The State of Social Equity in American Public Administration
The State of Social Equity in American Public Administration
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Over the years, public administrators have con- tributed much in helping to create a more equi- table, fairer, and more just America. Yet we have much more to contribute. As a core value in public administration, social equity is no longer novel or new. Nevertheless, during the past thirty years, as social equity has grown in importance in public administration, there is an irony: Americans have become less equal in virtually all aspects of social, economic, and political life. In our literature, in our classrooms, and in our administrative practices we have learned to talk the social equity talk. But if the data on the growing gap between the haves and have-nots in American are any clue, we are not walking the social equity talk. In this essay, I attempt to describe the changing terrain of public administration and sketch the challenges adminis- trators face as they navigate both the theory and the reality of that terrain. Finally, I offer some sug- gestions for walking the social equity talk in the years ahead.
The Evolution of Social Equity in American Public Administration
In his seminal essay of almost a century ago, “General Principles of Management,” Henri Fayol listed equity as one of fourteen general principles. His description of equity was entirely internal, hav- ing to do with equitable or fair treatment of employ- ees. Fayol put it this way: “Desire for equity and equality of treatment are aspirations to be taken into account in dealing with employees. In order to satis- fy these requirements as much as possible without neglecting any principles of losing sight of the gen- eral interest, the head of the business must frequent- ly summon up his highest faculties. He should strive to instill a sense of equity throughout all levels of the scalar chain” (p. 58).
Though claiming equity to be a primary principle of management, Fayol did not consider the details of how to achieve equity in the context of the “scalar chain,” or hierarchy, which contains such obvious inequalities as difference in pay, authority, and responsibility. Furthermore, because his founding essay had primarily to do with business organiza- tion, Fayol did not wrestle with the unique public administration challenges of equity in public policy or service delivery. Except for an essay by Woodrow Wilson, none of the other founding documents con- sider what we now call social equity in public administration.
Wilson pointed out that it is “harder to run a con- stitution than to frame one” and claimed that “administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics”; nevertheless, he describes a form of public administration social equity. Consider these words from his founding essay, “The Study of Administration”: “The ideal for us is a civil service cultured and self-sufficient enough to act with sense and vigor, and yet so intimately connected with the popular thought, by means of elections and constant public counsel, as to find arbitrariness or class spir- it quite out of the question” (p. 24).
Aside from these glancing blows, and the more con- sidered treatment of justice in the early literature, for the first several generations of the field of public administration it was simply assumed that good administration of government was equally good for everyone. It was during the 1960s that it became increasingly evident that the results of governmental policy and the work of public administrators imple- menting those policies were much better for some citizens than for others. Issues of racial and class inequality and injustice were everywhere evident
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and the subject of open anger, indignation, outrage, and passion. Riots in the streets over racial injustice and an unpopular war tend to concentrate the mind. It was in this state of concentration that the phrase social equity entered the literature and later the practices of public administration. Certainly there had always been concern for fairness in the better practices of public administration, but it was not until the 1960s that the phrase social equity became a feature of public administration with an attendant set of concepts and a cluster of shared values.
In a brief and summary form, the initial elements of the concept of social equity are found in the claim that justice, fairness, and equality have everything to do with public administration. First, laws do not carry out themselves; implementation is our work. As one of the early leaders of our field wrote, “pub- lic administration is the law in action.” Second, if public administrators implement the law, can we not bring the law simply and precisely to life as it is writ- ten? No, we cannot. The law is seldom so clear, so precise, or so evident that it can uniformly be applied from case to case to case. Third, in the early years of our field it was written that public adminis- tration should be neutral implementation of law and policy. We know that this is not strictly possible. Public administration is the law in action and involves, indeed requires, interpretation of that law and discretion in its application. Fourth, our public institutions are the setting in which our elected lead- ers, working in our system of democratic self- government, struggle with issues of fairness, justice, and equality. But because public administrators are responsible for carrying out the laws and policies, we too have important struggles with fairness, jus- tice, and equality. As a nation, we are not as fair, as just or equal, as we should be. Public administrators cannot say that these problems belong only to law- makers.
In the early stages of the development of social equi- ty in public administration, it was assumed that other academic fields or disciplines and other bodies
of professional practice were also developing and embracing self-aware concepts of social equity. We now know that this was not the case. Only in recent years have other fields, disciplines, and bodies of professional practice stepped up to consideration of social equity.
So it could be said that, at least with respect to social equity, public administration has led the way.
In the early years of applying concepts of social equity to public administration, emphasis was on issues of race and gender in employment, democrat- ic participation, and service delivery. Efficient and economical management of government agencies characterizes the ethics that guided much early rea- soning in American public administration. The logic of those ethics allowed public administrators to assume that the effects of good management, effi- ciency, and economy would be evenly and fairly dis- tributed among our citizens. Gradually, however, public administration began to acknowledge that many public programs were implemented much more efficiently and effectively for some citizens than for others. Indeed, public administrators could not logically claim to be without responsibility for some practices that resulted in obvious unfairness and injustice, so an argument emerged for social equity as an added ethic in public administration. Eventually, social equity took its place along with efficiency and economy as the “third pillar” of pub- lic administration. Indeed, by the late 1990s these words were in Shafritz and Russell’s standard text:
Because public administrators are responsible for carrying out the laws and policies, we too have important struggles with fairness, justice, and equality. As a nation, we are not as fair, as just or equal, as we should be. Public administrators cannot say that these problems belong only to lawmakers.
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“The ethical and equitable treatment of citizens by administrators is at the forefront of concerns in pub- lic agencies. Reinforced by changing public atti- tudes, the reinventing government movement and civil rights laws, the new public administration has triumphed after a quarter century. Now it is unthinkable (as well as illegal), for example, to deny someone welfare benefits because of their race or a job opportunity because of their sex. Social equity today does not have to be so much fought for by young radicals as administered by managers of all ages” (p. 436).
Over the years the phrase social equality has come to encompass the many complex issues associated with fairness, justice, and equality in public admin- istration. Shafritz and Russell list three qualities of social equity:
First is the obligation to administer the laws they work under in a fair manner. It is hard to believe today that this first obligation was once contro- versial.
The second way of interpreting obligations to advance social equity is to feel bound to proac- tively further the cause—to seek to hire and advance a varied workforce. The attitude requires a specific approach: It is not enough to go out and find qualified minorities. You must go out, find them, and then qualify them. This is why the U.S. armed forces have been so much more successful in their affirmative action efforts than the society as a whole.
Third, government can go only so far in forcing social equity. But there is no limit to the amount of inspiration it can provide to encourage people to do the right, decent, and honorable thing. This encouragement has a name. It is called moral leadership. [pp. 436–437]
Over the years both the subject of social equity and its language have changed. Equity is now more broadly defined to include not just race and gender but ethnicity, sexual preference, certain mental and
physical conditions, language, and variations in eco- nomic circumstances. The words multiculturalism and diversity are now often used to suggest this broader definition of social equity.
There is little doubt that inequality in America would be worse were it not for pubic administra- tors dedicated to social equity in their practice, but there is no question that the broader context of American politics has tilted the playing field toward the privileged and away from the under- privileged, making contemporary commitment on the part of public administrators to social equity particularly difficult.
Some Examples of the Widening Social Equity Gap
The growing acceptance of social equity in public administration over the past thirty-five years has occurred during a time when the actual status of social equity in America has been in steady decline. Although we have been promoting democracy abroad and even fighting to bring it to others, democracy at home is in trouble. The recent report of the Task Force on Inequality in America of the American Political Science Association puts it this way: “Our country’s ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government may be under growing threat in an era of persistent and rising inequality. Disparities of income, wealth, and access to oppor- tunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in many other nations, and gaps between races and ethnic groups persist. Progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed” (p. 651).
At the time of the emergence of social equity in pub- lic administration, racial and gender inequality and discrimination were widespread. But in our time “the scourge of overt discrimination against African Americans and women has been replaced by a more subtle but still potent threat—the growing concen- tration of the country’s wealth and income in the hands of the few” (p. 651). Rising economic inequality is accompanied by other forms of demo-
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cratic privation—highly unequal voices in political affairs and government processes that are much more responsive to the privileged than to other Americans. “Disparities in participation,” the task force goes on to say, “mean that the concerns of lower- or moderate-income Americans, racial and ethnic minorities, and legal immigrants are system- atically less likely to be heard by government offi- cials. In contrast, the interests and preferences of the better-off are conveyed with clarity, consistency, and forcefulness” (p. 658). In addition to the gap between the poor and the rest of society, there is a growing gap between privileged professionals, man- agers, and business owners on the one hand and the middle strata of white, African American, and Latino workers and blue-collar employees on the other. Put bluntly, despite our claimed commitment to social equity, important elements of professional public administration are part of the problem. All of the contemporary social equity research and data seem to indicate that the terrain of social equity has shifted from more-or-less exclusive concentration on the equity issues of minorities to broad considera- tion of how to achieve social equity in the context of growing disparity between the haves and have-nots, recognizing that minorities constitute a dispropor- tionate percentage of the have-nots.
The APSA task force concludes their report with these words:
The Declaration of Independence promised that all American citizens would enjoy equal political rights. Nearly every generation has returned to this promise and struggled to elevate the perfor- mance of American democracy to its high ideals. The promise of American democracy is threat- ened again. The threat is less overt than the bar- riers of law or social custom conquered by earlier generations. Today the risk is that rising economic inequality will solidify longstanding disparities in political voice and influence, and perhaps exacerbate such disparities. Our govern- ment is becoming less democratic, responsive
mainly to the privileged and not a powerful instrument to correct disadvantages and look out for the majority. If disparities of participa- tion and influence become further entrenched— and if average citizens give up on democratic government—unequal citizenship could take on a life of its own, weakening American democra- cy for a long time to come. [p. 662]
In the manner of political science, the APSA Task Force on Inequality in America report calls for research on matters of social equity and for “the engagement of political science with improving American democracy through scholarship” (p. 661). For two reasons, however, those identified with pub- lic administration, either as a field of political science or as a freestanding academic field and body of pro- fessional practice, are inclined to a less passive and more engaged approach to the problems of inequali- ty in America. First, the argument that issues of inequality belong to politics and policy and not to public administration must be rejected. Virtually all empirical research in the field indicates that public administration is highly influential in policy making and implementation. Second, as an academic field, a body of research, and a field of professional practice, public administration has always been applied. After all, how can we run the constitution and carry out the laws if we do not get our hands dirty? Because our work tends to be applied, it is not a surprise that public administration wrestled with issues of social equity for thirty years before our political science col- leagues looked into it. It is also not a surprise that our political science colleagues have chosen to attempt to improve democracy through scholarship,
“If disparities of participation and influence become further entrenched—and if average citi- zens give up on democratic government—unequal citizenship could take on a life of its own, weaken- ing American democracy for a long time to come.”
