Linguistic Diglossia and Parochialism in American Public Administration: The Missing Half of Guerreiro Ramos's Redução Sociológica

Paradigmatic and Ontological Tensions in U.S. Public Administration

“…This suppression of dissenting discourse is buttressed by a U.S. doctoral committee system that is self‐policing and censorial of critical epistemologies and research issues to be undertaken. Academic publications are remarkable for a characteristic absence of “alien” citations—an intellective aspect of “reverse diglossia” (Candler 2006, 541). Patriotism is another ingredient in the “reverse diglossia” within the intellectual enterprise—another aspect of the Academy functioning to service power—to service the “King” (Farmer 2005).…”

Towards Global Scholarship in Public Affairs

“…A second dimension of the ‘global’ nature of these various literatures might be gleaned from the languages used in the references in the various articles surveyed. Candler (2006b) has addressed this in previous research comparing the US to Brazilian and French scholars, and raised concern about the monolingualism of the US literature:…”

“…If one accepts the diagnoses offered in this paper, cures will be less easy to implement. Even a seemingly simple solution – like requiring language classes in doctoral programs to overcome the linguistic failings of Anglophones – has proven surprisingly difficult to implement despite at least 40–50 years of recognition of the problem (Candler 2006b, pp. 542–3).…”

Pretending Not to See or Hear, Refusing to Signify: The Farce and Tragedy of Geocentric Public Affairs Scholarship

“…The "public" is now become so inchoate, fragmented, and shapeshifting that no administration thereof is able to keep up. Into this breach between deracinated need and uncoupled agency has rushed doctrinaire "new public management," signed, sealed, and delivered by a monolinguistic (Candler, 2006) American public administration syndicate, packaged for unbundling on delivery to one after another of shocked and awed economies plundered like clockwork following predictive "insurgent" unrest (cf. Chossudovsky, 2003Chossudovsky, , 2005Juhasz, 2006;Klein, 2007).…”

“…Ten years after its publication, Alexander's piece received its first (and as yet only) citation in public administration journals: the PAR special symposium on Katrina (Stivers, 2007). Candler (2006) offers to American public administrationists a clarion call to linguistic competence backstopping the ironic preoccupation with "discursive competence" that has transfixed the kind of scholarship hosted in the PSQ symposium cited above. In a survey netting 77 National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) accredited Masters of Public Administration programs in the United States, Candler finds a startling lack of international linguistic competence: 12% of faculty who are bilingual, 16% of faculty doing significant non-U.S. research, 17% of programs advertising an international concentration or focus, 10% requiring international courses in their programs, 1% requiring second language competence for entering students.…”