Administrative Fiction and Credibility

Abstract

T HE DEVELOPMENT of empirical research and scientific methodology in the study and practice of administration has induced on the one hand a skepticism concerning the validity of any and all generalizations and on the other has promoted painstaking analysis of any kind of microcosm, relevant or otherwise. While the literature of political scientists on the political and administrative novel tends to support the value of fiction for professional purposes, colleagues informally have voiced skepticism about spending time on intentional fiction. That the study of administrative novels has not been seriously launched is as much a testimony to professional skepticism, if not outright rejection, as an unwillingness to launch into this new aspect of the discipline. Yet fiction remains an important human output, a social output, and administrative novels and stories continue to appear. It is germane for the student and practitioner of administration to evaluate such products for purposes of his own and his discipline. Rowland Egger, Edwin Bock (in the pages of this Review), Dwight Waldo and others have presented concepts of definition and scope.' First we must consider a central problem which raises the hackles of the social scientist when he reads fiction for professional purposes: the problem is that of credibility. Students of administration tend to approach credibility in one of two ways, both somewhat alien to the writer of fiction. The literally observed phenomenon, precisely described with its theoretical implications carefully ex-