The Importance of Social Equity to Prevent a Hollow Public Administration

In their contribution to this journal, Robert F. Durant and David H. Rosenbloom (2017) seek to identify factors that have contributed to shortcomings in linking public administration research and theory to practice. In their view, the field faces a “theory–practice conundrum” (p. 719). They raise a wide range of issues that could be explored further, but we think it is imperative to address one of the arguments in this commentary—that the emphasis on social equity has weakened public administration and should be removed as a central defining value of the field. They “critique the logic and empirical basis of two major pillars of public administration”—efficiency (a topic for another discussion) and social equity (p. 719). They view these  normative values as “weak and decontextualized” (p. 720).