Toward Public Administration as a Humanities Discipline: A Humanistic Manifesto
Toward Public Administration as a Humanities Discipline: A Humanistic Manifesto

Summary/Abstract: I would like to begin with an account of personal experience relating to my scholarly activities. From a humanities perspective, bias is not something that one eliminates, or at least attempts to reduce to an imperceptible influence on one’s thinking as in positivistic forms of research, but instead one uses legitimate forms of bias to understand the experiences one has, bringing, in Weber’s terms, a value-orientation theory of social action and method in achieving Verstehen that draws upon ‘an empathic or artistically appreciative quality’. (1968, p. 5) My own early university education was in philosophy, history, and literary studies. In other words, I am a humanities person. It was only later, and somewhat reluctantly, that I began studies in public administration. My father had been a Deputy Minister and Cabinet Secretary, and my impression while growing up was that public administration was one of the most boring technical fields one could study, and its practice fraught with an internal politics I did not find attractive. As I began my graduate programmes in administration I discovered that my initial impression was true. But only in certain respects.

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