Other Voices/Other Rooms: Towards a Care-Centered Public Administration

Abstract

One of the key contributions of the theorist is to present alternatives—in Truman Capote's (1948) telling phase, “other voices/other rooms”—to taken for granted disciplinary realities through the introduction of new or different perspectives, concepts, and ideas. The “other voice” of feminism has the potential to establish “other rooms” within American public administration that could create spaces for broader theoretical conversations within the discipline. Specifically, this paper will focus on feminist theorists—Joan Tronto and Viriginia Held, among others—who have given voice to care as an important concept and value that hould inform practices in public life. It will argue that within public administration a discourse on care must be developed for the purpose of ensuring that care is considered one of the “hallmarks of good government and meaningful citizenship” (Mackay, 2001, p. 155). To that end, this paper first explores “the other room” of the care perspective, noting that the care perspective offers an alternative framework for public administration that is gender sensitive. Second, five implications of the care perspective for public administration are explicated. These include complicating the discipline's conventional founding narrative, recognizing Mary Parker Follett as a pioneering thinker, legitimating relational leadership, making care ethics more prominent, and establishing a different assumptive base for public administration theory and practice. Third, the paper concludes by arguing that essential to all of the prospective new work within public administration grounded in the care perspective is the establishment of a fresh discourse that legitimizes care narratively by telling the many stories of how care is valued and practiced by people at all levels of government.