Administrative Theory & Praxis

Vol. 25, No. 2, 2003: 157–172

Editor’s note: This is an invited essay on the Public Administration Theory Network. Michael Harmon graciously agreed to sift through documents, communicate with people involved in development of the Network, and write a short history. The result is an interesting study in the relationship of a portion of public administration scholarship to the larger field, and it is timely because the Network is 25 years old this year. An essay such as this cannot cover everything of interest, but both longtime and new members may find it useful for understanding the initial and developing nature of the Network. Many thanks to Michael Harmon for his efforts and for this fine history of PAT-Net. RB

PAT-NET TURNS TWENTY-FIVE: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION THEORY NETWORK Michael Harmon The George Washington University AUTHOR’S NOTE

At last year’s PAT-Net meeting in Cleveland, Richard Box asked me write a history of the Network—perhaps on the assumption that I was its oldest living member. Although that would not quite be accurate, I have been associated with PAT-Net throughout its several incarnations, and, indeed, participated in some of the events (and wars) that preceded its founding. I mention this not to take any credit for the Network’s development; quite the contrary, my inquiry has served as a reminder of how meager, compared to those of the many people mentioned here, my own efforts have been. Perhaps my relative distance from the real work performed by so many of PAT-Net’s members over the past twenty-five years, however, can serve as a fair surrogate for objectivity, a quality that in any case few of us take seriously. During the early stages of this project, I considered including a brief intellectual history of the Network—a rough content analysis tracking the evolution of the intellectual fashions and themes reflected in the twenty-five volumes of Dialogue and ATP—in addition to recounting the events, dates, places, and actors (especially the heroes) indispensable to an adequate chronology. Alas, I soon realized that writing an intellectual history, in addition to a more conventional chronology, would be overly ©2003, Public Administration Theory Network

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Administrative Theory & Praxis vVol. 25, No. 2 ambitious in view of the space (and time) limits I had imposed on myself. I do hope, though, that someone else will someday see fit to take on that task. Thus, my more modest ambition in writing this brief history is mainly to satisfy the curiosity of those relative newcomers who may have wondered how, when, and why the Network came into being. I also hope to evoke enough nostalgia among those members who participated in the founding to, among other things, prompt them to fill in the gaps in the story and correct the errors that it no doubt contains.

INTRODUCTION Should one want to identify a date on which to celebrate the anniversary of the “official” founding of the Public Administration Theory Network, May 4, 1978, would probably qualify as the best choice. This is the date on a letter that Guy Adams, then in the process of moving from California State, Hayward, to Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, sent to about fifty academics who, during the preceding eight or nine years, had participated in the theory panels at the annual conferences of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). The Phoenix, Arizona, ASPA conference, held a month earlier, had proved to be a frustrating and disappointing experience for the informal network (lower-case) of theory-oriented scholars. As Adams wrote in his May 4th letter: There has been talk at recent ASPA meetings and in other forums…about the lack of outlet for theoretical ideas in the field of public administration. Many of us have discussed this difficulty as it pertains to the dearth of journals willing to publish theoretical pieces. The recent ASPA conference in Phoenix, as varied as it was, had fewer panels of theoretical interest than past conferences. And generally, there has been concern among a number of us with bringing public administration out of the intellectual and theoretical backwater in which it has remained for so long…. [I]t has occurred to me that a network, or perhaps invisible academy…, of the theoretically oriented in public administration might also be of use. This is important enough to me that I am volunteering to manage such a network, at least for a while. I see my role as network manager as: 1) maintaining a mailing list, 2) facilitating contact amongst the group, and 3) putting out a newsletter/information exchange—as well as other functions that you might think of…. We also need a name; I will call us the “Public Administration Theory Network,” until I get a creative flash, or until some one of you does. (G. Adams, personal communication, May 4, 1978)

“For five dollars or so to help defray printing and mailing costs” (G. Adams, personal communication, May 4, 1978), you could join up.

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ANTECEDENT EVENTS Before moving forward in the Network’s chronology, some mention is needed of how the informal network of public administration theorists initially emerged, and why it was that Guy Adams, in view of his key role in formalizing the Network, became involved in it. Two public administration programs—the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the School of Public Administration at the University of Southern California—are central to this part of the story. The Maxwell connection stems from the so-called New Public Administration (or Minnowbrook) conference held, in September, 1968, at a rustic lodge owned by Syracuse University in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The conference’s benefactor was Dwight Waldo, whose Albert Schweitzer professorship at the Maxwell School provided him with funds to sponsor worthy causes in the academy. In 1967, Waldo attended the Conference on the Theory and Practice of Public Administration, sponsored by the American Academy of Political and Social Science, at which the conferees sought to produce a “high-level, critical assessment of the status and problems of Public Administration” (in Marini, 1971, p. xiv). Although he regarded that conference as largely successful, Waldo noticed that very few of the participants were under age fifty, and began to wonder what the younger generation of scholars in the field thought about public administration’s status, problems, and, most importantly, its future. The following year Waldo named a committee of three junior colleagues at Maxwell—Frank Marini, George Frederickson, and Harry Lambright—to arrange a conference of young (generally age thirty-five and under) public administration academics and practitioners “to discuss whatever was important to them” (p. xiv). Thirty-four attended, ten of who were asked to contribute papers and ten others to provide commentary on them. Three years later, the papers and commentaries were published as a book, which Marini edited, titled Toward a New Public Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective. Although some of the more enthusiastic Minnowbrookers soon began to refer to a “New P.A. Movement,” the diversity of the theoretical orientations represented by the Minnowbrook papers hardly warrants a label signifying such solidarity. Fully half of the papers represented thoroughly mainstream intellectual traditions of the field, while the other half were far from uniform in their critiques of those traditions. Nevertheless, a discernible mood did emerge from the Minnowbrook conference, a combination of discontent about the relevance of the discipline to the important issues of the day (this was 1968, it should be recalled), and optimism about the possibilities for transforming both the study and practice of public administration in socially consequential ways. The effects of that mood were thus far more evident in the

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later informal association among some of the Minnowbrook attendees at ASPA meetings and other venues than in the production of a unified body of theoretical work. The University of Southern California connection to PAT-Net may in large part be traced to the influence of Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, a Brazilian political refugee recruited (indeed virtually rescued) by Frank Sherwood, dean of U.S.C.’s School of Public Administration. Upon joining the U.S.C. faculty in 1966, Guerreiro soon became the intellectual godfather to many of the School’s Ph.D. students, including Larry Kirkhart, a Minnowbrook contributor, and Jong Jun and Richard VrMeer, who later became the first editors of Administrative Theory & Praxis. Michael Harmon, another eventual Minnowbrook contributor who was then teaching at U.S.C., also became one of his proteges. Guerreiro Ramos, who had served on the faculty of the prestigious Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro before his abrupt departure for Los Angeles, was a European-educated scholar steeped in a wide array of Continental philosophical and theoretical traditions. Prominent among these was phenomenology, which Kirkhart (1971) introduced to the American public administration literature in his Minnowbrook paper two years after meeting Guerreiro. His influence is also evident in later works produced by VrMeer and Jun after they joined the Public Administration Department (which VrMeer, in fact, founded) at California State University at Hayward. Also deserving mention in the U.S.C. context is Neely Gardner, who joined the public administration faculty in 1967, a year after Guerreiro arrived. Also recruited by Frank Sherwood, Gardner was an early and influential organization development teacher and practitioner, who had previously served as Director of Training for the State of California under Governor Pat Brown (who, in 1966, was defeated by Ronald Reagan, thereby leaving Gardner without a job). It is probably fair to say that Gardner’s O.D. teachings provided a sort of practical counterpart to Guerreiro’s phenomenology, a linkage discerned mainly by the U.S.C. Ph.D. students. A theoretical approach to organization development partly informed, at least initially, by the phenomenology literature later became a prominent topic at later ASPA conference theory panels and in the writing of some of the network’s (still lower-case) members, such as Kirkhart and Orion White, during the 1970s. Note should also be made of the close ties between U.S.C. and Syracuse during this period. George Frederickson, a U.S.C. graduate shortly before the Guerreiro/Gardner era, joined the Maxwell faculty in the mid-1960s, and was later responsible, no doubt, for inviting Kirkhart, Harmon, and Robert Biller (who several years later returned to U.S.C. from the University of California at Berkeley to serve as the P.A. School’s dean) to Minnowbrook in 1968. Todd LaPorte, formerly a U.S.C. faculty member who later moved to Berkeley in

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1966, also contributed one of the Minnowbrook papers. A year after Minnowbrook, Kirkhart also joined the Maxwell faculty, where he formed a close association with Orion White, yet another of the Minnowbrookers. The incestuous history of PAT-Net’s antecedents culminates in Guy Adams’s arrival as a Ph.D. student at the George Washington University in the early 1970s, about five years after Minnowbrook. On the public administration faculty at G.W. at that time were Harmon and Bayard Catron, the latter of whom had recently received his doctorate in social policy planning at Berkeley, where he had been a graduate student, and later a friend, of Todd LaPorte. While at G.W., Adams developed a keen interest in phenomenology, eventually the subject of his dissertation, which Catron directed. Honing his organizing talents early, Adams formed what he whimsically called the AHCHOO Society—the Ad Hoc Committee to Help Overcome Objectivism—consisting of himself, Catron, Harmon, Peter Vaill, Jerry Harvey (the latter two being members of the organizational behavior faculty at G.W.), and fellow graduate student Jay White, an early member of the network. By 1976, Adams had finished his dissertation, moved to Hayward, and started attending ASPA conferences. The ACHOO Society also disintegrated upon his leaving G.W. Both before and after its “official” founding in 1978, the network’s relation to ASPA, though often troubled and disputatious, was crucial to its rapid formation. About half of the “Minnowbrook book’s” contributors, as early as 1969 or 1970, began appearing on ASPA conference programs and, by 1972, full-blown theory “tracks” (later called “clusters”) had become staples of ASPA’s annual meetings for the remainder of the decade and, though only occasionally, in the 1980s. Theory-oriented academics from outside the Maxwell/U.S.C./Minnowbrook orbit, many from smaller and less-visible public administration programs throughout the United States, already regularly attended the ASPA conferences, and quickly found an intellectual home in, and indeed became founders of, the new theory group. Gaining approval for theory panels from ASPA’s program committees, however, nearly always met resistance. The theorists, at the time, needed ASPA, but ASPA did not need, or at least regard itself as needing, the theorists. Moreover, “theory” never attained the status of a formal ASPA “section,” as did several other of the field’s academic specialties, nor is it clear, in view of the anarchic character of the theory group, that its members seriously sought such a designation. (One of these sections, sometimes confused with the Theory Network, is the Public Administration Research Section, which Frederickson organized in the mid-1980s.) In an e-mail reminiscence, Barry Hammond provides a late, but nevertheless representative, example of how the relationship between ASPA and the theory network led to their eventual parting of the ways.

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I was on several of the national program committees for ASPA and was told by several national council members that the theory “cluster” could be expanded on the program if we would agree to accept “non-theory papers” on the panels. This worked as follows: the theory cluster coordinator would be given an “extra panel or two” in exchange for agreeing to support and sponsor papers “forwarded” by council members. I thought this was not reasonable and said so at some length. I don’t know when the last theory panels were part of the ASPA program. I stopped going to ASPA meetings soon after the [1989] Miami meeting. (personal communication, March 5, 2003)

Some of the ASPA program committees’ resistance to the theory group stemmed from ASPA’s hybrid composition of academics and practitioners, the latter of whom, or so the program organizers often asserted, wanted a clear demonstration of the practical relevance of conference panels, and even practitioner representation on them. It was clear to all, however, that very few city managers, for example, were eager to contribute papers to a panel on the hermeneutic circle, and equally few budget analysts to a discussion of phenomenological reductions. The theorists would counter that attendance at theory panels, which included a surprisingly large number of practitioners who were hungry for intellectual stimulation (or perhaps simply curious), was always high, usually exceeding the capacity of the rooms allocated to them. Sometimes this argument worked, while at other times it fell on deaf ears, reinforcing the theorists’ suspicion that the program organizers’ insistence upon “practitioner relevance” was merely code to disguise the antiintellectualism endemic in the field’s academic mainstream. By the 1978 Phoenix conference, the theory group’s patience with ASPA had worn thin. Dialogue: 1978–1992 A few weeks after Guy Adams’s May 4th letter, he, along with George Goerl of California State/Hayward and Marco Walshok of San Diego State University, sent to an expanded group of recipients a longer letter detailing their aspirations for a Network (now upper-case) newsletter. Portions of that letter aptly summarize much of what the newsletter—and therefore the Network—in fact became during the first few years of its publication. We see ourselves moving toward a threefold program in which we 1) disseminate written materials and ideas…in public administration theory, 2) provide an editorial screening service by a facilitative and supportive group of reviewers for embryonic theoretical efforts, and 3) on an occasional basis publish papers (both single monographs and collections around key themes)….On the distant and fuzzy horizon, we see the possibility of reaching a point where we would consider a more

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formal publication format like a journal or a semi-annual publication of collected papers…. [The Network] takes as one of its main responsibilities an ongoing engagement with the existential mainstream of the field, but at the same time attempts to transcend in some measure the clamor for “here-andnow” relevance, and to speak to broader analytical and normative concerns affecting the development and use of knowledge in the field…. Such a format must inherently be a critical one; a format which offers a place for the scrutiny of conventional knowledge and its underpinnings, which examines assumptions and presuppositions, which unravels the logics of instrumental and prescriptive rationales, and which begins to unpack both the explicit and tacit normative baggage of the concepts…and language used to formally define…the contemporary practice and thinking of public administration…. We want to encourage pieces which would stretch from purely metaanalytical critiques and statements; to epistemological statements; to broadly utopian statements; to particular historical analyses which illuminate critical aspects about the conventional thinking and “doing” that characterize modern public administration and public service. (G. Adams, G. Goerl, & M. Walshok, personal communication, June, 1978)

In the fall of that same year, the Network’s newsletter, Dialogue, began publication. (Oddly, the first issue was titled Dialog, with the “ue” added in all subsequent issues.) Issue Number 1 of Volume 1 (September/October, 1978) consisted almost entirely of letters from new members, who commented on the proposal contained in the Adams/Goerl/Walshok letter, plus brief biographical statements of thirty-three of them. The Network (or PATN, as it was then abbreviated) started out with a total of about forty members, one of whom was Dwight Waldo, who remained an active member until his retirement in 1991. A form on the back page noted that the annual membership fee had now risen to $20.00. All volumes of Dialogue spanned two years (usually July to June) until 1993, when the newsletter was superseded by Administrative Theory & Praxis. The first three volumes included six issues each, reducing to four issues per volume during the final three years of Adams’s editorship (during which time the cost-conscious editor lowered the annual fee to $12.00). All issues in Volumes 1 and 2 (and some in Volume 3) consist chiefly of letters, many of which received replies in later issues; brief and informal articles, sometimes footnoted and sometimes not; short book reviews, mainly written by Adams; and announcements of forthcoming conferences organized by members of the Network and like-minded academics from other disciplines. Because so few of the items printed in the first two volumes clearly qualified as articles, indexing did not begin until Volume 3, when the newsletter began to resemble an informal journal consisting mainly of brief (though, on

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occasion, fairly long) articles. Between 1980 and 1986 (Volumes 3 through 8), multiple contributors to Dialogue included: Bayard Catron, Ralph Clark Chandler, Robert Golembiewski, Ralph Hummel, Vincent Ostrom, Ron Sokolsky, Camilla Stivers, Frederick Thayer, Curtis Ventriss, and Sir Geoffrey Vickers. PAT-Net members will no doubt differ about which were the most influential articles published during Adams’s term as editor; but surely one of the most talked-about, appearing in 1984, was the so-called “Blacksburg Manifesto” (formally titled “The Public Administration and the Governance Process: Refocusing the American Dialogue”) (later published in Wamsley et al., 1987), written by Virginia Tech University’s Public Administration and Policy faculty, and which provoked conversation and written responses both within and outside the Network’s membership for several years afterward. The first years of the Network’s activities were not limited exclusively to Adams’s publication of Dialogue. In a 1982 letter to the membership, Adams noted that the Network had sponsored panels and informal discussions at the ASPA meetings in Detroit and San Francisco, a practice that continued intermittently until the Network’s break from the national ASPA conference in 1988. Included in that letter was a list of the Network’s current membership, which had increased to 110, of whom still only four hailed from countries other than the United States. In 1984, after six years of coordinating the Network and editing Dialogue, Guy Adams decided that it was time for someone else to coordinate and edit. He made his announcement at an informal (as always) gathering of the Network’s members at the Denver ASPA meeting in April of that year. Unprepared for such unwelcome news, the membership found only one volunteer, Gerald Caiden, of the University of Southern California, willing to take on the editorship. His tenure lasted just one year—during which four issues of Dialogue were nevertheless produced—and was by most accounts a difficult one. Personalities clashed, arguments erupted over the intellectual content and format of the newsletter, and paid membership precipitously declined. In a letter attached to the fourth issue of Volume 7, Caiden lamented that it was “possibly the last and [thus] a collector’s item.” Only sixteen paid memberships had been received, while “PATN carries over seventy (70) free loaders who have not responded in any fashion to letters, issues, and telephone calls” (G. Caiden, personal communication, March 1, 1985). He concluded by requesting that the Network’s members assemble the following month at the ASPA conference in Indianapolis where, “hopefully, it will not be a wake but an awakening” (G. Caiden, personal communication, March 1, 1985). The Indianapolis meeting was in fact an awakening, though possibly not the sort that Caiden expected. The members present selected Barry Hammond, from Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, as Dialogue’s new editor,

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while Henry Kass, of Lewis and Clark University assumed the role of coordinating many of the Network-sponsored symposia, ASPA panels, and other activities. Hammond’s term as editor lasted seven years (one year longer than Adams’s), during which, among other things, he reformatted the newsletter, spruced it up with a nice cover and plastic binding (no more stapled sheets of yellow paper), and took full advantage of a new computer technology called “word-processing.” Moving Out and Leaving Town: The Divorce from ASPA As the publication of Dialogue continued, so too did the Network’s process of separating from the national ASPA conferences. At the encouragement of the Network membership, Henry Kass and Douglas Morgan, both from Lewis and Clark University, organized, in April, 1988, the inaugural National Symposium on Public Administration Theory, convened in Portland, Oregon, immediately preceding the National ASPA meeting, which was also held there. More often simply called the “theory conference,” this and subsequent symposia “piggy-backed” on the ASPA meetings through 1993. Finally a free-standing event, and thus rid of the strictures imposed by ASPA program committees, the 1988 symposium was both well-attended and enthusiastically received. Its theme dealt with the search for a new identity for public administration, and resulted in the publication two years later of several of the symposium papers in a book, edited by Kass and Catron (1990), titled Images and Identities in Public Administration. The issuance of the Images book began a nearly decade-long association with Sage Publications, which concluded with a Network-sponsored series (edited by Kass) of five books—by Larry Terry, Michael Harmon, Geoffrey Vickers, O. C. McSwite, and Guy Adams and Danny Balfour—focusing on new trends in public administration theory. The theory symposium/conference has been held every year since 1988. With the exception of 1989 and 1990 (Miami and Los Angeles), each meeting has been hosted by a local university in the host city. (See Table 1 for a listing of the conference sites, hosts, and host institutions.) By 1994, however, the aggrieved party in the divorce (the Network) had not only “moved out,” but also “left town.” In that year, the Network joined forces with ASPA’s Public Administration Teaching Section in sponsoring back-to-back, two-day conferences in different cities and months than the ASPA conferences. Many Network members were also members of the Teaching Section, and stayed to participate in both meetings. The first of these “dual” conferences was held in Akron, Ohio (hosted by the University of Akron), an arrangement that lasted six years, concluding with the 2000 meetings in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. PAT-Net was single again, although reconciliation with the Teaching Section

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remains as a future possibility. So too, it seems, has a reconciliation occurred with ASPA during the past few years. Theory panels have reappeared as almost regular features of National ASPA conference programs, with Network members now functioning like section members in organizing panels. Table 1: PAT-Net Annual Conference Sites Year

City

Host Institution

Site Host(s)

1988 1989

Portland, OR

Lewis & Clark University

Henry Kass, Doug Morgan

Miami, FL

(No host university)

Jay White (program organizer)

1990

Los Angeles, CA

(No host university)

Camilla Stivers, Henry Kass (program organizers)

1991

Washington, DC

George Washington Univ.

Cynthia McSwain

1992

Chicago, IL

Roosevelt University

Len Robins

1993

Hayward, CA

California State, Hayward

Jong Jun, Richard VrMeer

1994

Akron, OH

University of Akron

Danny Balfour

1995

Seattle, WA

Seattle University

John Collins

1996

Savannah, GA

College of Charleston

Arthur Felts

1997

Richmond, VA

Virginia Commonwealth U.

Blue Wooldridge, David John Farmer

1998

Colorado Springs, CO Univ. of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Richard Box

1999

Portland, OR

Portland State University

Henry Kass, Douglas Morgan

1999

Nepean , NSW, Australia (regional)

University of Western Sydney

Alex Kouzmin

2000

Fort Lauderdale, FL

Florida Atlantic University

Hugh Miller

2001

Leiden, Netherlands

University of Leiden

Mark Rutgers, Hendrik Wagenaar, Petra Schreurs

2002

Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland State University

Camilla Stivers

2003

Anchorage, AK

University of Alaska

Steven Aufrecht

2004

Omaha, NE

Univ. of Nebraska, Omaha

Richard Box

Administrative Theory & Praxis In 1992, the leadership of the Public Administration Theory Network moved west to California State University at Hayward, with Jong Jun and Richard VrMeer assuming control (loosely speaking) from Barry Hammond. Dialogue was not published in 1992, which accounts for the absence of a Volume 14. Indeed, only one issue of Volume 13 appears to have been produced. In addition to hosting the Theory Symposium at Hayward in 1993, Jun and VrMeer transformed Dialogue into a full-fledged journal, titled

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Administrative Theory & Praxis (ATP). The first issue of Volume 15 appeared early in 1993, so that henceforth ATP volumes would coincide with the calendar year. The new editors’ inaugural volume contained just two issues, increasing to three issues during each of the next four years, and, finally, four issues per year since 1998. (For a complete listing of Dialogue and ATP editors, years, and volumes, see Table 2.) Within a year of its launching, ATP had added a separate book review section, with Camilla Stivers serving as editor (later succeeded by Lisa Zanetti), and a “Commentary” section edited by Henry Kass. Later retitled “Forum,” this section was subsequently edited by Cheryl King and now by Mohamad Alkadry. An editorial board of 37 members was soon listed under the journal’s masthead. Table 2: Publication Chronology of Dialogue and Administrative Theory & Praxis Vol.

Year(s)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

1978-79 1979-80 1980-81 1981-82 1982-83 1983-84 1984-85 1985-86 1986-87 1987-88 1988-89 1989-90 1990-91 1991-92 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

No. of issues 6 6 6 4 4 4 4 4 3 4 4 2 1 0 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 (anticipated)

Editors Guy Adams (Dialogue)

Gerald Caiden (Dialogue) Barry Hammond (Dialogue)

Jong Jun and Richard VrMeer (ATP)

Jong Jun (ATP)

Richard Box (ATP)

Jun and VrMeer shared the principal editorship of ATP and jointly coordinated PAT-Net’s other functions until 1997, when administrative duties at his university forced VrMeer to step aside, leaving Jun, alone, as the main man. (At Dvora Yanow’s suggestion, Jun and VrMeer also semi-officially coined the acronym PAT-Net, from the earlier PATN, a change that briefly dismayed a few of the old loyalists, including Camilla Stivers, who complained that it sounded like a brand of hair spray or the name of a

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computer game. They were quickly forgiven, however, in view of the reservoir of good will accumulated from a membership grateful for their having revitalized the Network.) Launching ATP entailed some risk. Like its predecessor, Dialogue, the journal in its early years was chronically short of publishable manuscripts. A chief reason for creating ATP, in fact, was the editors’ belief that a journal would help greatly in attracting more and better manuscripts. Judging from the impressive, sometimes even enormous, size of ATP’s more recent issues, they appear to have been right. As Jun has recently noted, at first he and VrMeer “had an informal process of reviewing and selecting articles and inviting our colleagues to contribute. Developing symposium issues was another way of energizing people’s collaboration” (personal communication, March 7, 2003). A full refereeing process started with the first issue of 1998 (Volume 20), when the journal began quarterly publication. Seven years has thus far proved to be limit of Dialogue/ATP editors’ endurance; so, in 2000 (Volume 20), the journal’s editorship shifted once again, this time to Richard Box, at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Responsibilities for editing the journal and coordinating the Network were then divided, with Gary Marshall, also at Omaha, agreeing to serve (until 2002) as PAT-Net’s coordinator. The Network now has 209 members. PAT-Net Goes Global The application form regularly appearing on the back page of each ATP issue specifies the cost (currently $35.00) of membership in U. S. dollars. This is a useful qualifier in view of the large number—now 58—of non-U.S. PATNet members. (See Table 3 for a breakdown of Network membership by country of origin.) By 2002, ATP’s editorial board of 48 members included thirteen from outside the United States, representing Australia, Canada, Denmark, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The first non-U.S. Network member was Jaap Breunese of the Free University in Amsterdam. Breunese, who contributed an article to Dialogue in 1980, no longer appeared on the Network’s membership list in 1982, but the names of five other non-U.S. members did (one each from Australia, the Netherlands, and Mexico, and two West Germans). Roger Wettenhall, a longtime faculty member at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (as of 1990, the University of Canberra), was the first Australian member, followed shortly afterward by Hal Colebatch of Kuring-gai College of Advanced Education in Sydney. (By 1986, these were still the only two Australian members of the total of eight non-U.S. members.) Each subsequently a contributor to Dialogue, Wettenhall and Colebatch, although already known

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Table 3: 2003 PAT-Net Membership by Country (58 non-U.S.): United States China

151 15

Netherlands 8 Australia 8 Korea 6 United Kingdom 4 Canada 3 Denmark 2 Japan 2 One member each: Belgium, Cameroon, Germany, Ireland, Nepal, Portugal, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine Total: 209 members; 18 countries Source: 2003 PAT-Net Membership Directory

to one another, joined the Network via different, but ultimately converging, routes. Wettenhall’s association with the Network can be traced back to the early 1970s, when he first met Dwight Waldo, who spoke to a group of political science and public administration faculty on a visit to Canberra. Stating his displeasure about the condescension shown by Australian political scientists toward academic public administration (“a ‘dirty’ bit of a ‘real’ discipline”), Wettenhall was pleasantly surprised to hear Waldo’s expression of sympathy for his complaint. Wettenhall later visited the Maxwell School in 1978, where Waldo told him about the recent creation of the Network, which he joined almost immediately. By this time Wettenhall had already read the Minnowbrook book, published a few years earlier, and was eager to read additional American material in that same genre. He followed up his interest during a 1984 sabbatical at U.S.C., where Gerald Caiden was then editing Dialogue, thus providing him further opportunities to talk with Network members. Colebatch and a Kuring-gai colleague, Pieter Degeling, first heard about the Network from Michael Harmon, whom the two Australians met at the 1982 ASPA conference in Honolulu. Using PAT-Net as a rough model, Colebatch and Degeling formed, about two years later, a counterpart network called Australian and Pacific Researchers in Organisation Studies (APROS). Colebatch (1984) described the new association to Dialogue readers two years later; and Wettenhall (1986) reported on PAT-Net and Dialogue at the 1986 APROS meeting in Melbourne, which Harmon attended and, as Wettenhall recently reminded him, helped spread the word of the Network’s existence. Early APROS members included Wettenhall, Colebatch, Alex Kouzmin, and Stewart Clegg, all four of whom still belong to PAT-Net.

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The Australians’ visibility in PAT-Net has steadily increased since the 1980s, as evidenced by their prominent attendance at the annual Network symposia (Judy Johnston, Adrian Carr, and Guy Callendar frequently participate), publication in and board membership on ATP, and participation on symposium planning committees. In June, 1999, soon after the annual symposium in Portland, the University of Western Sydney, in Nepean, hosted the first PAT-Net-sponsored (regional) event held outside the United States. The Nepean meeting was organized by Alex Kouzmin, Jong Jun, and Margaret Vickers. Although only six or seven American members made the long trip, the venue proved convenient for many of PAT-Net’s growing Asian contingent, many of whose papers later appeared in a special issue, which Jun (2001) edited, of The Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management. Korean and, more recently, Chinese membership (now with six and sixteen members, respectively) has increased sharply, although the Asian members’ attendance at the annual Network symposia has typically not been high. Tied with Australia with eight members, the largest European contingent of PAT-Net is from the Netherlands, an association that began when Hendrik Wagenaar, of the University of Leiden, attended the 1993 symposium at Hayward. He came at the encouragement of Hayward faculty member Dvora Yanow, who a decade earlier had met Wagenaar, then starting his Ph.D. studies at M.I.T. A year after the Hayward meeting, Wagenaar invited Yanow to teach in Leiden for a year, where she met (and recruited) Mark Rutgers, Jos Raadschelders, Paul ‘t Hart, and Mark Bovens, all junior faculty at the time. Within just a few years, Dutch attendance at the Network symposia had risen dramatically, representing not only Leiden, but Tilburg, Amsterdam, and Utrecht Universities as well. PAT-Net’s international character was such that, in June of 2001, the University of Leiden sponsored the first Network annual symposium held outside of the United States. Mark Rutgers, Wagenaar, and Petra Schreurs hosted and organized the event (conceived three years earlier at the snowbound Colorado Springs meeting), which drew, as expected, the largest European attendance in the symposium’s history. Of the more than 150 people who attended, half were from the United States, and the rest from all over the globe, including one participant from South Africa. An Afterthought on Dialogue Richard Box recently told me that, at the time he asked me to write this, he had not realized that 2003 would mark PAT-Net’s silver anniversary. Nor had I realized it until noticing, upon checking Table 2 for errors, that it ended with the twenty-fifth volume of Dialogue/Administrative Theory & Praxis. The fun of writing this small bit of history on the occasion of that anniversary has

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stemmed chiefly from trading reminiscences, via e-mail correspondence, with twenty long-standing members of the Network (listed under References), whose memories were nearly always clearer than my own. Those reminiscences, though sometimes recalling outrages endured at the hands of our detractors (and sometimes ourselves), in the main reflect a palpable sense of pride about what PAT-Net both was and has become. One concern occasionally expressed in that correspondence, however, deserves mention, namely, a feeling that the progressive formalization of the Network may well have stifled the spontaneous give-and-take that earlier characterized both its meetings and published communications. I had, in fact, ended an earlier draft of this article (quite unwisely, as it turns out) by quoting one correspondent who had lamented: “We just don’t dialogue anymore.” Within just a few days, four reviewers of the draft wrote back—begging to differ. One reviewer correctly noted that dialogue can connote many things other than a roomful of people talking together, adding that his almost daily email correspondence and telephone conversations with other Network members provide, both for him and a colleague with whom he had recently spoken, a kind of dialogue that helps to sustain their intellectual lives. Moreover, all four reviewers noted that various symposia published in ATP, plus its Forum section, very often include responses—themselves a form of dialogue—to articles that have appeared in the journal. Another reviewer reminded me that a broader dialogue in which PAT-Net members participate extends far beyond the pages of ATP and the annual Network symposia to include contributions to other prominent journals in our field, including Public Administration Review, Administration & Society, American Review of Public Administration, Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, Journal of Public Affairs Education, among others. Despite their intellectual diversity, the writings of PAT-Net members do, in fact, comprise a body of work reflecting a distinctive and critical point of view no longer located wholly outside public administration’s academic mainstream. Our dialogue, both written and oral, is not just among ourselves. Finally, another reviewer noted that writing constitutes a form of dialogue, including both the internal conversation entailed in the act itself as well as the conversations with others that make that act possible. He cautioned against assuming too direct a causal connection between the fact of PAT-Net membership and the content of what each of us has actually written; but, speaking for myself, I cannot imagine that very much of my own work (for better or worse) would even faintly resemble its current form were it not for my long association with PAT-Net. Nor, though it pains me somewhat to say so, can I imagine that many people outside the Network would take the time to read it.

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REFERENCES Colebatch, H. K. (1984). Beyond bureaucracy: Introduction to APROS colloquium. Dialogue, 7, 21–23. Jun, J. (Ed.). (2001). The Asian crisis: Its sources, administrative inefficiency, and corruption. The Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 9, 1–45. Kass, H. D., & Catron, B. L. (Eds.). (1990). Images and identities in public administration. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kirkhart, L. (1971). Toward a theory of public administration. In F. Marini (Ed.), Toward a new public administration: The Minnowbrook perspective (pp. 127–164). Scranton, PA: Chandler. Marini, F. (Ed.). (1971). Toward a new public administration: The Minnowbrook perspective. Scranton, PA: Chandler. Wamsley, G. L., Goodsell, C. T., Rohr, J. A., White, O. F., Jr., & Wolf, J. F. (1987). The public administration and the governance process: Refounding the American dialogue. In R. C. Chandler (Ed.), A centennial history of the American administrative state (pp. 291–317). New York: Free Press. Wettenhall, R. (1986, Fall). A report on the Public Administration Theory Network. Dialogue, 8, 22–70.

Note: Uncited quotations and other references are all from recent e-mail correspondence. I thank the following PAT-Net members for their prompt replies to my many questions: Guy Adams, Steven Aufrecht, Richard Box, Bayard Catron, David John Farmer, Barry Hammond, Ralph Hummel, Jong Jun, Henry Kass, Alex Kouzmin, Larry Luton, Gary Marshall, Cynthia McSwain, Hugh Miller, Mark Rutgers, Camilla Stivers, Roger Wettenhall, Jay White, Orion White, and Dvora Yanow.

Michael Harmon is Professor of Public Administration at the George Washington University, where he has taught since 1970. His most recent book is Responsibility as Paradox: A Critique of Rational Discourse on Government. He is currently completing a book of essays on Pragmatism and Public Administration.

Michael Harmon - Public Administration Theory Network

years, however, can serve as a fair surrogate for objectivity, a quality that in any case few of us ... Guy Adams, then in the process of moving from California State, Hayward, to. Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, sent to about fifty.

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