TO REFRAME A CONSTITUTION: PUBLIC SERVICE IN A CONSUMPTIVE STATE STEVEN T. SALMI Bachelor of Liberal Arts The Evergreen State College September, 1988 Master in Public Administration The Evergreen State College September, 1995 Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN URBAN STUDIES AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS at the CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY July, 2010 © COPYRIGHT BY STEVEN T. SALMI 2010 This dissertation has been approved for the College of URBAN AFFAIRS and the College of Graduate Studies by ____________________________________________________ Dissertation Chairperson, Professor Camilla Stivers, Ph.D. ___________________________________ College of Urban Affairs, Date _____________________________________________________ Professor Jennifer K. Alexander, Ph.D. ___________________________________ College of Urban Affairs, Date _____________________________________________________ Professor Nancy Grant, Ph.D. ___________________________________ Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies, The University of Akron, Date To Cindy, Jason, McKenzie and Rikki TO REFRAME A CONSTITUTION: PUBLIC SERVICE IN A CONSUMPTIVE STATE STEVEN T. SALMI ABSTRACT This normative analysis builds upon Ulrich Beck’s world risk society theory to argue that the United States is making a shift of revolutionary proportions from an administrative state to a consumptive state. Public administration theory is assessed for its ability to address a consumptive state’s unprecedented dynamics, e.g., accelerating technoscientific development and mega-hazards such as global warming. Qualitative evidence suggests that the field’s adaptability has been limited by a continued, if generally unacknowledged, embrace of obsolete normative commitments such as to a politics-technoscience dichotomy, contempocentrism, and overconsumption. The sustainability movement, a discourse coalition with roots largely outside public administration, is presented as having the greatest potential of transcending the field’s limitations if it avoids cooptation by a technocratic mindset. Institutional implications of knowledge production are critiqued and reforms suggested. A new school of thought is sketched – sustainable public service – that imports sustainability principles into public administration education. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................v LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ vii LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................1 II. WORLD RISK SOCIETY THEORY ........................................................15 III. ADAPTATION TO ACCELERATING CHANGE ..................................52 IV. TWO KEY NORMATIVE FOUNDATION STONES .............................85 V. CONSUMPTION AND COMMODITIZATION ....................................104 VI. CONSUMPTIVE CITIZENSHIP & INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE .......124 VII. THE RISE OF A CONSUMPTIVE STATE ...........................................151 VIII. CONTINGENCIES OF REVOLUTIONARY ACTION ........................171 IX. SEE NO REVOLUTION, HEAR NO REVOLUTION ...........................195 X. THE SUSTAINABILITY MOVEMENT: AN OVERVIEW .................234 XI. SUSTAINABILITY FOR WHOM? ........................................................254 XII. TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE PUBLIC SERVICE ...............................282 GLOSSARY ..................................................................................................................309 END NOTES ..................................................................................................................320 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................340 vi LIST OF TABLES Table I. The nine characteristics of industrial society and risk society hazards .................18 II. Politics and subpolitics in simple and reflexive modernity ...................................46 III. Baudrillard’s phases of the image applied to the Kyoto Protocol .........................82 IV. Driving forces behind environmental destruction .................................................98 V. Global consumption classes .................................................................................106 VI. Commodity potential of basic needs ....................................................................111 VII. Linkage between personal and professional consumptive practices ...................142 VIII. Philosophical characteristics of administrative and consumptive states .............162 IX. Institutional responsiveness and governance gaps: four extremes .....................177 X. Eras in American public administration ..............................................................197 XI. Risk society hazard characteristics, ranked according to prominence within public administration discourse ................................................................205 XII. Philosophical underpinnings of sustainability schools of thought ......................260 XIII. Interaction between sustainability schools and spheres of action .......................266 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The consumptive citizenship feedback loop ........................................................137 2. Public administration’s theoretical triad ..............................................................202 3. The sustainability movement’s theoretical triad ..................................................256 viii “A new era has come upon us like a sudden vision of things unprophesied and for which no polity has been prepared.” — Woodrow Wilson, 1901 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In the 1980s Dwight Waldo argued that more attention needed to be paid to the rise of a postindustrial society. He insisted that this shift would “affect public administration as profoundly as did the arrival of industrialism” (1984, lvii). A generation of thinkers has, in effect, responded to Waldo's call. Revolutionary rhetoric is trendy, with the literature rife with post-isms, reinventions, and refoundings. Charles Goodsell has lauded public administration’s intellectual life as “animated, feisty, energetic, lively, and loudly argued” (1995, ix). Others have noted, however, that a lively conversation does not guarantee the ability to transcend the problematic aspects of industrial society, which is also referred to as modernity. “(W)e are unable to think ourselves out of a paper bag,” warns Ralph Hummel. “For, literally, to escape means to fight what we have become; but what we have become determines that the only way we can fight to escape is to use the tools of modernity itself” (1994, 265). If public administration is indeed the “identified patient” of democracy’s dysfunctions (McSwite 1997, 10), then the direction of the field in a postindustrial political economy arguably takes on an importance well beyond its modest plot of land in the sprawling intellectual suburbia of contemporary American scholarship. 1 A major theme in recent public administration theory is that better understanding a postindustrial order requires the field to develop a higher level of reflexivity about its normative assumptions. For example, O. C. McSwite1 has argued that too many of the field's assumptions, “despite their centrality to the discussion, remain implicit, undisclosed, and undiscussed” (1997, 2). This essay focuses on an area that has been under-discussed, despite its central importance in a postindustrial society: the insidiously powerful relationship between public administration, technoscientific change, and consumption. SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT Evidence is presented that the U.S. is making a shift of revolutionary proportions from an administrative state (Waldo 1984) to a consumptive state. This new state is dominated by a world risk society (e.g. Beck 1992a; 2009) of unprecedented hazards that result from accelerating technoscientific development and overconsumption. A focus of discussion is global warming,2 which is presented as an archetypal mega-hazard. The transition to a consumptive state can result in widening governance gaps between the scale, speed, and complexity of global warming and the polity’s ability to respond to it. Failure to close these governance gaps could be devastating, both in the direct harm that results as well as a decline in the legitimacy of democratic forms of governance. American public administration may be only one actor in a complex global drama, but it does possess a modicum of power through its regulatory authority, access to technoscientific knowledge, and consumptive discretion. This power, which often manifests in seemingly mundane professional rituals by practitioners as well as theorists, 2 can either support or resist adequate responses to global warming. The field will not rise to the challenge without making a paradigm shift in its theory and practice. I argue that, despite the diversity in public administration’s scholarly schools of thought, the field is dominated by an orthodoxy. Challenging it requires debunking a central tenet of American administrative theory for the last century: that the focus should be on more effectively administering the U.S. constitution rather than reframing it (Wilson 1887;