Synopsis
This book is a bridge between the technical literature of administrative theory and philosophical discourse. It is needed because an adequate axiology (value theory) of administration is ignored by the former and lacking in the latter. That value theory is necessary to leadership and administration follows directly from decision making and policy formulation, and indirectly from post-modern conditions and context. Moreover, leadership requires self knowledge and motivational insight. The knowledge of good and evil as a critical component of administrative thought ought not to be denied by any technocratic asepsis. Central themes include organization and administrative theory, decisions and policy making, hierarchy, leadership, power, values, and interests. Particular attention is paid to pathologies, ideologies, and the problems of praxis. A robust value theory is presented together with its implications both for the common interest and for personal value auditing. A unique feature of the book is its concurrent presentation in aphoristic form of a general propositional logic of administration. The work is the consolidation of a quarter century of research, teaching, and publication in the subject field. Drawing upon this body of knowledge, the author reconstructs a definitive text along with the extensive new material, notably in the areas of polemic management, ideology, value auditing, and leadership critique.
Review
Peter Ribbins, University of Birmingham, UK
Administration as a field of study and practice, has been riven with fierce paradigm wars. This is a contest which has been fought out between unequal camps on several fronts of which the most crucial is that which separates the many who see administration as a science from the few who view it as an art. In this struggle Christopher Hodgkinson has long been, in Peter Burger's elegant phrase, with Thomas Greenfield, our leading humanistically orientated "condottiere of social perception." For two decades and more in a series of challenging books of which this latest is the most inclusive and important, he has revolutionised the thinking of practitioner and academic alike. He has reestablished the place of philosophy in the field and in doing so has rediscovered the significance of values in administration and the administrator as a moral actor. To paraphrase what Greenfield once said of one of his earlier books "no-one can read Administrative Philosophy: Values and Motivations in Administrative Life with its orchestrated and plangent credos, without knowing that this is a work of great moral architecture, profound and moving." It is also a work of great scholarship, subtle humour, dazzling wit and above all else of humane understanding.
Peter Ribbins, University of Birmingham, UK
Administration as a field of study and practice, has been riven with fierce paradigm wars. This is a contest which has been fought out between unequal camps on several fronts of which the most crucial is that which separates the many who see administration as a science from the few who view it as an art. In this struggle Christopher Hodgkinson has long been, in Peter Burger's elegant phrase, with Thomas Greenfield, our leading humanistically orientated "condottiere of social perception," For two decades and more in a series of challenging books of which this latest is the most inclusive and important, he has revolutionised the thinking of practitioner and academic alike. He has reestablished the place of philosophy in the field and in doing so has rediscovered the significance of values in administration and the administrator as a moral actor. To paraphrase what Greenfield once said of one of his earlier books "no-one can read Administrative Philosophy: Values and Motivations in Administrative Life with its orchestrated and plangent credos, without knowing that this is a work of great moral architecture, profound and moving," It is also a work of great scholarship, subtle humour, dazzling wit and above all else of humane understanding.
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