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Key
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Hendrik Wagenaar
(2004), ‘Knowing’ the Rules. Administrative Work as Practice, Public Administration Review, 64, 6: 643-655 |
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| This article is an exercise in empirical philosophy. It develops the practice perspective that I formulated in the preceding publication. Taking public administration as its substantive topic, it argues that traditional conceptions of knowledge as explicit, objective, disengaged, universal, and wholly transparent is deficient and argues that all knowledge is instead situated, action-oriented, engaged and embodied. By taking the example of rule “application” in large bureaucratic organizations, the paper shows how rules are not enforced by applying general knowledge to particular situations, but instead must be seen as practical judgment in an administrative environment that is characterized by complexity, indeterminacy and the necessity to act upon the situation at hand. | ||
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Hendrik Wagenaar (2007), “Governance, Complexity and Democratic Participation: How citizens and public officials harness the complexities of neighbourhood decline”, American Review of Public Administration, 37, 1: 17-50 | |
| In this book - to which I contributed the Introductory Essay and a chapter on policy practices -, we lay out a methodological-conceptual vision for political science and public policy. We argue (a) that in the modern network society politics enters public life through the effects of, and reactions to, public policy initiatives, (b) that methods are not politically neutral but embody and sustain, a particular political arrangement, and we (c) suggest that given the ontology of politics as networked and deeply pluralistic, a policy science that ‘fits’ should be interpretive, practice-oriented, and deliberative. The book has become a classic in the field and has found entrance in course syllabi all around the world. It has had a wide impact in the field of interpretive policy analysis and is considered a reference work. | ||
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5. Hendrik Wagenaar (2007), “Governance, Complexity and Democratic Participation: How citizens and public officials harness the complexities of neighbourhood decline”, American Review of Public Administration, 37, 1: 17-50. | |
| This article discusses the intricacies of the generalized notion of fit between methods and the subject of research (political life in this case) that was put forward in our book Deliberative Policy Analysis. The argument in this paper is that in political analysis four key factors inextricably hang together: 1) public policy making, in particular the limits of traditional, hierarchical policy making – the approach that in policy texts usually has the qualification “rational” ascribed to it, 2) complexity as one of the root causes of the limits of traditional government, 3) an epistemology of public policy that suggests that policy is – and should be - driven by objective, empiricist knowledge of the world, and 4) participatory democracy as a possible answer to the challenge of complexity. One of the main thrusts of the paper is its detailed description of the intricate, and not well understood, relations between these four topics. It uses participatory governance in disadvantaged neighborhoods as its example. In the second part of the paper I present detailed examples of the different tactics that citizens employ to harness the complexity of their environment | ||
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