Forging new tools for new administrative houses: Comments on the symposium

Abstract

In 1964, a reporter asked Fannie Lou Hamer, a redoubtable leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, whether she and her party were "seeking equality with the white man." She answered, "No! What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don't want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that'll raise me and the white man up…raise America up" (Harding, 2010, pp. xx-xxi).Among the amazing aspects of Ms. Hamer's declaration is her conviction that freedom and equality do not mean assimilation to the normal, nor conformity to the neutral. More than 50 years on, as we continue to struggle with the hegemonic power of maleness and whiteness, her dedication to "true democracy" still inspires, and reminds us that gender and race equity offer America an opportunity rather than requiring a sacrifice.The essays in this symposium reflect many interesting and heartening views on where the field of public administration stands now on these issues, and where we might head. Their arguments and empirical evidence give us all hope of "raising America up." From this rich assortment, a few points stand out for me.(1) The first has to do with what Bishu, Guy, and Heckler (2019) call "seeing gender." Their essay focuses on the persistence of gender (and by implication race) neutrality, even blindness, in organization and management texts. It seems to me this issue has implications for the paradigm that has come to constitute "normal science" in public administration, that is, quantitative empiricism. Feminist theorists have long observed the implicit masculinity of this form of science: objective, unbiased, rigorous, and dependent on the model of the scientist as a "separated self" that supposedly has no identifying entanglements (e.g., Keller, 1985, Bordo, 1987Harding, 1986).Today, the gender dimensions of normal science persist in the scientist's fear of contamination by Mother Nature and in the preference for "hard" over "soft" data, norms our field has doubled down on in the last couple of decades. The entire conversation about social equity is imprisoned within the disciplinary rule that only objective measurements count (pun intended), even though equity is an ethical-political issue. In our field's normal science terms, to understand gender and race as they are lived (see Edwards, Holmes, & Sowa, 2019) somehow seems to threaten bias. As accomplished a piece of research as Thomas (2019) has produced should not have to justify including interview results, especially those that so clearly reveal the lived experience of African-American female faculty members. In my view, there is a huge literature gap that only interpretive research can fill with evidence on this and other issues, documenting how individuals and groups understand social realities in bureaucracy and academia. Just as not all professors, students, and bureaucrats are white males, not all solid evidence is quantitative. Causal links are not all we need; we also need to know more about how to forge them, that is, about social processe...