East Asia in Transition: Toward a New Regional Order

This widely acclaimed work provides a lively counterbalance to the standard assessment-measurement-accountability prescriptions that have made showing you did your job more important than actually doing it. Now extensively revised, it articulates a postmodern theory of public administration that challenges the field to redirect its attention away from narrow, technique-oriented scientism, and toward democratic openness and ethics. The authors incorporate insights from thinkers like Rorty, Giddens, Derrida, and Foucault to recast public administration as an arena of decentered practices. In their framework, ideographic collisions and everyday impasses bring about political events that challenge the status quo, creating possibilities for social change. "Postmodern Public Administration" is an outstanding intellectual achievement that has rewritten the political theory of public administration. This new edition will encourage everyone who reads it to think quite differently about democratic governance.

Biography

Robert S. Ross is associate professor of political science at Boston College and associate-in-research at the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University. He is the author of various works on Chinese policy toward East Asia and U.S.-China relations, including Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989 (1995)