The Fantasies of Public Management and Creative-Relational Inquiry: A Psychoanalytic Critique

This paper presents a psychoanalytic deconstruction of the relationship between public management researchers and the fantasies of co-production and citizen participation. This article highlights that given the castration... [ view full abstract ]

This paper presents a psychoanalytic deconstruction of the relationship between public management researchers and the fantasies of co-production and citizen participation. This article highlights that given the castration complex of public administration, formulating a disciplinary identity often means giving up on the idea of directly helping the public—the symbolic mother in this oedipal complex—through our research—as she is constructed as inaccessible and disinterested—and substituting it with a desire to help the practitioner-father who is deemed to have access and knowledge about helping the mother-public. The central position of the practitioner-father in the symbolic order of public administration is also the reason why we continue to cover up the negative aspects of administrative praxis as they problematize the sanitized and idealized version of the practitioner-father. Yet public administration researchers also keep nurturing fantasies to please the mother-public. That is why, we continue to try to convince the practitioners to “care for” the citizens and give them “more voice” in the policy decisions as evidenced by the increasing research on citizen participation in public management. However, we have not yet realized that this cannot happen till we realize that no one has the symbolic phallus i.e., neither the practitioner-father is an all-knowing demagogue nor do we have access to the knowledge that can satisfy the mother-public. Instead, it is only the mother-public that knows what it desires and how to satisfy those desires. Giving up these foundational fantasies will, however, require a fundamental reorientation of our disciplinary identity and research focus.