian discourses. In fact, it would not be unfair to say that postmodern liberal, conservative, and market discourses serve primarily as sources of symbol and language-games, often cast as propaganda for different authoritarian predilections. It is interesting to note, for example, that each employs many of the common devices associated with propa-

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ganda. Most obvious are the glittering generalities each employs in its depiction of human nature, reality, and the goals of a just society. Postmodern approaches to conservative thought speak, for example, of abstractions such as virtue, character, and collective wisdom; postmodern approaches to liberal thought speak of freedom, equality, and rational self-interest; and postmodern approaches to market thought speak of free choice, a definitive hierarchy of needs, and open, responsive markets. All of these are vague and abstract terms designed to win positive reaction, not to make reasoned choice or a thoughtful engagement with either mundane or wicked problems. Consider equality, for example. Do we mean along with Aristotle that we must treat equals in the same manner and non-equals differently (Aristotle, 1998)? If so, what is our benchmark for equals? Is it need? Is it effort? Is it intelligence? How do we know? Alternatively, does equality entail allocating the same resources to everyone? If so, should everyone receive exactly the same amount of the same kinds of resources? Perhaps we should simply leave everyone equally alone. Again, does equality entail the assurance of equal outcomes for everyone? If so, equal outcomes with respect to what? Services? Goods? Consideration? Perhaps we should guarantee everyone the same opportunities. What would that entail? Perhaps starting everyone at the same point? How do we know? The point is that employing equality as a goal of the just society leaves us without direction in concrete situations. Similarly, consider the ideas of a universal standard as revealed through tradition, custom, and prejudice. The problem here is that there is some disagreement over what this standard might be. Suggestions include, for example, human nature (Aristotle), natural law (all of science), dialectical necessity (Hegel), certain categorical principles of rationality (Kant), and the social contract adopted by everyone upon leaving the state of nature (Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau). Another problem with such standards is that they tend to be elusive in practice. Again, for example, most would agree with Aristotle’s universal standard that we ought to treat equals equally; but what exactly does this suggest that we do (Aristotle, 1998)? First, no two people can be equal in all respects. That would constitute an identity with one another, and that is a simple impossibility. So, which of the many aspects of human beings are to be the benchmark of equality? Aristotle suggests that virtue is the benchmark. Traditionally, at least since the Middle Ages, the clergy make less than doctors do, and significantly

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less than entertainers do. Is this an indication of their relative virtue? If not, what, exactly, is the universal standard directing this distribution? In brief, such standards are empty vessels that by themselves leave us without substantive direction in concrete situations (Alexander, 1993, p. 776). In a similar vein, we should note the use of card stacking in each discourse. Card stacking occurs when information is selected, or omitted, or distorted, or overemphasized, or underemphasized in order to stack the cards against, or in favor of, a particular conclusion. The postmodern conservative mythos, for example, overemphasizes both the embeddedness of individuals in the histories and traditions of their communities, and the emotional commitment that they have to historical and institutional values. As the postmodern conservative discourse is wont to say, “the most important part of community life takes place in the heart of man” (Y. Simon, 1965, p. 96). In complementary fashion, the postmodern liberal mythos overemphasizes the disconnectedness of reason and selfinterest from historically developed epistemologies and values, arguing that the most important part of community takes place in the mind. Moreover, of course, the postmodern market mythos maintains that the most important part of community takes place in the belly. Of course, to those of a pragmatic persuasion, all of these postmodern discourses are hypothetical. That is, taken pragmatically, the postmodern conservative position, for example, reduces to saying that if there is a cosmological order, and if there is a collective and immemorial wisdom that perceives that order, and if it can be found in tradition and prejudice, then tradition and prejudice should be both the criterion of justice and the ethic of sound political practice. Translated in this way, the mythic insights of postmodernists can, of course, be either confirmed or cast out as contrary to the evidence. Nevertheless, to ardent postmodern scholars and practitioners of all three discourses, there are no hypotheticals, only foregone conclusions following from their personal proclivities. Because of this, postmodern conservative, liberal, and market approaches all require some mental ingenuity when their champions are called upon to argue some position. Accordingly, they have devised many a subtlety for evading rational critique and rendering their myths impregnable to scientific investigation, including auxiliary hypotheses, hypothetical substances, unverifiable entities, the ad hominem argument, and scapegoating one another as well as their fellow travelers, when programs or causes go awry. The bottom line, then, is that power of the postmodern liberal, conser-

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vative, and market myths lies not in any foundation of shared experience, but in its ability to mobilize an elite consensus, thereby giving the appearance of democratic consent while creating sufficient confusion, misunderstanding, and apathy in the general population to allow elite programs to go forward. And as the postmodern conservative, liberal, and market discourses are dealing in myth rather than the meanings of justice that are out there as revealed in the classical, capitalist, and egalitarian discourses, they are more hindrance than help to public administrators seeking an intersubjective consensus on good governance.

A Postmodern Error Therefore, it appears that postmodernists have made a great mistake. By virtue of their perspective, they have surrendered any meaning of justice as constructed through our shared economic, political, and social experiences, and imposed their own relativistic predilections. Arguably, they have done this because some have misunderstood what it means to deconstruct. In their defense, it must be admitted that the term deconstruction is often its own worst enemy. It suggests, to many reasonable people, the loss of all meaning, the radical relativism of all values, and the futility of all beliefs. In fact, it is not the abandonment of meaning, but only a way of demonstrating that there is no abstract essence to any word and no transcendental significance to any discourse. It demonstrates, rather, that there are humanly constructed essences to words and that we are responsible both for what they mean and for what they are in practice. Far from suggesting the relativity of all values or the futility of all belief, it throws into sharp relief both the purport of differing values and the consequences of discordant beliefs. Deconstruction then, is not an enclosure in nothingness, or emptiness, but instead opens us to “the other” (Derrida, 1976). If anything is in fact destroyed by deconstruction, it is not any discourse, but the claim to an unequivocal domination by one discourse over another (B. Johnson, 1985). So deconstruction can augment discourse as a means to deepen meaning, to explicate values, and to elucidate belief. The openness offered by deconstruction stems from the observation that whenever particular interests construct and participate in a discourse, they communicate certain things over and above, or aside from, or even quite the opposite of, what they suppose. There is something important

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to be gathered from the gaps, contradictions, and ambiguities of any discourse, as well as from constructing a counterdiscourse that inverts the meanings of key terms. This is an enticing thing to do because concepts, principles, and the discourses that employ them can be understood fully, to the Western mind at least, only in relation to their opposites. So each of the predominate discourses on justice provides not only a means of access to all of the others, through concepts sharing family resemblances, but the terms of their own critique as well. Put another way, the discourses on justice are not mere attempts to define the parameters of our personal behaviors, and our institutional practices, and our societal purposes, and our political decisions, and our economic choices, to favor some to the detriment of others. Nor are they inherently and inescapably pretences for the oppressive exercise of power. Rather they are multivocal disputations over the proper meaning of justice. Even as they communicate the distinct messages of the particular interests that each discourse is constructed to serve, they simultaneously point to what they oppose, devalue, and do not understand. For this reason, they are sites of conflict and resonance with all other interests that are claiming attention. It is for this reason as well that deconstruction uncovers the cultural inclinations, continuing conflicts, ultimate aspirations, power structures, tensions, and ambiguities among the classical, capitalist, and egalitarian discourses. Thus, justice is not merely a mask disguising a naked exercise of power over commodity distributions given the ultimate meaninglessness of all terms, the radical relativism of all values, and the futility of all beliefs. The meaning of justice, the values it puts at stake, and the beliefs upon which they are grounded are out there, but while it is true they cannot be located anywhere other than in the discourses themselves, it is not true that justice may mean just anything at all. Signifiers have meaning; they are not vacant masks waiting to be worn by just any interest. They have meaning as given by the dynamic context of social life from within which they arise and within which they have their application. Consequently, the term justice, while not signifying anything permanent, nevertheless derives its meaning from our shared form of life, and as that changes so does the nature, the meaning, and the essence of justice and what we must do to secure it. The meaning or nature of justice is in this sense indeterminate; and while its meaning is neither a matter of strict logic nor practical necessity, it is not arbitrary either. It is socially and humanly coherent. It is

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not essentially any particular thing, but it cannot be just anything at all. The meaning of justice is coherent exactly to the extent that our form of life and its transformations are coherent. Put another way, discourses on justice that are not grounded in the history of our shared experiences, or reactions against previous theories with substantive content, are not just flawed but substantively meaningless. Meaningful discourses are always carried on against a set of background presumptions that are derived from social and historical experience. This is a cognitive necessity, as the meaning of any word is determined in concrete social practice and cannot be understood unless connected directly to our actions and to the ways that others respond. That is, it is “only in the stream of thought and life [that] words have meaning” (Wittgenstein, 1981, p. 173); and using words in particular ways is thus part of a particular form of life. In the language-games embedded in a form of life’s concrete customs and practices (1974, p.59) words in essence help explain that form of life. Hence, the criteria of justice by which we live have meaning and operate only within the dynamic context of social life from within which they arise and within which they have their application. They cannot be turned successfully around to depict, explain, or direct the dynamics themselves. All attempts to begin with criteria rather than practice result in either circularity (as, e.g., when living according to Christian values and traditions is explained by its being Biblically enjoined, and attending to the Bible is explained by the fact that one is Christian) or infinite regress (as, e.g., when one explains living according to Christian values and traditions as being Biblically enjoined, explains attending to the Bible as being required by God, explains attending to God as what we must do to avoid punishment, explains avoiding punishment as necessary to avoid pain, explains avoiding pain as rational; at which point we return to circularity; i.e., why is it rational? Because it avoids pain. . .). That is, “Giving grounds . . . [at some point] comes to an end . . . [and] at the end of reasons comes persuasion” (Wittgenstein, 1969, p. 81). Thus, we must come to realize that there is no substantive ontological content to any criteria of justice that we might discover through reason or revelation alone. Such criteria are given content only through agreement, largely in practice, among ourselves as to how we shall employ the criteria as we practice. It is only in the absence of such agreement that any particular criterion of justice becomes unacceptable. At that point, “[we] cannot be

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reconciled with one another . . . [and] each man declares the other a fool and an heretic” (p. 81).

The Role of Public Administration Public Administration typically operates at that point where agreements break down and where interests may go unreconciled. Within which discourse, then, should we speak in the theory and practice of Public Administration? The question clearly involves a controversy among significant groups of people over what policies and decisions are to be considered obligatory as a matter of political, economic, and social justice. Thus, it is a controversy over the proper application of some normative principle or set of principles. Our problem emerges from the observation that there are rival normative principles, grounded in rival discourses, some of which yield opposed conclusions as to what we should do when faced with the same situation or similar situations. Individually, each discourse gives guidance concerning just policies and decisions in the particular priority of shared values it expresses. Justice in capitalist discourse is primarily a matter of sustaining or altering properly the status quo distribution of commodities according to the laws of property. Justice in classical discourse is most importantly a matter of reconciling the claims of moral, material, and political egalitarianism with the claims of those extolling hierarchical, fixed, ascriptive systems. Justice in egalitarian discourse then is a matter of placing human equality foremost in our concerns, principally by guaranteeing an ever-expanding assortment of social, political, and economic rights. The problem for administrative scholars and practitioners is that each of these discourses comes to different conclusions on a regular basis. As all of these discourses enjoy strong proponents in positions of formal, informal, legal, and situational power to whom the administrator must answer, the decisive use of any particular discourse is precluded. Consequently, the solution for administrative scholars and practitioners lies within some set of normative principles that are seen as having merit by those conversing in each of the discourses. This solution is possible because, while each discourse is grounded in the experiences of different groups that have developed different interests because of those different experiences, each discourse is also grounded in the history of our shared experiences and is lent a shared substantive con-

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tent in practice as we deal with one another in the public sphere. Outside of the public sphere, the different discourses arise initially from the detachment of their criteria of justice from the overall circumstance and context of the nation as a whole. This detachment narrows the substantive content of justice within any individual sphere. Hence, the discourses may be conformed by recontextualizing their uses of the term; and paradoxically, the decontextualized criteria are useful in this endeavor because they are revealing something about justice, just not what they think they are revealing. Specifically, they are not revealing the essence or true meaning or ontological substance of the term. Rather they are revealing the different uses of the term in our society (in our form of life) and the family resemblances that lend them intelligibility (Wittgenstein, 1953). Hence, it is to these family resemblances that we may look to understand the inclusive meaning of justice in the context of our society rather than the exclusive meanings proffered as claims by different individuals and groups. In looking to these family resemblances, it is clear that most if not all currently intelligible uses involve a claim upon others, and that the word justice is given meaning only in the public realm of speech and action. It is employed only sparingly, and metaphorically, in discourses on personal characteristics (e.g., virtue), for example, although current uses bear a family resemblance to Plato’s virtue of controlling appetite by reason (e.g., justified claims are based on reasons). It is used by some (e.g., Rawls) in discourse over the characteristics of public institutions, although only in so far as the discussion is about whether they recognize certain kinds of claims made in the pubic sphere. Overall, however, all criteria of justice tend to resemble each other in being claims that certain interests deserve public respect and that without such respect in the public sphere there may be “legal sanction or superior power, but no justice” (Aristotle, 1948, pp. 20–21). As these claims for recognition are made on behalf of a wide array of individuals in a wide array of circumstances, these criteria also resemble each other in being claims for respect on the same terms that it is granted to everyone else. It is in this regard where each discourse shares key terms with each of the others. Each discourse speaks of the greatest good for the greatest number, each speaks of rewarding merit, each extols the inherent dignity of each person, each heralds liberty, and each insists that the needy be given a share. The difference among them is how they prioritize these values. In other words, all of the criteria of justice that we find

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in our public discourse resemble each other not in being different means of regulating the distribution of anything, but in being distinctively political demands for the end of both disrespect and indifference (oppression) in the public sphere, where they are by definition publicly imposed. Of course, one may look to publicly imposed burdens and benefits to determine whether they in themselves or by comparison show disrespect for those upon whom they are visited. It is not, however, the distribution of burdens and benefits that constitutes justice or injustice. Rather, they constitute some of “those circumstances experienced as unjust . . . on the basis of the criteria that affected subjects themselves use to distinguish between a moral misdeed and mere ill luck” (Honneth & Farrell, 1997). This, then, is the complex idea of justice that is out there, embodied in the predominate discourses of our society. By justice, we mean an acceptable distribution of whatever benefits and burdens we are dividing up, and we decide what is acceptable by referring to capitalists, liberal, and egalitarian discourses, on merit, equality, liberty, utility, and need. Justice means getting the burdens and benefits that we earn, it means being treated with equal dignity, it means being free of unnecessary interferences with our privacy, or our behavior or our lifestyle choices, it means seeking the greatest good for the greatest number, and it means attending to those in need, especially dire need. No discourse may extricate itself from these key terms if it hopes to be intelligible within our society. Because these experiences, ideas, and beliefs are at some level shared we can build conformity to them. For example, the capitalist discourse gains ground because the market metaphor is ubiquitous, spawning institutions affecting everyone’s life on a daily basis. As a result, we must all attend to its workings during much of our life and so it is capable of initiating and sustaining a set of values, attitudes, and beliefs that affect significantly the substantive content of justice on a society-wide basis. Administrative institutions, however, are particularly capable of promoting value priorities that are different from those of the market. This capacity arises from their ubiquity, their “precision, stability . . . [and] reliability” (Roth & Wittich, 1978, p. 223), as well as their generally integral role in bringing order to an otherwise chaotic, confusing, and crushingly complex reality, and the interpretative and decision-making roles they play in providing services, implementing policy, facilitating public action, and mediating conflicts between the public and the private spheres (Barth, 1996; C. King & Stivers, 1998; Marshall & Choudhury, 1997). In fact,

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given these roles, Public Administration not only has the capacity to conform the substantive content of justice but cannot help but affect the status quo as something other than a mere instrument of the executive or legislative branches ( Jones, 1994; Rohr, 1986; Schoenbrod, 1993; Spicer & Terry, 1993; Terry, 1995; Thompson, 1975; J. Wilson, 1989). Moreover, as has been pointed out, the rules that structure economic interactions require non-market values in society as a whole. Hence, for capitalism to continue working in the economic sphere, non-market values are required in the social and political sphere, and administrative institutions are especially capable of articulating and sustaining such values. This capability was recognized and made part of Pubic Administration’s raison d’être early on. As a discipline it became disturbed by the sort of Hobbesian individualism (an individualism hampered only by the side constraints of justice as understood primarily in terms of commodity rights) that is promoted by market economics as proper guides to policymaking and moral discourse. Goodnow, who along with Woodrow Wilson is considered one of the founding fathers of classical Public Administration (Rutgers, 1997, p. 290), argued that “For reasons of both convenience and of propriety . . . the interpretation of the will of the state shall be made by some authority more or less independent of the legislature” (Goodnow, 1900, p. 73). Charging public administrators with the task of giving a truer expression to the public will than could interest group– driven legislatures (a concept akin to Rousseau’s idea of the individual will rightly understood) they spoke out against the market-defined popular sovereignty of America during the early twentieth century. Wilson, for example, attributed the poor state of Public Administration during his Presidency to the partisan interest group politics styled “popular sovereignty” in the United States (W. Wilson, 1966, p. 371). Goodnow believed that the subjugation of Public Administration to the principles of such a popular sovereignty was without theoretical justification (1900, pp. 113– 114). Public Administration’s proper function, then, was understood to exist as a counter for the power of market interests, values, and practices by accumulating, “large powers and unhampered discretion” (W. Wilson, 1966, p. 373) that politicians, legislatures and even courts “should not be suffered to manipulate” (p. 371). From its earliest incarnations, then, Public Administration, at least in theory, was charged with the task of improving governance through partisan and not necessarily political neutrality (Van Riper, 1984). Adminis-

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trative practices and the scholarship informing them were intended to accomplish enduring and vital public purposes through a thoroughgoing commitment to the public good rightly understood, in contradistinction to justice as understood primarily in terms of an interest group struggle over commodity rights. This raison d’être of public administration theory and practice has changed remarkably little over time (Bingham & Bowen, 1994), so that today Public Administration exists both as a political and a social scientific corrective to purely commodified justice as it endeavors to correctly assemble and properly operate political institutions so as to improve governance (Abel & Sementelli, 2003, ch. 1).

Conclusion Public Administration adds to the discourses on justice a practical element regarding what we mean by justice. It is unique in the sense that it crosses, touches, or otherwise interacts with all of the predominant discourses of our society. In addition, it most often acts as a medium for an acceptable distribution of whatever benefits and burdens we are dividing regardless of its political, economic, or social origins. Be it objective, rational, subjective, or relative, in practice we tend to decide what is acceptable by referring to capitalist, liberal, and egalitarian discourses on merit, equality, liberty, utility, and need as they emerge from our prevailing communities of interests. Justice, in practical terms, means getting the burdens and benefits that we earn; it means being treated with equal dignity; it means being free of unnecessary interferences with our privacy, behavior, or lifestyle choices; it means seeking the greatest good for the greatest number; and it means attending to those in need, especially dire need. This is the meaning of the goals and values of justice in Public Administration as developed from its earliest conception through living out the administrative discourses, administrative practices, and administrative power struggles into which we weave the term (Gallie, 1956; Wittgenstein, 1953). In this way, then, justice can be pursued in the public realm, not by an unswerving impulse to a visionary ideal, not by symbol, not by a popular vote, but by pursuing each of the dimensions of justice and its varying uses, more or less simultaneously, through an intentional ambiguity structured into public institutions. Finally, there are certain particular qualities that enable Public Administration to deal with semiotic conceptions of justice. First, semiotic justice

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does not mask any particular set of claims within society as it is constructed from the family resemblances among all other masks. Consequently, it is likely to have a broad understanding if not acceptance. Second, as semiotic justice masks no particular set of claims, it is more consistent than the others with a public raison d’être. In essence, it can embody citizen interests while remaining consistent with seeking good governance. Third, Public Administration can access the only mask whose character is not overtly powerful, while working under the constraints of the profession. In praxis, it is in many instances brutally egalitarian (Thompson, 1975), and is both symbol and substance with administrators existing as both citizen and administrator (C. King & Stivers, 1998). Public Administration by its nature consistently wrestles with both with postmodern symbolic action (C. Fox, 1996), and tangible managerial issues (Terry, 1998). It maintains an emancipatory role that is not necessarily to ensure that everyone gets what he or she deserves, but to create an environment wherein everyone can interact with everyone else on equal terms. Public Administration, in essence and in practice, offers the logical nexus point to study justice given the existence of a postmodern condition.

6 Critiquing and Contextualizing Justice

At this point in our argument, we have raised a number of issues that might make a number of people who study justice rather uncomfortable. Rather than emphasizing some idealized notion of what is just, we instead have consistently taken the approach that justice is both an immanent and lived experience. From this we have crafted a conception of justice that might be best understood as a contemporary view of justice that is at its core very different from the views of Rawls (1971, 2001), Nozick (1977), Walzer (1983), Pufendorf (1991), and many others. Fundamentally, we have diverged from these authors by fusing the symbology and relativism offered by Baudrillard (1994), the understanding of language and its use of Wittgenstein (1953, 1969, 1974, 1981), and our earlier work on critical theory (Abel & Sementelli, 2003) to recontextualize justice generally, and apply it to Public Administration and public affairs. Consequently, it becomes rather useful at this point to overtly distinguish our conception of justice from the forms of justice offered by scholars including Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, and others. We hope that by the end of this chapter we will have convinced the reader that the conception of justice we are offering is at least more realistic, if not more applicable than most if not all the earlier conceptions. To this end we will provide a cursory examination of the critiques of justice offered by others and demonstrate how our conception either does not fall prey to the issues raised or mitigates the issues raised in those critiques. Additionally, we in no way intend to diminish the work of these earlier scholars through this examination, for it is through their work that we have arrived at this theory-space.

Critiques of Rawls Rawls has been a staple for most scholars of justice for decades. His work has over time raised the ire of utilitarians, communitarians, and some

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feminists to name a few. In addition, Rawls is usually understood as a theorist who makes normative assumptions, starting from a conceptual blank slate, where actors are not typically aware of their status in a society thus ensuring a certain level of fairness or equity (Rawls, 1971, p. 17). He expresses this through the notion that all “parties in the original position are equal. That is, all have the same rights in the procedure for choosing principles; each can make proposals, submit reasons for their acceptance, and so on” (p. 17). Unfortunately, this assumption has rarely if ever been found to be reasonable in practice. Walzer (1983) for example, points toward issues of access, while he focuses on the modern caste systems that exist outside the United States, and on medieval examples in Europe. Instead we need only look within U.S. borders, where we see differing access to rights including voting (most felons cannot vote, which might limit the equality of their input), policymaking (e.g., SEC-proposed rule 206(4)-5, which attempted to restrict contributions to politicians), and many other challenges to participation (e.g., timing of open meetings, access to their sites, etc.), all of which tend to paint this cornerstone of Rawls’s argument as a pie-in-the-sky approach to justice. Communitarian Responses Communitarian writers tend to react strongly to Rawls and his work. His use of classically liberal political theory tends to run against the Aristotelian tendencies that many writers embrace, especially during the 1980s. One of the most vocal critiques of Rawls during this period is Sandel (1982). In Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, he questions the reasons why anyone might adopt Rawls’s conception of the self. Particularly, Sandel focuses on the separation of moral and religious questions from political ones. Additionally, he points to issues of justice, discussing how justice might not apply in the context of pluralism, morality, or religion in certain contexts. Sandel also tends to favor the inclusion of religious and moral arguments in political discourses, which makes a powerful communitarian counter to Rawls. Utilitarian Responses Utilitarian approaches make an argument that is analogous to that of the communitarians. While Rawls focuses on the notion that people are separate, utilitarians tend to believe that society, when ordered, maximizes the overall utility for the greatest number of people. However, as

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we understand from basic economic thought, in many cases it is necessary for certain minority groups to suffer for the greater economic good (e.g., minimum wages and the reduction of employment, the trade-off between wage scales and poverty, and the artificial equilibria that emerge from governmental actions). This premise, as we understand it within the context of economic/utilitarian thought, goes beyond simple notions of deferred gratification, since the utility maximization also happens under resource constraints. This view is consistent with Rawls’s understanding of utilitarianism. He states: “The striking feature of the utilitarian view of justice is that it does not matter, except indirectly, how this sum of satisfaction is distributed among individuals any more than it matters, except indirectly, how one man distributes his satisfactions over time” (Rawls, 1971, p. 26). So when one considers justice from a utilitarian point of view, there are not effective constraints on limited scale oppression, including slavery, given that it can create greater utility for another group. This conflation of people into groups, according to Rawls, undermines individuality, limits personal choice, and reduces the capacity to do justice in broadly egalitarian terms (p. 27). Feminist Responses Rawls’s theory of justice also takes criticism from feminist literature.Specifically, Okin argues against his conception of the unconstrained individual, arguing that without socialization (and indeed a very particular, two-parent socialization), there can be no meaningful deliberation regarding justice (Okin, 1991). Additionally, Stoll (1998) points toward some of the other assumptions made by Rawls. One of her criticisms is that there is a presumption of a split between public and private affairs, enabling a space for injustice against women. Stoll further points toward a potential situation where this injustice could emerge in practice, thereby distancing the practice of traditional roles from Rawls’s requirement of an unencumbered original position. In each of these cases, one discovers an essential problem in Rawls’s conception of justice. Regardless of whether or not it is contextualized from the position of communitarianism, feminism, or utilitarianism, it always falls prey to real-world inequities. These arguments, in turn, force the reader to consider once again the pie-in-the-sky critique of Rawls. In contrast, the conception of justice we have forwarded in our earlier

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chapters is less susceptible to the criticisms aimed at Rawls. Rather than taking what might be best described as a normative approach, we instead ground our discussion in the symbols, language, and communication that happens in a prevailing community of interests. The inclusion of such a notion enables something that is not really possible within Rawls’s conception, the possibility of change or drift (Abel & Sementelli, 2003). The possibility of change and drift can enable the inclusion of feminist voices; it can open spaces for debate among communitarian interests, as well as for communication among utilitarian interests. The trade-off we make for this capacity for change is the establishment of a living, process-driven conception of justice instead of the sort of stable one forwarded by Rawls. At first blush, such a conception might appear to be new and dangerous to many scholars of the justice literature. However, we need only to remind the reader that one of the most established, consistent, and yet arguably vibrant approaches to justice still lives in our understanding of common law, with its relativistic notions of proof, penalty, and incrementally driven change. Upon consideration and reflection, one might then argue our relativistic approach to the conception of justice is both reasonable and useful, and neither new nor dangerous.

Critiques of Nozick Nozick, like Rawls, has faced a series of critiques over the years. They include issues regarding the state of nature and issues of moral justification (Ladenson, 1978) and ontology (Grafstein, 1983). Nozick’s pie-in-the-sky approach is different from Rawls’s, taking an even more unrealistic, individualistically driven approach to justice than Rawls. His approach is open to being critiqued from the public sphere as well as from the private sphere, primarily because of the ontological assumptions Nozick uses to make his case. Nozick and the State of Nature Ladenson (1978) attacks Nozick from his conception of the state, focusing on whether or not the state could be successfully disjoined from law. For example, Nozick claims that governmental institutions emerge from the state of nature to serve certain minimal functions (Nozick, 1977, part 1), with the assumption that private enterprises will craft and maintain protective associations to maintain freedom and act as a foil against coercion

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(p. 25). This establishes an interesting but unlikely scenario for the protection of rights, whereby private interests in a territory, with a geographic monopoly on coercive force, are purported to act on behalf of the populace. Nozick assumes that this private organization, rather than using its monopoly of power to act in an economically rational manner maximizing its own resources, utility, and interests at the expense of all else (Sementelli, 2006), in reality would most likely carry out the sort of oppression, domination, and alienation forwarded by many critical theorists in the tradition of the Frankfurt school (Horkheimer, 1998; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947; Marcuse, 1964, 1969, 1970, 1972). Unfortunately, faith in the nondominant protective associations suggested by Nozick is misplaced, as few if any modern private organizations shun the utility-maximizing behavior that would necessarily conflict with actions as a protective association. Nozick and Moral Justification Ladenson instead concentrates his efforts on the problem of moral justification of the application of coercive power by states. First, he points toward the tautological connection between the holding of political authority and the idea that the position itself provides a moral justification for coercion (1978, p. 443). Secondly, he raises an issue with the subject’s “duty of allegiance” to the “state of compliance” with existing laws (p. 443). Or more simply, Ladenson tries to clarify the differences between duty and justification rights ( J. Feinberg, 1973), stating that the assertion of sovereign rights are linked to justification rights. The consequence of this is that there is no tidy logic that links the rights of sovereignty with the duty of subjects (p. 443), which tends to undermine Nozick’s argument. Nozick and Ontology Grafstein addresses Nozick’s work more holistically than most. He first attacks Nozick’s work at its foundations. Particularly, Grafstein is concerned with the antireductionist approach used by Nozick, since it tends to “devalue individuals, to reduce their psychology to neurophysiology, their behavior to biological imperatives, and their ethical nature to socially instilled preferences” (Grafstein, 1983, p. 404). As a whole, one might then argue that Nozick’s reductionist strategies tend to misrepresent the social aspects of human life (Barber, 1977, p. 14). In particular, Nozick’s approach tends not to consider the public consequences of private action, opening

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up opportunities for individuals to abuse common resources and for certain inequalities. For example, such a strategy can enable certain people or groups to pollute while others are being prosecuted (Grafstein, 1983, p. 405). Nozick, in addition, attempts to reduce/collapse social spheres through the application of an odd sort of language-game. His argument for a minimal state, for example, is that if political descriptions can be equated with nonpolitical descriptions, then the political can be understood in terms of apolitical language (Grafstein, 1983, p. 407). Grafstein describes this phenomenon as a “predicate reduction” (p. 407), which he in turn uses to raise a number of objections to Nozick’s work. Very often, for example, the assumptions of human nature and rationality are violated, and minimal states are understood as irreducible political entities. Consequently Nozick’s story becomes just that, an odd yet implausible story for the emergence of a system that bears little in common with the practical issues most often driving this emergence.

Critiques of Walzer Some might argue that Walzer (1983) bears the closest family resemblance to the piece we have offered. Let us first discuss the strengths and shortcomings of Walzer’s piece, before going on to clarify the differences as well as similarities, if any, that his approach might have to the conception of justice we have proposed. Many argue that Walzer provided a comprehensive treatment of complex justice. Unfortunately, he also linked this conception to a sort of egalitarianism that severely limits the ability to apply his notion of spheres of justice in practice, and further confounds it with an added component of relativism. In many ways, Walzer mirrors Habermas’s (1991) discussion of spheres of communication and society. Additionally, it seems as if Walzer wants to dabble with notions of Frankfurt-style critical theory and relativism while lashing himself to certain core ideas and moral absolutes. Consequently, Walzer is tied to a notion of interlocking but separate spheres of justice, each having some criteria for distribution (morality, desert, and merit), and each containing some purportedly universal values. Unfortunately, many of these universal values are anything but univer-

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sal. Many if not all are at best essentially contested concepts (Gallie, 1956). These purported universal values offered by Walzer could alternatively be described as a set of a priori assumptions. In either case, this is problematic for his conception of justice. If we choose to accept this notion of a set of moral absolutes as an a priori truth, it fundamentally undermines Walzer’s egalitarian focus by establishing (through some power differential) a set of imposed norms. If we instead view these values as essentially contested concepts, we might alternatively arrive at a more practical end—declaring that these universal values are a function of some mutually agreed upon set of norms that emerge from a prevailing community of interests. By moving away from the notion that there are some universal truths, which dictate some modes of distribution (morality, desert, and merit), we can then begin to understand, contextualize, and realize some of the ends Walzer was attempting to reconcile. For example, if one were to assume a communitarian realm then one would be operating from the position that there is a distribution of resources based on need. However, communitarians are not the only group who seek justice. We still have utilitarianism, liberalism, capitalism, and others, potentially competing within some prevailing community of interests for the position of a dominant ideology (Abel & Sementelli, 2003). In practical terms, in any society there is a multiplicity of civic spaces that can exist given some prevailing community of interests. Unlike Walzer (1983), we find that these communities of interests rarely exist in pure forms. Consider the case of localities imposing a communitarian ideal, such as dry county where adults, who would normally be able to purchase and consume alcohol, are geographically prohibited from exercising their legal right, based on some perception of a common good. Alternatively we might consider the right-to-carry (firearms) legislation, which often pits the ideology of liberalism against certain communitarian values. Or one might consider the policies that prescreen potential transplant recipients to limit the implantation of organs in people considered to be a poor risk (maximizing utility). We as a country have not even begun to come to terms with even the simplest of these issues, leading us to question the practicality of having “separate but interlocking” spheres of justice (Walzer, 1983). Consider the issue of injustice for an instant. Let us assume for a mo-

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ment that injustice occurs when some established or agreed upon criterion is ignored or replaced, possibly at the behest of some other community of interests. This replacement could realistically involve completely different sets of criteria, as well as different mores, different assumptions about what is good, right, and proper, and even what might be understood as just. Walzer’s approach is severely limited in such a situation since it tends to paint choices as either political or economic, with social issues emerging from the interaction of the two. Consequently, Walzer’s justice is as limited as many of the microeconomic models which also happen to share a two-dimensional structure. What we argue instead is that conflicts regarding justice can be far more complex than what Walzer and others often argue. Rather than arguing about the nature of the relevant sphere for the problem, one might instead discover that it cuts across multiple disciplines, with multiple concerns, and multiple approaches. Walzer’s model is ill equipped to deal with these sorts of issues, these wicked problems. Such wicked problems, which tend to be far more common than anyone would care to admit, highlight the limitations of using approaches like Walzer’s. Fundamentally, Walzer, like many other scholars of justice, simply cannot deal with anything but mundane problems. In this case “mundane” problems are those that fit easily into some legal, political, economic, or ethical frame of reference. An example of a mundane problem would be the question of whether or not to hire a family member instead of conducting an impartial review of credentials. In certain circles, such as in a small business, this might be perfectly acceptable, but if it were instead a hire for the senior executive service, it might raise questions. Both cases are easily defined within economic or political terms. Additionally, there are certain sets of generally accepted practices that emerge from practice in each of these situations. It is, for example, considered normal to replace or fill SES positions after each presidential election with loyal party members. It is not considered acceptable to use family members for such a post (RFK a notable exception to this unwritten rule). However, in many small businesses, family members, who may or may not be as qualified for the position, are frequently hired. When combined with the fact that many personnel laws do not apply to businesses with few employees, and that familial labor can work at a discount or even free to help build the business, we see more of this duality, where things are seen as situationally wrong or right.

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A Critique of Pops and Pavlak Until this section of the chapter we have dealt with conceptions of justice that have been drawn primarily from the disciplines of philosophy, law, or political science, where most of the substantive discussions of justice typically take place. This makes it particularly challenging to address issues of justice within public administration and public affairs, since there are not that many systematic treatments of it. More often than not, we find some excellent contextualized discussions of a specific topic, like the discussion of administrative evil by Adams and Balfour (2004), ethics and legitimacy (Rohr, 1989), or administrative ethics (Cooper, 1990). What was still lacking, however, was a systematic treatment of justice in Public Administration and public affairs. We found one book specifically addressing justice in Public Administration, an applied text by Pops and Pavlak (1991). Unfortunately it does not break new ground theoretically. Instead it applies many of the concepts discussed earlier in this chapter, framed within the context of public affairs and Public Administration. By loosely adapting the arguments presented by Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, and others, Pops and Pavlak fall prey to many of the limitations each of these schools of thought carry with them. For example, Pops and Pavlak restrict many of their arguments unnecessarily. They claim that “the primary concerns of administrative justice are (1) to bring about those outcomes envisioned by legitimately formulated public policies and (2) to treat people fairly in the process” (Pops & Pavlak, 1991, p. 67). Although this is an interesting summary and interpretation of how one might do justice, it raises many questions. Primary concerns relative to our argument include a number of questions, including: Who determines which policies are legitimate? Does legitimacy equate to justice? Who decides what is fair? In addition, we can go into lengthy discussions of the differences between fairness as egalitarianism, as utilitarianism, and even as opportunity. Exacerbating this initial problem of unnecessary limitation, they propose that administrative justice is dominated by the study of administrative law (Pops & Pavlak, 1991, p. 68). Unfortunately, there are worlds of difference between what is legal and what is just; such a statement serves to undermine the higher-level discussions of ethics and administrative responsibility proposed by Cooper (1990), Rohr (1986, 1989), Gil-

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ligan (1993), and others who have provided extensive discussions of the tension between what is right and what is legal, as well as how they can affect Public Administration. In the end, we find that Pops and Pavlak, though well intentioned, are missing any systematic treatment of justice. Almost apologetically, they make the argument that “we do not see justice soon becoming a cornerstone of a new paradigm for American public administration” (Pops & Pavlak, 1991, p. 176). This claim is most disturbing given the postmodern turn of American society, the fusion of political rhetoric and fundamentalism, and the trend toward an increasingly value-driven government. For if justice does not become a cornerstone in the theory and praxis of Public Administration, what will?

Summary What we are left with at this juncture is the realization that there are realistically at least two applications of justice. The first is the tried-and-true routine set of processes by which administrators cope with most of the situations—by relying on sets of rules that have been challenged, tested, and accepted over an extended period of time. The second is a very complex set of processes, which requires the administrator to think outside the normal realm of what is understood as justice. In this second case, the administrator is often dealing with fundamentally opposed notions of what is just, what is acceptable, and who benefits. These situations have exponentially increased in frequency as society has taken a postmodern turn (Lyotard, 1999). Rather than determining penalties for the loss of time at work, the cost of hiring choices, and the rules for political action, administrators have become immersed in questions of when life begins and ends, who gets to live or die in emergency situations, and how should justice be exported outside our borders—if it even should be, and if so, under what circumstances. The conclusions they reach are based on our prevailing community of interests. These questions are but a few that often frame the new class of wicked problems faced in contemporary American society. These questions differ from the sort that have been raised by Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, and others because they are complex; they cannot be easily broken into issues of right and wrong, moral and immoral, black and white.

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It is in these situations where our conception of justice can truly make the most impact, not necessarily on the implementation of just practices, but by considering the complexities of these situations rather than simply trying to drive them into hackneyed categories grounded exclusively in a moral ideology, a single philosophy, or politics or economics.

7 Semiotic Justice and Public Administration

Concluding arguments about any body of work are usually difficult. In this case, we have presented a radically different set of ideas about justice. At this point it is useful to recap what we have done and tie it explicitly to Public Administration, its scholarship, and its practice. Broadly, we set out to try and apprehend a contemporary understanding of justice in Public Administration. This book diverges quite a bit from most of the contemporary conceptions of justice. Instead of deducing some meaning of justice from a specific institutional context, or egalitarian political theory laden with conceptual baggage and often unreachable goals, we developed a view of justice from the historical, social, political, and economic discourses that embodies our shared experiences as communities of interests. Such a choice makes this work a departure from much of the contemporary research in both organizations generally and public organizations in particular. Our conscious effort to divest discussions of justice from the literature on utopian socialism as much as possible and utopian notions generally has specific consequences. If the reader believes us successful, then we have instead managed to ground justice in the lived experiences, in the discourses, and the cultures and subcultures that pervade our existence. This conception of justice, at least from our perspective, “works” both generally and in light of the postmodern conditions faced by the profession of Public Administration. Additionally, the choice to ground this conception of justice in prevailing communities of interests has certain advantages. From a Wittgensteinian perspective, this framework enables both scholars and practitioners to uncover and thereby discuss each set of mutually agreed upon concepts framing the discourse among the participating individuals. This choice also enables this view of justice to encompass the sort of discourses

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envisioned by Habermas (1984, 1989), Fox and Miller (1994), and others without necessarily “buying in” to the teleology that informs each. In addition, by framing our discussions using a prevailing community of interests, we can also encompass the sorts of discourses that do not necessarily require participants to deconstruct the system, such as those proposed by Foucault (1977, 1980, 1994), and others (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992; Sementelli & Herzog, 2000). In essence, what is gained from our work in this book is the opportunity to explore, uncover, and truly debate the underpinnings informing contemporary justice both as theory and as practice. We do not diminish the importance of justice as either phenomena or epiphenomena. Instead, the strategy we have laid out in this book acts as a starting point for both practical and theoretical applications. We have stripped away the oftendebated objective and neutral discourses on justice and instead have contextualized and grounded it, making justice reachable rather than allowing it to remain a utopian ideal. We might now systematically appraise the evaluative elements of justice, which are painted often to appear as neutral and objective on the surface, but in reality are heavily influenced by the beliefs of some prevailing community of interests, its language, and its actions. Consequently, when we characterize justice from such a stance, that of communities of interests and their language-games, we might uncover the inherent inequalities that tend to stymie many of the “objective” notions of justice forwarded by the more mainstream scholars (Rawls, 1971, 1988; Nozick, 1977; Walzer, 1983, 2004). In addition, by focusing on a community of interests, we can then meaningfully reintroduce both the positive and negative elements of power (Abel & Sementelli, 2002) back into the study of justice as well as its practices. Specifically, we can finally address how one community of interests might favor a particular set of individuals, or a group, leading to the allocation of benefits and burdens of certain social or interpersonal actions. If that community of interests or group falls out of favor or is supplanted by another group, we might find that what was originally considered to be a just approach or action might be re-evaluated or shifted onto another group. As public resources are by definition scarce, we find that the initial group being favored might in fact return to the state of injustice that drove the emergence of their favored status. This in turn fosters the possi-

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bility to create drifting patterns of change (Sementelli & Abel, 2000) that better represent the waxing and waning of both political and administrative institutions as they interact with society. Furthermore, if we adopt the strategy laid out in this book, discussions of neutrality and the common good, when referring to conceptions of justice, make little sense outside the context of their language-games, given that the determination of what is good, right, and proper is often a function of the mores of some prevailing community of interests, and not necessarily the common good. Instead, this notion of what is just (i.e., what is for the common good) could rightly reflect the ideals of some powerful or vocal minor group that happens to be in control at that moment in time. In addition, since the more mainstream conceptions of justice (Rawls, 1971, 1988; Nozick, 1977; Walzer, 1983, 2004) rely on determinations that are by their nature value laden (e.g., the notion that justice is neutral), then by examining these determinations we can demonstrate the sorts of language-games that exist in the context of their discussions. What we can now say is that there seems to be a common set of family resemblances (Wittgenstein, 1953) among justice and its uses and language that cohere around contemporary discussions. When the term justice is employed in relevant contexts regarding social achievements, we discover that the notion of good takes on the meaning of being a social and individual good with value determined by the prevailing community of interests. Consequently, things are understood in the broadest terms when the notion of good accounts for diversities of opinion, thereby including the concerns of those operating within the prevailing community of interests as well as those who might be viewed as having dissenting opinions. Additionally, by adopting this view of justice rather than the more mainstream approaches forwarded by Rawls, Nozick, and others, we can systematize, analyze, deconstruct, and further understand the nuances of the predispositions, perceptions, or prejudices, and how they might explicitly or implicitly taint discussions of justice and related terms such as merit— all within our understanding of these prevailing communities of interests. Like Walzer, we are making the case that justice is relative to social meanings (Walzer, 1983, p. 312). Unlike Walzer, we move the argument beyond notions of justice in light of the harmony or autonomy of spheres (p. 318). By couching his argument within such language, it limits the application. Instead, by elucidating justice in terms of language-

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games, symbols, and the family resemblances they have with each other, we can capture the fluid motion of praxis, which tends to be not nearly as bounded nor as clear as Walzer, Nozick, or even Rawls might desire. Justice in this sense—semiotic justice—is messy. It is a living concept (Blackmore, 1999), a complex of related phenomena and epiphenomena that change, shift, and drift (Abel & Sementelli, 2003) as societies, governments, and people change. Such an understanding of justice offers the potential to be far more useful for describing and explaining the day-today practices of administrators in the public sector. Consider for a moment the notion of merit. To be eligible for merit, someone must first be recognized or at least accepted as a member of the in-group (the prevailing community of interests). Such a prescreening assumption might not be considered fair in the sense of Rawls’s (1991) conception of justice if an employee performance otherwise meets or exceeds expectations for some position. However, if we account for the influences that the beliefs, language, and symbols of a prevailing community of interests explicitly or implicitly have on the norms of an organization, we might then understand and possibly explain how such a person might remain ineligible within this group. This helps us to understand how certain out groups (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001) or otherwise marginal groups can suffer certain injustices without many noticing that they are suffering these injustices. In many instances, such injustices can be understood from the perspective that they are not seen as eligible for the benefits of justice (merit) given the mores, practices, and perceptions of members of some prevailing community of interests that happens to be in power. Once seen as different, they are not considered part of the community. They can be deemed outsiders and thus have no mechanism to challenge injustices within the realm of such decisions. This is by no means a new phenomenon. Historically, only people defined as citizens (typically landed males) were granted protection by Greek and Roman law. In our contemporary society, detainees from certain Middle Eastern countries are being held indefinitely at the military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba because they are deemed a danger to the citizens of the United States. Some might see these prisoners and other members of marginal or out groups as victims; others see them as criminals. However, as these individuals are not part of the prevailing community of interests, their differences as identified through language games (in language, ethnicity, and culture) become enough to set them

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apart as a marginal group. Such a situation then might make these marginalized individuals ineligible for the contemporary brand of justice offered by the prevailing community of interests.

Justice and Public Administration Theory Within this scenario and others like it, we discover that our conception of justice helps better explain the nuances of why and how certain actions happen, even when they might not appear to be just when held to the sort of objective standards offered by Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, and others. In this sense, our conception of justice is not something that would be easily understood as normative; instead it is descriptive, somewhat relativistic, and in some instances predictive. Unlike other conceptions, it enables the sort of immanent critique and reflection necessary to determine if the actions of some prevailing community of interests can be understood as good, right, and proper from the perspective of the marginalized groups and out groups. By taking the role of prevailing communities of interests into account, one can then reexamine our collective understanding of justice and, specifically, the concepts that tend to be associated with it. In Public Administration at some level, this involves at least a cursory discussion of issues including merit, equality, liberty, utility, and need. These concepts often cohere around many discussions of administrative roles common to many discussions of Public Administration and tend to inform at least implicitly the core of debates in the profession. When people discuss the notion of merit they are most often concerned with people getting what they deserve, or what they have earned relative to their productive inputs in a workplace. In Public Administration, this is tied most closely to the literature often understood as the “orthodoxy,” referring to the classical studies of Public Administration grounded in the assertions made by Weber (Roth & Wittich, 1978), Fayol (1987), H. Simon (Simon, Thompson, & Smithburg, 2000), and others (Bingham & Bowen, 1994). This body of literature includes many of discussions, debates, and concerns raised by issues of political corruption, graft, and nonfeasance (Finer, 1941) that have been part of core debates in the profession. Consequently, in the literature of Public Administration’s orthodoxy we find that merit becomes a path to just administration through the dispassionate, professional performance of administrative tasks that are rewarded based solely on the competence of the professional.

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Another central concept in the study of justice in Public Administration is equality. To many, equality refers to the notion that everyone is treated as responsible and rights-vested, but never simply as a means or an end. In the praxis of Public Administration, this shares a common intellectual foundation with the literature on merit. The notion of a dispassionate, professional, competent administrator, in accord with the literature discussed earlier, should by its nature result in equality, typically without the need for structures to enforce equality, given that the participants are rational decision makers seeking optimal solutions for their administrative goals (H. Simon, 1947). Therefore within the controlled environment of administrative orthodoxy proposed by many classical scholars of Public Administration, behavioralism, scientific management, and efficiency can ultimately lead to equality through meritorious performance. We also find the notion of liberty is a central concept in the profession of Public Administration. Liberty in this case refers to autonomy from the arbitrary exercise of authority, freedom of choice and action with a minimum amount of necessary interference to ensure overall liberty. In Public Administration, this plays out in discussions of administrative legitimacy and the proper exercise of authority (Rohr, 1986, 1989), the use of administrative discretion (Kerwin, 1994; Lowi, 1979, 1995; Schoenbrod, 1993), and how administrative agencies can act to protect liberty (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1996). The question then becomes: to which liberty are we referring? Is this the positive liberty referred to by Berlin (1969) and others, where people can fulfill their potential? Is this the negative liberty (Hobbes, 1997; Locke, 1980), referring to freedom from the interference of others? Alternatively, is it some combination of both? Gawthrop (1998), for example, discussed the nuances of creating an environment of positive liberty in administrative agencies, ultimately touching on a series of issues raised more broadly by Fox and Miller (1994), including the normative issues of sincerity, authenticity, and others. This notion of liberty becomes more complex by the inclusion of Kettl’s (2002) concerns regarding liberty in the context of globalization and devolution of responsibility. When we turn our attention toward discussions of utility, or the economic notion of providing the greatest good for the largest number of people, we find it is a central idea in Public Administration. In the study of policy analysis (Gupta, 2001; Nagel, 1991; Stokey & Zeckhauser (1978); Weimer & Vining, 1989), for example, we find that a common goal is

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to manage risk, often by choosing low-cost options. Said risk is often managed in practice by evaluating risks and rewards and then arriving at the best way to analyze, implement, and evaluate some set of policies. These strategies can be understood as maximizing utility by reducing the disutilities (e.g., fiscal pain) associated with the processes of governance. Also, much of the literature on the New Public Management often focuses on utility maximization, also from the stance of minimizing disutility. Kaboolian (1998) sought to maximize utility by enabling citizens to make choices. In certain cases, scholars of the New Public Management have at least a tacit understanding of what the roles of communities of interests are (Kelly, 1998, p. 207). This understanding in turn can move the rhetoric of their argument toward our logic of prevailing communities of interests. However, we also find that this New Public Management is often locked into the same issues as the more mainstream scholars of justice, including for example certain orthodox views of economic utility, focusing on the use of clear principles (Kaboolian, 1998, p. 192), which often inform the day-to-day, routinized concerns of Public Administration but do little to aid in our understanding of justice. We next examine discussions of need, focusing on how certain groups get more relative to others due to the dire nature of their conditions. It is here where we find many contemporary scholars wrestling with justice and the making of just decisions. Much of this scholarship has origins in the first Minnowbrook conference. The literature following the New Public Administration (Marini, 1971), as well as a great deal which emerged as a consequence of it, has often been concerned with how to deal with unmet needs emerging from the impacts of social change, with relevant action, and with how to correct inequities. From this perspective, understanding need is paramount and often takes a humanizing approach to the study of administration as a mechanism to relate to clients (C. King & Stivers, 1998). This then can lead to the emergence of some systematic study of anti-administration (Farmer, 1995; McSwite, 2001) and other alternatives as a means to address these needs, often without regard to the impact of such differential treatment (Thompson, 1975). Need also has been used as a mechanism to enable administrative discretion. In the case of rulemaking, for example, we find a case at the national level regarding how administrators use discretionary power to provide the details regarding how to implement the laws passed by Congress (Kerwin, 1994, p. 2). In this sense the rules become tools to address cer-

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tain needs, such as the need to clean up a point discharge of pollution, the need to alleviate poverty in some area, and the need to improve, retool, or reexamine policies (e.g., educational, emergency management, and fiscal) to correct contemporary injustices. Rulemaking then offers a certain level of flexibility to address areas of need without requiring an Act of Congress to solve a problem that has been at least framed in the abstract. What we discover is that even though aspects of Public Administration are at the very least concerned with (if not adapting) these different facets of what we call contemporary justice, in no incidence have we found any sort of holistic approach to the study of justice itself. Consequently, each of these facets of justice raises concerns, criticism, and even dissent based on how a certain brand of justice succeeds or fails to be just. In practice, certain actions seen as just then can promote inequality by focusing on need, can reduce liberty by fostering utility, can increase utility by neglecting needs. What is the result? It is apparent that the theory and practice of Public Administration is home to many of the ideas linked to the broader studies of justice. In addition, there are spaces where one might discover certain practices in Public Administration that can simultaneously be just and unjust, can be equal and unequal, can create utility and disutility, and can foster liberty at the expense of community. In contemporary society, within postmodern conditions, such situations can and do happen often. Upon reflection, it becomes rather apparent how and why so many tend to fall back on the conceptions of justice offered by Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, and others. Specifically, people tend to adopt a theory of justice that bears the closest family resemblance to the practices they undertake, are concerned with, or believe in given their prevailing community of interests, socialization, and duties—regardless of whether or not it actually functions in practice. Though incomplete, and far from perfect, in practice these conceptions of justice provide a somewhat comforting utopian goal that can provide at least a heuristic mechanism to understand, to apprehend, or to make sense of administrative actions, if only in some narrow sense. However, if we intend to understand truly the theory and practice of justice in contemporary Public Administration as a whole, we must move beyond this reliance on dysfunctional but comforting notions, and try instead to wrestle with the complexity of the phenomena and epiphenomena, the theory and praxis, which encircle the lived experiences of contemporary justice.

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To accomplish this, it becomes imperative to provide a framework to understand the how and why of these essentially contested, different groups, which stress and prioritize these dimensions differently in producing some essential meaning of justice. We believe that our approach, fusing the work of Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Baudrillard, fusing the study of language, power, and symbols, creates such a framework. Since the uses and meaning of justice are not simply a matter of some moral, economic, social, institutional, or professional perspective, understanding the language, symbols, and processes of justice then enable us to understand what justice is, not simply what it should be. Each of these single-approach possibilities is often embedded in another, sharing teleological assumptions that may or may not be compatible with the arguments raised or even useful to understand the problems faced. Thus, in many instances each can only make sense to the other when operating in a context that shares some overall commonality, or set of family resemblances. If it does not share enough of a family resemblance, the conception of justice might not be accepted, or might instead compete for dominance in the different groups’ decision making. Furthermore, because the language-games within each of these communities of interests are in many instances conceptually linked to each other, the organizations and the society as whole become bound together in certain important ways. If certain practices are undertaken based on a single community of interests, it can change the possibilities for justice and drastically conflict with other communities of interests, based on issues of language, of symbolism, or of practices. We find this can raise a multiplicity of concerns regarding how justice may or may not be served. Such exchanges tend to happen on the periphery of acceptance and understanding, in cases that tend not to conform to the goals, objectives, and mores of the prevailing community of interests. This happens at the periphery because it is there where we find our prevailing communities of interests making contact with divergent (possibly dissenting) views. One also could argue that it is at the periphery where members of these prevailing communities of interests tend to have the least amount of habituation, of socialization, and of commonality, making them more sympathetic to if not accepting of certain beliefs divergent from the norms (of the prevailing community of interests). Consequently, when examining justice within such an environment or situation, we find that different aspects tend to emerge over others as be-

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ing most important, most valued within the context of that specific community of interests. Though there are differences, which are stressed, one also discovers that disputes, especially those regarding proper uses (Gallie, 1956) and applications of justice are not debated endlessly. Instead, one discovers these different stresses amount to differences in views about what is most important in a given situation. This in turn helps determine which brand of justice might be used. We find that some activity becomes an issue for the prevailing community of interests because the activity or the reaction to it can advance one or more of the dimensions or facets of justice we have considered. Conflict over what is just arises through a series or a set of moment-tomoment actions that cohere around one or more of the brands of justice discussed earlier, such as equality, liberty, merit, or utility. Through the language-games used in these processes and the symbols employed, one discovers which dimension is most important at that moment to the community of interests that happens to be in control at that time. This series of events moving from discovery, to conflict, to action then make up the living process we call “doing justice.” The collective goals of some prevailing community of interests are pursued, if not attained, through these sets of conflicting processes. In the aftermath of taking some set of just actions the prevailing community of interests sometimes can become vulnerable to criticism, to political attack, and to responses by certain client groups, marginalized out groups, or other groups that are most often not part of the prevailing community of interests. Additionally, these client groups, out groups, or opposition groups often do not share the same lived experiences of the prevailing community of interests, their mores, and possibly their social or economic status. Furthermore, the selection and use of some specific brand of justice also enables one to lay out what things count as interests, what things are primary goals, and what things ought to be promoted in light of others. We see through this process how one might uncover the adverse consequences of some action on a specific group. This can help us to single out the similarities and differences that cohere around the way people treat others. It can also help us to broadly determine if someone is truly doing justice if only from the perspective of some community of interests. We have uncovered, at least within the theory and practice of Public Administration, how these disparate ideas play out in our day-to-day existence. Public Administrators, in a contextually dependent way, find them-

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selves mediating among these varied approaches, perceptions, and applications of justice. We find that the tensions among these assumptions at their core often inform debates regarding the proper roles and functions of the administrative state. We also find that administrators are in a unique position, arguably the best strategic position, to do justice as they interact with multiple constituents, multiple environments, and multiple communities of interests. We also find that as a profession, Public Administration is well suited for the role of wrestling with this multiplicity of issues arising from this complex understanding of justice. A number of scholars have approached different elements of justice and its complexity, often emphasizing issues of liberty, of equity, of merit, of utility, and of need. This has taken the form of debates regarding legitimacy, administrative discretion, and the rise of managerialism, administrative ethics, and the manner by which administrators serve the public interest. Justice, then, implicitly if not always explicitly, pervades both the theory and practice of Public Administration. The profession is unique in the sense that it is coherent enough to have the need to do justice in theory and praxis, while being diverse enough to continually wrestle with the fundamentally contested nature of justice as a concept, as a goal, and as a practice. Contemporary Public Administration is at the very least tacitly aware of these differences, based on differing sets of assumptions, approaches, and practices. It also provides the context whereby scholars, professionals, and philosophers might begin to understand the interrelatedness, the difference, and the incommensurable elements of the concept that inheres in the simple word justice. We hope to have moved the debate forward by introducing both a measure of complexity into the study of justice and an approach for investigating this complexity. Rather than distilling ideas into the Aristotelian notion that justice happens when there are citizens to rule and be ruled (Barnes, 1998), with people taking turns, with some preconceived assumption that everyone has completely equal access at all times, we have recast justice as something dynamic, contested, and driven by groups, subgroups, individuals, and communities of interests. Rather than assuming a single, egalitarian, normative stance, we instead included the realities of power differences, of persuasion, and of symbolism. In short, it is a semiotic view of justice, a justice that is essentially contested, equal and unequal, and paradoxically often consistent in practice.

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Index

abdication of social responsibility, 28 Abel & Marsh, 33 Abel & Sementelli, 15, 89, 91, 94, 97, 103, 105 Adams & Balfour, 99 Adorno, 80, 118 aesthetics, 65 Agger, 65 agora, 24 Alexander, 81 alienation, 95 Allison, D., 68 Allison, G., 59 altruism, 24 Alvesson & Wilmott, 103 anomy, 11 Aquino, Lewis, & Bradfield, 56 Arendt, 8 Aristotelian, 92, 112 Aristotle, 6, 7, 19, 22, 71, 80, 86 authoritarian, 71, 72, 76, 79 Bakhtin, 20 Barber, 75, 95 Barnard, 55, 59, 61 Barth, 87 Baudrillard, 4, 15, 64, 66, 69, 91, 110 Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 107 Belliotti, 12 Belohlav, 55 Bercovitch, 36 Berlin, 37, 38, 107 Best & Kellner, 64

Bierhoff, Cohen, & Greenberg, 56 Bies & Moag, 58 Bies & Shapiro, 58 Bingham & Bowen, 89, 106 Blackmore, 105 Bramsted & Melhuish, 73 Brickman, Folger, Goode, & Schul, 47 card stacking, 81 citizenship, 60 coercion, 3, 37, 61, 75, 94 Cohen, 56, 79 commodification, 64, 89 conforming space, 8–9 Cooper, 99 Coppage v. Kansas, 41 counterdiscourse, 83 Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobcel, & Rupp, 60 Crozier, Huntington, & Watanuki, 72 Dahl, 4 Dawkins, 20, 64 deconstruction, 65, 68, 82, 83, 103, 104 Derrida, 82 Deutsch, 56 Dewey, 74 dialectical necessity, 80 domination, 24, 64, 75, 82, 95 drift, 30, 94, 105; as drifting patterns of change, 128 emancipation, 30, 90 endogenous evolution, 30

126 / Index epiphenomena, 103, 105, 109 essentially contested concept, 2, 5, 53, 97, 112 ethics, 57, 78, 79, 81, 95, 98 fairness, 51, 54, 56–59, 61, 92, 99 Farmer, 66, 108 Faubion, 65 Fay, 49 Feinberg, J., 95 Feinberg, Krishna, & Zhang, 57 Finer, 106 Folger & Greenberg, 57 Fox, 64, 65, 90 Fox & Miller, 65, 103, 107 Fredrickson, 34 Gaus, 43 Gauthier, 79 Gawthrop, 59, 107 Gilligan, 99 Golembiewski, 4 Grafstein, 61, 94, 96 Gray, 73 Greenberg, 55, 56, 58 Greenstone, 39 habits of thought, 22 habituation, 30, 110 Hochschild, 45, 77 Hodas, 59 Honneth & Farrell, 87 Hoover & Plant, 72 Horkheimer, 95 Horkheimer & Adorno, 95 Horsman, 34 Huntington, 36, 39 immanent critique, 106 intentional ambiguity, 4, 89 interactional Justice, 58, 60 intersubjective, 65, 69, 70, 82 interests of the strong, 3 James, 9 Jiwei, 79 Judge & Colquitt, 56

Kaboolian, 108 Katona & Strumpel, 47 Katznelson, 36, 51 Kelly, 108 Kerwin, 107,108 Kettl, 107 King, C., & Stivers, 87, 90, 108 King, D., 59 Kirk, 71–72 Konovsky & Cropanzano, 60 Koslowski, 77 Kramer, 70 Kymlicka, 75 Ladenson, 60, 94–95 Lane, 45, 46, 76 Lee, Pillutla, & Law, 56 Leventhal, 57 Levinas, 2 lifeworlds, 9 Lin & Carley, 58 Lind, Kulik, Ambrose & Park, 1 Lowi, 107 Major, Bylsma, & Cozzarelli, 61 Marcuse, 55, 95 Marshall & Choudhury, 87 Martin, Bartol, & Kehoe, 56 McClosky & Zaller, 45, 77 McSwite, 108 Mellor, Barnes-Farrell, & Stanton, 61 Merquior, 73 metaphor, 30, 58, 86, 87 Mikulincer & Shaver, 105 Miller, 65 Minnowbrook, 108 modernity, 64, 65 Morgan, 61 Myer & Rowan, 2 narratives, 65 nationalization, 49 objectivity, 22 ontological, 84, 86, 94

Index / 127 Osborne & Kaposvari, 58 Ostwald, 19 Pacanowsky, 58, 59 panopticon, 65 Pfeffer, 60 phases of the image, 66 Pitkin, 22 Polanyi, 10 Pufendorf, 91 Rabinow, 65 Ramos, 8, 11 reification, 59, 79 Rueda & Chan, 59 Rutgers, 88 Salancik & Pfeffer, 60 sanctions, 7, 55, 86 Sandel, 76, 92 Sartre, 17 Schon, 1 Scott, 59 Selznick, 55, 59, 60, 61 Sementelli, 95, Sementelli & Herzog, 8, 55, 103

Sheppard & Lewicki, 57 Shotter, 23 signifier, 68, 70, 79 Simpson, 12 Solomon & Murphy, 3 Somers, 5 Stoll, 93 subjugation, 78, 88 Swabey, 79 Tannenbaum & Yukl, 58 tautology, 95 teleology, 103, 110 tolerance, 73 utopian, 61, 102, 103, 109 Verba & Oren, 46–48 voluntary associations, 45 Weick, 61 wicked problems, 13, 58, 59, 80, 98, 100 worldviews, 29 Yates, 1, 69