Administration among Ways of Knowing, toward Common Understanding

摘要

Margaret Stout's article "Competing Ontolo-gies: A Primer for Public Administration" is immediately applicable for individuals working across cultures. The public administrator has historically missed the significance of alternative ways of being and knowing, to the lasting disgrace of the field of development administration in particular (Escobar 1994; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997), but with clear application to any instance of working outside one's own community: urban or rural, in the United States or abroad. Beyond this immediate application, Stout's questions draw public administra-tion discourse into the most challenging, exciting, and dynamic social agitations of our time.