Public administration and modernism revisited: a maquette of narrative construction

Abstract

Twenty years ago, Hindy Schachter (1989) posed a question about the foundation we use to structure the Public Administration theory narrative. Would an approach based on an art model, rather than the more common science model, produce a narrative with less distortion? This essay employs a definition of modernism developed by Thomas Vargish and Delo Mook outside the purview of public administration and a famous M. C. Escher lithograph as a basis for proposing an alternate way to construct the narrative. It then applies the alternative approach to Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo.

Citation

Cawley, R.M. (2010), "Public administration and modernism revisited: a maquette of narrative construction", International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 500-524. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOTB-13-04-2010-B003