The Death of the Practitioner

Abstract

This article examines how the term "The Practitioner" organizes knowledge and power in public administration, and how it constrains thought about the field's possibilities. The Practitioner has neither the specific qualities it posits as a representative of executive authority, nor the generic, universal quality as a neutral figure of science, stripped of all particular characteristics. The Practitioner is shown to reinforce a preoccupation with a narrow range of social concerns and questions and, ultimately, determines what constitutes legitimate public administration speech and inquiry and who may speak on behalf of administrative realities. On a more fundamental level, however, The Practitioner names a specific kind of formal relationship in which the actual content of the term is less critical than the basic relationship it establishes and seeks to reproduce. Through its pedagogy, public administration fabricates heterogeneous practitioners into The Practitioner. The possibilities for a different kind of relationship are explored via the injunction of David Farmer to embrace the "death of The Practitioner." The article concludes that, in order to move beyond The Practitioner, public administration must consider the significance of its "passionate attachments" to this figure. To this end, an "erotics of public administration" is outlined.