ADMINISTRATIVE CULTURE - THE CONCEPTS

by Fred W. Riggs, University of Hawaii

Professor R. D. Sharma has asked me to comment on the concept of administrative culture. It is a worthy challenge because the word, culture, has so many meanings that it invites confusion. According to the recently published ENCARTA WORLD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, it means at least nine different things, three of which can be ignored here: they relate to 1. biology as in a culture for growing microorganisms; 2. the microorganisms grown in such an environment; and 3. tillage, as when preparing land for growing crops. The six other sense are all relevant to administrative culture, as summarized below. To help us distinguish between them, a distinctive term is proposed for each manifestation of administrative culture.

1. The Arts - music, literature, sculpture and painting. We may write Culture, capitalized, for this concept and Aesthetic Administrative Culture for the aesthetic products seen in Public Works that glorify the achievements of a People and a State - they adorn public buildings, parks, murals, and sculptures, and they promote ceremonial music and public festivals.

2. Knowledge and Sophistication - the result of an excellent education. Preparing humane public officials, such as members of the Administrative Class, who are capable of integrating and implementing complex policies for the general welfare is an example of Educated Administrative Culture at its best. The tradition of generalist career bureaucracies is as ancient as the Chinese mandarinate. It reached India via the British Imperial Indian Civil Service, from which it migrated to the English Administrative Class and, radically transformed, the American career civil services.

3. Shared Beliefs and Practices - the anthropological sense of a culture includes all the distinctive attitudes and behaviors of a community - in this sense we may speak of bureaucratic culture, referring to the characteristic life-ways of public officials, including military personnel as well as civil servants. The bureaucratic culture may be seen as one dimension of a total cultural system that exists in a single society - or, more broadly, we find patterns of bureaucratic culture that reproduce themselves in many societies where the dynamics of governance by officials generates distinctive cultural features that exist independently of the local cultural system.

4. People who share a Culture - anthropologists also refer to the community whose members adhere to shared beliefs and practices as a culture. In this sense, bureaucratic cultures pertain to bureaucracies or, more broadly, to societies. Traditional societies normally have a well-established cultural system shared by all their members of a society, but modern societies are increasingly heterogeneous as global forces intrude into and transform their ways of life. In this context, bureaucracies increasingly resemble each other across political boundaries, both because administrative organizations spontaneously produce their own distinctive beliefs and practices, and also because public officials actively borrow and export some of their characteristic features.

5. Shared Attitudes - in a metaphoric sense, we speak of a group's code of conduct as its organizational culture. The code of silence, for example, is a common attitude of public officials who conceal each other's misconduct, perhaps hoping thereby to escape personal responsibility - we may call it self-protective administrative culture. One way to identify this form of administrative culture is to observe the changes in attitude and behavior of officials when they are on-duty by comparison with how they act when they are off-duty.

6. Improvement - a systematic effort to enhance skills and capabilities as exemplified in programs of physical culture. Administratively, this can take the form of in-service training and we might understand normative administrative culture as activities that improve the efficiency and quality of public administration through research, education and training. Normative administrative culture results from efforts by political leaders and top bureaucrats to reform (or "re-invent") organizational structure and guidelines in order to achieve more efficiency and responsible governance. No doubt, conscientious public servants also seek to improve their own performance - in this sense administrative culture involves the enhancement of administrative performance. An outstanding example is provided by http://www.lbsnaa.ernet.in/academy/academy.htm ... The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, in Mussoorie, India. A notable center for promoting administrative culture can be found in France at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, http://www.ena.fr/. Comparable facilities in other countries also support training and research programs that promote administrative culture as a normative process - an international list of them can be found at http://www.iiasiisa.be/schools/aesites.htm - web sites of the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Public Administration.

In short, the study of "administrative culture" involves a complex of related but different things. It might enhance the clarity of its work if IPSA/RC48 were to use different terms to identify each of them. All are worthy of study and the umbrella term, administrative culture can be understood as including and linking them in a synthesis.

PRISMATIC CONTRADICTIONS. Let me add a personal note based on my own field research in which I discovered the contradictions that often arise on the basis of overlapping and incompatible cultural systems (the 3^rd concept listed above). I used the prismatic metaphor to refer to the co-existence of traditional and modern cultural systems, each with its distinctive norms and practices. In many cases what is shared is not a single coherent set of traits but a discordant mixture of overlapping, mutually inconsistent, even clashing, beliefs and values. Further information about these questions can be found on the author's http://www2.hawaii.edu/~fredr/welcome.htm#pa Web Site.

In public administration, prismatic clashes lead to formalism. Typically this involves public adherence to internationally sanctioned norms that are secretly violated in favor of local principles that are traditionally sacred. Bribery and corruption is ubiquitous in all countries, but it is especially rife where official rules and laws ban customary practices or prescribe taxes and other obligations that seem unreasonable to citizens and bureaucrats alike. New rules typically call for the equitable treatment of all citizens, whereas traditional norms give priority to family and local community members. Clashes also occur between caste-like social structures that institutionalize inherited differences between social groups, and class-based ideals of social mobility rooted in secular equalitarianism and democratic values.

The hiatus between mutually contradictory systems or cultures, each of which can work well by itself, generates violence and conflict - often producing military rule, anomie, and corruption. I see these as signs of unresolved conflicts between incompatible cultural systems. Culture conflict is a standard focus of anthropological analysis in societies subjected to ethnic diversity, criminal violence, and contradictory role models. Similar principles apply to the explanation of cultural discord as it occurs in contemporary bureaucracies subject to the winds of change now blowing around the world.

SIX CONCEPTS OF ADMINISTRATIVE CULTURE. Each of the six senses of culture listed above presupposes internal consistency among its component practices or traits. In the world today, however, overlapping and incompatible cultural systems generate prismatic contradictions and poly-normative conflicts. Industrial imperialism has for the last two or three centuries produced or aggravated these conflicts, but since the collapse of these empires and the termination of the Cold War, globalization, speeded by the Internet and spreading access to instantaneous communication in cyberspace, has rapidly accelerated the dissemination of modern secular equalitarian norms and systems of democratic governance. These same forces also provoke resistance movements and efforts to preserve indigenous traditions and life styles. Prismatic contradictions with many negative consequences have, therefore, become ever more prevalent and conspicuous in the evolution of conflicted administrative cultures in all countries. The focus on administrative culture organized through IPSA's Research Committee #48 provides a welcome and much needed arena in which to study and seek solutions for these problems.

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Posted 2 July 2001