Is Art the Weapon to Kill the King?(To Kill the King: Post-Traditional Governance and Bureaucracy‪)‬

Since its inception, the field of public administration has enjoyed or suffered (pick your term) debates over preferred methodologies. In the past twenty-five years, many of these debates have devolved into disputes between proponents of public administration as a science using quantitative positivist methodologies and public administration as an art concerned with interpretation and subjectivity. Works intended to increase public administration's scientific standing would include McCurdy and Cleary's (1984) critique of case-study dissertations in favor of experimental, quasi-experimental and statistical methods; Dubnick's (1999) call for greater rigor throughout the public administration community; and Gill and Meier's (2000) statement that public administration must develop its own quantitative, scientific methods--as if the issue of the use of quantitative methods per se and a scientific appellation were already settled. The thrust of pro-science argument is Houston and Delevan's (1994, 268) statement that "more rigorous use of the quantitative methods advocated by mainstream social science may well be more useful in public administration than their current use suggests." The reply to this concern has been that qualitative, interpretive narrative inquiry or story telling represents a major alternative to positivist science for acquiring administrative knowledge (e.g., Dodge, Ospina and Foldy 2005). Proponents of narrative inquiry score positive science for examining a small slice of human concerns and neglecting the individual in favor of mass analysis; as Hummel (2007, 1018) has noted "social science deals with averages and designs and improves policies that because they fit everyone, tend to fit no one." In this viewpoint, positivist studies lead more to control than broad understanding. What the positivists see as a narrative mode's major drawbacks--subjectivity versus objectivity, involvement versus detachment, and uniqueness versus the ability to replicate studies--turn out to be important strengths when examined from an interpretive view (Hummel 1991).