As an MPA student, I recall the account that the third Minnowbrook conference gave rise to the concept of 3 E's - Economy, Efficiency and Effectiveness. I still have the index card I wrote with this claim on it, as if it was an immutable fact. As students learning complicated concepts and their application in real-world settings, we did not critically engage with this knowledge (although I anxiously wanted to). In fairness, this requires a transformation in personal capacities that help shift the student beyond the customary role of technician, and a space in which such conversations are encouraged, such as a PhD program. Mary Timney (2009), reflecting on what Dwight Waldo was trying to achieve in the first Minnowbrook conference in 1968, writes,
…show more content…
Bryer (2009) describes the procedure of getting the 56 new scholars at the Minnowbrook Conference Center at Blue Mountain Lake, New York. “Senior scholars were asked to nominate junior scholars for the opportunity to participate in this phase, and some people self-nominated. Approximately 150 names were put into the pool, and 56 were chosen for participation” (p. 102). Upon acceptance, each scholar wrote a critique of the field prior to joining the conference: Bryer’s paper was titled, Un-masking Administrative (Scholars’) Subjectivity: A Liberal Bias or Closeted Conservatism, a plea to enhance public administration’s relevancy as a discipline through a spirit of openness without artificially constructed walls of objective expertise. In phase one of the Minnowbrook conference, these paper critiques facilitated exchange of ideas on issues of importance to the participants. Groups that formed were grounded in topics as diverse as social equity, public financial management, performance measurement, public administration theory, and others. While organizers of the conference agreed the mission of Minnowbrook III was to critique the current state of public administration, Nabatchi, Goerdel, and Peffer feel that some “heavy-handed” critiques never made it to the whole group of participants to discuss. Bryer (2009) is also critical of the facilitation of small discussion groups that failed to give …show more content…
They identify two problems that impede the ability of public administration to govern effectively during these ‘dark times’. First, they believe that public administration has failed to acknowledge itself as a discipline responsible for shaping societal affairs, and interdependently, the second concern is that the field is entrenched in a “bureaucratic pathology” that limits its capacity to address complex policy problems (p. 29). On the later, they argue that democratic ethos, which requires critical attention to the values governance structures and processes imply, particularly as they relate to social inequities, justice, and access to political systems, should be preferred over a bureaucratic ethos (p. 36). Drawing upon the work of Stivers who contemplated the meaning of public service in “dark times” (Stivers 2008, quoted in Nabatchi, Goerdel, and Peffer, p. 32), Nabatchi, Goerdel, and Peffer clarify, “in our view, public administration in dark times is characterized by numerous and growing catastrophic events in social, political, environmental, and economic arenas, significant, persistent, and systematic policy failures across policy domains, and the loss of vibrant public spaces in which citizens can wrestle with important
Bryer (2009) describes the procedure of getting the 56 new scholars at the Minnowbrook Conference Center at Blue Mountain Lake, New York. “Senior scholars were asked to nominate junior scholars for the opportunity to participate in this phase, and some people self-nominated. Approximately 150 names were put into the pool, and 56 were chosen for participation” (p. 102). Upon acceptance, each scholar wrote a critique of the field prior to joining the conference: Bryer’s paper was titled, Un-masking Administrative (Scholars’) Subjectivity: A Liberal Bias or Closeted Conservatism, a plea to enhance public administration’s relevancy as a discipline through a spirit of openness without artificially constructed walls of objective expertise. In phase one of the Minnowbrook conference, these paper critiques facilitated exchange of ideas on issues of importance to the participants. Groups that formed were grounded in topics as diverse as social equity, public financial management, performance measurement, public administration theory, and others. While organizers of the conference agreed the mission of Minnowbrook III was to critique the current state of public administration, Nabatchi, Goerdel, and Peffer feel that some “heavy-handed” critiques never made it to the whole group of participants to discuss. Bryer (2009) is also critical of the facilitation of small discussion groups that failed to give …show more content…
They identify two problems that impede the ability of public administration to govern effectively during these ‘dark times’. First, they believe that public administration has failed to acknowledge itself as a discipline responsible for shaping societal affairs, and interdependently, the second concern is that the field is entrenched in a “bureaucratic pathology” that limits its capacity to address complex policy problems (p. 29). On the later, they argue that democratic ethos, which requires critical attention to the values governance structures and processes imply, particularly as they relate to social inequities, justice, and access to political systems, should be preferred over a bureaucratic ethos (p. 36). Drawing upon the work of Stivers who contemplated the meaning of public service in “dark times” (Stivers 2008, quoted in Nabatchi, Goerdel, and Peffer, p. 32), Nabatchi, Goerdel, and Peffer clarify, “in our view, public administration in dark times is characterized by numerous and growing catastrophic events in social, political, environmental, and economic arenas, significant, persistent, and systematic policy failures across policy domains, and the loss of vibrant public spaces in which citizens can wrestle with important