Politics-administration dichotomy and political representation
While gesturing beyond the culture of modernity and its assumptions and preoccupations, Catlaw (2007) argues there is a continued tendency to view the primary problems of public administration narrowly in scientific, epistemological terms rather than broader question about the ontology of modernity, specifically, its particular construction of the political and the divisions, relations, and objects that it posits. As discussed earlier, the political ontology of representation begins from the presupposition of ‘the People’ (Catlaw, 2006). In effect, this is a name for a positive conception of the human world and in the language of deconstruction it presumes a doctrine of being. Catlaw (2007) explains, “representation asserts that there is a constituted political community that is antecedent to any formulation of a state or government. Political institutions, thus, are not generative but, analogous to a non-constructivist view of scientific concepts, merely represent (as in making present again) the given preferences and desires of the People” (p. 228). While modern political discourse collapses this distinction into the nation-state, particularly in international relations, the split clearly persists in the idea of popular sovereignty and representative government.
Catlaw maintains the division between the political and the domestic constitute the very core of Western political life since at least the Greeks. By attaching the field to a specific vision of socio-political order, scholars in public administration have always been confronted with difficult choices about critiquing, affirming, rejecting, or assuming these divisions. Catlaw considers that if the boundarie...
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... human processes to make sense of the world. Historically as well as social-scientifically, the mistake is to view structure as permitting us to think that, once and for all, we have a sure grip on the Past and to “choose one of these histories to the exclusion of all others. In other words, while Bevir understandably sees a concern for structuralist ahistoricism, Catlaw sees as a fundamental problem with historisizing.
These works on legitimacy and modern representations of authority are deeply interconnected with human subjectivity, a new political ontology and biopolitical practice. This requires a challenge to the traditional views on legitimacy and subjectivity. The transformations of these take shape and form in Catlaw’s book Fabricating the People, and further developed in several papers. The following section will explore Catlaw’s posthumanist biopolitics.
1. Over time, how have members of the field of public administration examined the subject of policy and administration (has the dichotomy changed)? The studies of policy and administration have been viewed in different ways; overtime, the pre-modern era to its now 21st century outlook has changed. In the beginning, kings had treasures and tax collector to oversee the daily business of the empire. Today these members are public servants working in all levels of government; implanting various inputs
America as it establishes the values and principles that would govern the nation’s political system. Yet, while the Constitution is a guiding document, it is intentionally vague leaving many aspects of public administration, or the implementation of government policy, up to interpretation. Therefore, since the earliest days of its ratification, the implementation of the Constitution has been contingent upon the political perspectives of the leaders of the Nation. These perspectives were not explicitly
Many political scientists symbolically consider the Balance-of-Power concept central to a firm understanding of classical realism. As T. V. Paul (2004) explains, the Balance of Power’s common form appears as a system of alliances in which the stronger nations deter their weaker counter-parts from acting belligerently (Paul, 2004). This symbiotic concept of balancing power, nevertheless, is not an inherent thought and specifically appeared in the modern era. Its entrance into the world of international
A research study was conducted on "Beyond Single Identity &Pathology: Revealing Coherent Multiple Selves and Transformative Activism in the Narratives of Two Transgender Women" by VanOra and Ouellette (2009). This paper used a conceptual framework based in critical personality psychology and a narrative strategy of inquiry to understand how two transgender women, whose lives and identities are depicted by sociological and clinical literatures as unidimensional and pathological, construct a set of
In Jhumpa lahiri’s novel The Lowland, one can easily find the depiction of formation with the evolution of characters’ individuality, which keeps on changing from time to time. It too tries to inhabit a sort of fluidity in the newly established cultural patterns they move to which are on the other hand tries to redraw on the canvas of previous culture they inherit. The novel The Lowland of Jhumpa Lahiri deals with the expatriate Bengali family that move on to the Rhode Island or the West to find