Minnowbrook I (1968)
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Backdrop:
o Vietnam War
o Johnson Administration -not running for reelection
o Assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. Robert Kennedy
o Urban riots and violent protests; Democratic National Convention
o People’s attention on civil rights and inequality
Organized by Dwight Waldo – H. George Frederickson, Frank Marini, William Lambright
Gathered 34 leading young scholars
Examined the relevance and role of public administration in a time of chaos.
Waldo felt that public administration had to respond to the events and turmoil of the day
Participants formed groups around topics of interest.
o Relevance of public administration
o Democratic grounding of the field (PA)
o Public administration as a moral enterprise
o The role of institutions in governance, and
o The importance of social equity
most ‘Minnows’ found the field (PA) inadequate in its “set of concepts and ideas to
explain the modern world of administration”
through the discussions, the participants formulated the beginnings of New Public
Administration
NPA is an action-oriented perspective that embraced normative inquiry and
advocated for social equity and citizen participation
Provided a space for deliberative discussion around larger issues re the past, present,
and future of PA.
Conference papers were published in a book, Toward a New Public Administration: The
Minnowbrook Perspective, edited by Frank Marini
Criticisms towards NPA:
o Too oriented toward political philosophy, insufficiently attentive to the need to
operate govt bureaucracies in more efficient and effective ways
o Victor A. Thompson (Without Sympathy or Enthusiasm, 1975): critique of NPA’s
position that public administrators should promote social equity independently of
a legal or other official mandate to do so. He called it “theft of the popular
sovereignty”, arguing against the idea that promoting social equity is either a
necessarily good thing or something public administrators should try to force on
the nation. He argued that procedural justice is crucial to PA & democratic
government.
Minnowbrook II (1988)
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Backdrop:
o Era of big government was being called into question
o Growing number of political & governmental leaders had begun to avow antigovernmental and anti-bureaucratic sentiments, giving rise to ideologies
antithetical to a strong public sector
o Ascension of liberal democracy over other political systems
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Organized by H. George Frederickson
Objective: to compare and contrast the changing epochs of public administration
Participants were more diverse; half of the participants were females; less radical both in
its assessment and in its process
More placid mood, younger participants possibly being intimidated by the more senior
participants
Less controversial, probably less influential than Minnowbrook I
Had fewer clearly identifiable themes
Paper had a more technocratic and individualist flavor – foci such as productivity &
performance management (greater connection to positivist perspective associated with
Simon)
Missed the coming importance of reinventing government movement and the emergence
of the so-called New Public Management
Focus is more on policy implementation, not on big questions about bureaucracy and
democracy
The cautious mood of Minnowbrook II might have been a reflection of the emerging
complexity of the process of achieving academic tenure.
Grappled with issues that permeated the disjointed and growing study of public
administration; which included contemporary challenges to the legitimacy and efficacy of
government bureaucracies.
Minnowbrook III (2008)
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Backdrop:
o September 11, 2001 terror attack; War on Terror
o Cold War had ended; European Union was created
o China was a rising power
o Iran and North Korea were new players in the nuclear age
o Domestic and international matters had become inextricable linked through an
increasingly global economy and growing cross-national interdependencies
o On the brink of Great Recession
o Mainstream PA is considered as a form of applied social science, the field was
growing increasingly scientific, rational, and positivist.
On the field of public administration:
o Academic side:
▪ More professional associations, journals, conferences, programs in the
US
▪ Standardization and credentialing of programs had become routine
▪ Greater competition due to program rankings and specialties
o Practice side:
▪ PA had become increasingly technocratic, performance oriented and
directed toward managing by results
▪ Further shift away from big questions on democracy and bureaucracy;
toward applied field focused on positivist science and technocratic issues
Organized by Rosemary O’Leary; two phases (to address possible problem of younger
scholars being intimidated by senior colleagues)
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Phase One:
▪ Pre-conference workshop for scholars who had been out of their PhD
programs for 8 years or less
▪ Minnows wrote and presented short thought pieces examining and
critiquing the current state and future of public administration, public
management, and public service
▪ Future Search exercise – envisioned the field of PA in 2018
o Phase Two
▪ Larger, more traditional conference at Lake Placid, New York
▪ More than 200 scholars and practitioners, including veterans of either
Minnowbrook I and II
▪ Paper presentations
Fairly traditional
Largely civil debate focused on established issues and research agendas
Herbert Simon
- Emphasized a more empirical investigation
of organizational and behavioral approaches
to understanding decision making
- incorporated tools of management and
social psychology
- some call the outcome of Simon’s work the
field of public management
- satisficing
Dwight Waldo
- more political, theoretical, and philosophical
approach to thinking about tensions between
democracy and bureaucracy
- more of a critique, less positivistic, and
more directed at increasing the bureaucracy’s
involvement in developing processes for
public participation and democratic
expression
- feared that PA as a field would become
replaced by decision makers overly
consumed with a set of values that focused
on making govt orgs efficient and effective at
the expense of democratic values
- The Administrative State (1948): challenged
the new idea that public administration is
value-neutral, performed in a dispassionate,
almost mechanical manner
- argued that public servants should become
active, informed political savvy, agents of
change, working to protect due process and
public access to government
- his book spawned a debate about politicalversus-“scientific” administration (hasn’t
completely faded even today)