Beyond Bureaucracy—Public Administration as Political Integrator and Non‐Weberian Thought in Germany

Abstract

The political role of public administration holds an ambiguous status in public administration theory. The dominant paradigms of the discipline offer more or less negative perspectives. Max Weber’s notion of bureaucracy conceives public administration as the apolitical tool of government, while the public choice school conceives it as the realm of individual selfishness and rent seeking at taxpayers’ expense. In this unfavorable epistemological environment, positive concepts of what makes public administration “political” can hardly flourish. However, as public authorities may organize clientele participation and consequently co‐opt stakeholders, they provide for symbolic sense making and create patterns of identity. Public administration thus works as a political integrator in its own right. Unfortunately, this subject is not prominent within contemporary scholarly research. German political integration through administration is analyzed here in order to address these and related theoretical questions.

Studying Hybrids: Sectors and Mechanisms

“…This is obvious in the case of social services, for example, faceto-face contact in ethnic communities, the appointment of top-ranking officials or the composition of governing boards of public agencies. But it is also clear that controlled representation of societal groups within the body of the personnel of public agencies may collide with the unfettered implementation of the legal purpose of a given agency -thus the enforcement of formal hierarchy -since that purpose necessarily treats the internal social structure of public bureaucracy as a neutral 'black box' (Seibel, 2010). It is here that the hybrid character of two overlapping governance mechanisms, hierarchy and participation/representation, comes to the fore.…”

Bridging the citizen gap: Bureaucratic representation and knowledge linkage in (international) public administration

“…But there is almost no individuallevel data to sustain claims about clientelistic behavior. Furthermore, active interest representation also violates core normative premises that guide most public service systems around the world, namely the Weberian idea of public servants who act neutrally and without regard for persons (sine ira et studio) as the apolitical tool of government (Weber, 1922(Weber, , 1968; see also Peters, Maravi c, & Schröter, 2013;Seibel, 2010).…”

Trends in the Study of Public Administration: Empirical and Qualitative Observations from Public Administration Review, 2000–2009

“…Often, journal editors ask authors to write about the state of the study in their country at‐large—for example, in the United States (Golembiewski 1996), France (‐Chevallier 1996), Germany (Seibel 1996), the Netherlands (Kickert 1996), Denmark (Jørgensen 1996), and the United Kingdom (‐Pollitt 1996). Recently, an article was published on the limited influence of Max Weber in and on German public administration (Seibel 2010). The British journal Public Administration carried articles by Siffin (1956) and Raadschelders (forthcoming) on American public administration.…”