Constructivism and Governmentality in Postmodern Public Administration

A Review of Charles J. Fox and Hugh T. Miller’sPostmodern Public Administration

1. Introduction

Traditional public administration has generally understood government through concepts such as bureaucracy, hierarchy, rules, authority, rationality, institutions, and administrative control. Such approaches often assume that organizations and institutions are relatively stable entities and that administrative problems can be addressed through rational analysis and appropriate institutional arrangements.

Fox and Miller challenge this conventional understanding. In Postmodern Public Administration, they attempt to develop a postmodern framework that questions the apparently fixed character of governmental institutions. Their starting point is that bureaucratic practices do not simply exist independently of human beings. Instead, they emerge through patterns of human thought and action. The authors therefore begin their reconstruction of public administration with social constructivism and Giddens's structuration theory. They argue that institutions are constituted through recursive practices, while Foucault's governmentality provides a way of understanding government as a collection of techniques and rationalities directed toward the care and control of populations.

Charles J. Fox and Hugh T. Miller’s Postmodern Public Administration challenges conventional approaches to public administration by questioning the assumption that bureaucracies, institutions, individuals, and governmental practices possess fixed and objective forms. The authors use social constructivism, Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory, and Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to develop an alternative understanding of government and administration. Constructivism explains how organizational and institutional realities are socially produced and reproduced through recurring practices, while governmentality explains how governmental power operates through rationalities, knowledge, classification, surveillance, normalization, and other techniques of governing populations. The central argument of this review is that Fox and Miller connect these approaches by showing that government is neither simply a formal institution nor merely the exercise of sovereign authority. Rather, it is continuously constructed through recursive social practices and exercised through dispersed techniques of power. Their approach also reveals the possibility of resistance because socially constructed practices can be reconstructed. This review examines the authors’ treatment of constructivism, structuration, governmentality, governmental rationality, subjectification, and recursive practices, and evaluates their significance for contemporary public administration.

The chapter titled “The Social Construction of Government” is particularly important for understanding this argument. It develops constructivism, connects it with structuration theory, deconstructs the conventional category of bureaucracy, and introduces governmentality. The conclusion of the book then brings these arguments together under the explicit heading “Constructivism and Governmentality.” The authors return to recursive practices and governmentality to demonstrate how public administration can be understood without treating institutions, organizations, or individuals as fixed and objective entities.

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2. The Book and Its Central Argument

Fox and Miller's Postmodern Public Administration seeks to move public administration away from what they regard as overly rationalistic and foundational assumptions. Their project is not simply to reject bureaucracy or government. Instead, they attempt to reconceptualize them.

The authors argue that criticism should make apparently easy assumptions more difficult. Thus, Their examination of public administration begins by questioning the apparently obvious categories through which government is understood. They propose a “radically contingent”[1] approach to social institutions and claim that bureaucratic practices emerge through habits of mind embodied in work.

The book's central intellectual movement can be represented as:

This movement is significant because each concept modifies the previous one. Constructivism tells us that reality is socially constructed. Giddens explains how these constructions become relatively stable through recurring practices.[2] Then, Foucault enables the authors to examine how governmental practices exercise power through knowledge, classification, discipline, surveillance, and normalization. Thus, the authors do not see government simply as an organization located within a constitutional or administrative structure. Government is also a collection of practices through which populations are understood, categorized, managed, and influenced.

3. Constructivist Social Theory

3.1 Meaning of Constructivism

Constructivism is a theory stating that people actively build knowledge and meaning through their experiences and interactions, rather than passively receiving information. The most basic proposition of constructivism in Fox and Miller's account is that organizational reality is socially constructed. Public administrators experience organizational life as it were an objective reality, but the authors argue that this reality is produced through human interaction and shared meanings.

This position is strongly associated with Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966). Fox and Miller explain that constructivism combines questions of ontology and epistemology because human beings who seek to understand social reality are themselves participants in that reality. Thus, The observer cannot stand completely outside the social world being observed. Social meanings are negotiated among people.

If administrative institutions are socially constructed, they are not necessarily permanent. A bureaucracy may appear natural, objective, and inevitable because people have become accustomed to its practices. Yet its apparent solidity is partly the result of repeated human behavior and shared expectations. So, The authors reject the idea that institutional reality exists independently of social interaction.

“Organizational reality ... is socially constructed Because organizational reality is not imposed by some impersonal or materia. force outside of human groups, it is amenable to adjustment by human groups”

Ontology is about being or existence. The flip side of ontology is epistemology, which is about what and how humans might know or acquire knowledge of being or existence.

The implication is important: what humans construct can also be reconstructed.

4. Constructivism and Structuration Theory

Constructivism alone can create a difficulty. If reality is constructed by human beings, how do institutions become stable enough to constrain human behavior? Fox and Miller address this problem through Anthony Giddens's structuration theory. Giddens rejects both extremes:

·         society should not be understood merely through individual actors,

·         social structures be treated as completely independent entities.

 Instead, the central object of social science is social practices occurring across time and space. Thus, the concept of recursive practice is central.

4.1 Recursive Practices

“Recursive” means recurring or repeatedly reproduced. Recursive means a process or function that repeats by applying itself to smaller parts of the same problem until it reaches a stopping point. Recursive is related to habit. Recursive activities “are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by them via the very means whereby they express themselves as actors”.[3] Human beings enter a social world containing existing meanings, rules, expectations, and practices. They adopt these patterns but simultaneously reproduce them through their own actions. Consequently, social practices are continuously recreated. A simple example can be found in bureaucracy.

An administrative office may have a particular method for processing files:

application → registration → verification → recommendation → decision → record

No single employee necessarily creates this entire system. Yet every employee who repeatedly follows the practice contributes to its reproduction. Over time, the practice appears to be an institutional fact. This is what makes the concept of recursive practice useful. The institution exists because people continually reproduce its practices.

The authors explain the idea through language. Language limits what can easily be expressed because speakers operate within existing vocabulary and grammatical rules. Language is  itself a pattern of recursive practices. Speaking a language means employing particular words and phrases from a rich stock of potential expressions and deploying them according to a more limited stock of grammatical formula Yet those same rules make communication possible. Thus, structures simultaneously constrain and enable human action. This insight can be applied directly to public administration.  Language limits the speakable, but it is also the enabler, the means through which we speak. ( It acts as both a boundary and a gateway for human thought and connection.) Administrative rules may restrict officials, but they also provide the framework within which officials can act.

5. Institutions Are Habits

One of the most memorable arguments in the book is the proposition:

“Institutions are habits, not things.”

This statement captures the constructivist approach to institutions. Conventional institutional thinking tends to treat institutions as stable structures. Fox and Miller, following Giddens, instead regard institutions as clusters of recurring practices sustained through rules and resources. Institutions might look the same from decade to decade from the outside, but their practices must surely vary according to the admixtures of personalities and histories that shape the norms and habits in play within them. From generation to generation the admixture itself will change radically as social sediments shift. Certain gestalt formulations within presumed institutionally fixed structures will actually change the institution itself, even as it goes by the same name and presents for public view the same reified logo. This does not mean institutions are unreal. Rather, their reality is social rather than metaphysical.

An institution can remain apparently unchanged for decades while its internal practices gradually change. Different generations of administrators bring different experiences, personalities, interpretations, and expectations. Consequently, an institution is continually reproduced and modified.

The second model shows that institutions both shape behavior and are reproduced through behavior. The authors capture this paradox through Giddens's observation:

“Human history is created by intentional activities but is not an intended project.”

It means that human history is the accidental by product of individual actions, rather than the result of a master plan or a single, conscious blueprint. This is particularly relevant to administrative reform. Reform does not necessarily occur only through formal legislative or organizational change. Small modifications in everyday practices may gradually transform an institution.

6. Deconstructing Bureaucracy

Fox and Miller next apply constructivism to the concept of bureaucracy. They argue that bureaucracy is often treated as it were a single concrete thing. In reality, Public-sector activity consists of diverse and sometimes contradictory practices. Thus, the word “bureaucracy” becomes what the authors call a “conflated aggregation.” In this context, Deconstruction means unpacking the apparently unified concept and examining the different practices hidden behind it.

The authors stated that bureaucracy is not an objective sign with a single meaning. Social perceptions, values, historical experiences, and shared expectations influence what people understand by bureaucracy. This produces an important postmodern insight:

“Bureaucracy quite plainly has no objective existence outside of human social interaction.”

The argument does not mean that administrative offices, officials, laws, or files do not physically exist. Rather, “bureaucracy” as a unified conceptual category is socially produced.

7. From Constructivism to Governmentality

The transition from constructivism to governmentality is the most important part of Fox and Miller's argument. Constructivism examines how social realities are produced. Governmentality asks how governmental power operates through those socially produced realities. For Fox and Miller, Michel Foucault's contribution is especially significant because Foucault shifts attention away from the formal organization and toward practices and techniques of power. Thus, Governmentality does not simply ask:

Who governs?

It asks:

How is governing accomplished?

This distinction is fundamental. Government can operate through laws and coercion, but it can also operate through statistics, expertise, classification, professional knowledge, surveillance, norms, administrative procedures, and apparently neutral policy techniques.

8. Governmentality

Governmentality means the ways and techniques through which government exercises power to manage and control people and the population.  Governmentality is Foucault's concept for understanding governmental rationality and techniques of governing.

Fox and Miller explain that governmentality provides a systematic way of questioning what government is actually doing through its administrative and policy practices. Thus, Governmentality examines the techniques through which populations are categorized, measured, managed, controlled, and cared for. In this paper, Fox and Miller, following Michel Foucault, explain that government does not control people only through laws or force. It also uses:

• Knowledge and statistics
• Classification and measurement
• Surveillance
• Normalization
• Policies and expert knowledge
• Care and management of the population

Traditional political theory frequently asks:

• Who possesses sovereignty?
• What is the legal authority of the state?
• What powers does government possess?

Governmentality asks different questions:

• How are populations governed?
• What forms of knowledge make governing possible?
• How are people classified?
• How are normal and abnormal behaviors distinguished?
• How are individuals encouraged to regulate themselves?
• What techniques make populations governable?

9. Governmental Rationality

Governmental rationality means the way government thinks about how to govern people and solve social problems. Government increasingly uses knowledge, statistics, experts, policies, and techniques to understand and manage the population So, The idea of governmental rationality refers to the particular ways through which government understands and organizes its objectives. It is the logic or way of thinking through which government decides what should be known, measured, managed, and controlled.

Fox and Miller show that government increasingly became concerned not simply with maintaining the sovereignty of the ruler but with managing the conditions of the population: health, wealth, sanitation, education, fertility, longevity, food supply, housing, and similar matters.

Sovereign → Territory → Population → Management of life

Government increasingly concerns itself with the population as an object of knowledge and intervention. Statistics are particularly important in this transformation. Political arithmetic and statistical knowledge make the population measurable and governable. Thus, knowledge and power become interconnected. A government cannot effectively manage a population unless it has ways of knowing that population. Government governs not only through laws, but also through knowledge and techniques of administration.

“The population” becomes an object of government.

10. Governmentality Beyond Sovereignty

Fox and Miller emphasize that governmentality should not be confused with a simple theory of the state. They explicitly state:

“Governmentality, then, is not a theory of the state: it is an analysis of the operation of governmental power.”

Governmentality is concerned with techniques, practices, rationalities, and strategies rather than merely constitutional structures. Government may claim that its decisions are based on neutral expertise or objective analysis. Yet Fox and Miller, following Foucault, argue that knowledge and administrative techniques are connected with power.

Power → Knowledge → Classification → Administration → Conduct

The exercise of power does not always look like coercion. Sometimes it appears as expertise, efficiency, professional advice, public health, social welfare, risk management, or administrative rationality. That is precisely why governmentality is useful for postmodern public administration.

11. Discipline and Techniques of Governmentality

Foucault's governmentality is particularly concerned with techniques that make individuals and populations governable. These techniques operate through everyday administrative practices. Fox and Miller identify several such techniques, including:

• classification
• normalization
• surveillance
• individualization
• examination
• comparison
• differentiation
• correction
• inclusion and exclusion
• pastoralism

For example, a government may classify people according to:

citizen/non-citizen or employed/unemployed or healthy/sick or eligible/ineligible or normal/abnormal

Once these categories are created, administrative decisions can be made according to them. Thus, the classification does not merely describe reality. It also organizes and influences reality. This is the point at which constructivism and governmentality become closely connected.

12. Subjectification

Subjectification refers to the ways in which individuals are constructed as particular kinds of subjects through discourse, knowledge, classification, examination, surveillance, and other practices of power. Fox and Miller explain that Foucault examined how social-scientific practices objectify individuals. Statistical systems, for example, transform individuals into records, variables, categories, and measurable characteristics.

The individual becomes:

person → record → variables → category → statistical subject

This can be seen in contemporary administration. A citizen may become a:

• taxpayer;
• voter;
• welfare recipient;
• student;
• patient;
• employee;
• consumer;
• criminal suspect;
• beneficiary;
• statistical unit.

The person remains a complex human being, but administrative systems necessarily represent that person through particular categories. Fox and Miller use Foucault's concept of power/knowledge to explain this relationship. Knowledge about individuals enables administration, while administrative practices simultaneously produce particular forms of knowledge about individuals.

13. The Decentered Subject

The concept of subjectification challenges the traditional liberal idea of the autonomous individual. Traditional administrative and political theory frequently assumes a rational individual who independently makes choices. Foucault's approach complicates this assumption. Fox and Miller state that the subject is not simply a God-given or naturally fixed concept. Subjectivity is produced through social and cultural practices. This produces the idea of a decentered subject.

The individual is not completely autonomous, but neither is the individual completely powerless. This tension is important. Governmentality shapes individuals, but individuals can also adapt, reinterpret, resist, and reconstruct existing practices.

14. Constructivism and Governmentality: The Core Relationship

“Constructivism explains how administrative reality is constructed through recurring social practices; governmentality explains how those practices become techniques through which populations are known, regulated, and governed.” The authors argue that theoretical assumptions influence how public administration perceives reality. Conventional command-and-control bureaucracy depends upon assumptions about rational individuals, causal relationships, concrete organizations, and stable institutional goals. Constructivism challenges these assumptions by arguing that reality is socially constructed and therefore potentially changeable. Giddens contributes the concept of recursive practices, showing how institutions emerge through repeated practices. Foucault contributes governmentality, showing how those practices can function as techniques of power.

Government itself is both socially constructed and a producer of social constructions.

15. Recursive Practices and Governmentality

The most interesting theoretical contribution of the book is the relationship between recursive practices and governmentality. Governmental practices become powerful partly because they are repeated.

Consider a simple administrative practice:

Registration → documentation → classification → verification → decision

When repeated thousands of times, this practice becomes normalized. Officials learn it, citizens adapt to it, institutions organize around it, and eventually it appears natural.

Repeated practice → institutionalization → normalization → governability

Governmentality operates through these practices. At the same time, because practices are socially constructed, they remain capable of modification. A new administrative technology, a new interpretation of a rule, a social movement, a judicial decision, or a change in public expectations may alter an established practice. This is why the authors' constructivism does not necessarily lead to political pessimism. Power creates constraints, but constructed constraints can become objects of contestation.

16. Strengths of Authors' Argument

A. It challenges institutional reification

The authors effectively demonstrate the danger of treating institutions as permanent objects. Their statement “Institutions are habits, not things” provides a concise explanation of institutional change.

B. It exposes the political character of administrative knowledge

Governmentality demonstrates that statistics, classification, expertise, and policy analysis are not necessarily politically neutral. Administrative knowledge can participate in the exercise of power.

C. It moves analysis from structures to practices

Rather than asking only what an institution formally is, the authors encourage us to investigate what administrators actually do.

D. It connects power and knowledge

The approach helps explain why modern government can exercise significant influence without relying entirely upon direct coercion.

E. It creates space for resistance

Because social practices are constructed and reproduced, they can also be challenged and reconstructed.

17. Limitations and Criticism

Despite its strengths, the approach also raises several difficulties.

17.1 Risk of excessive relativism

If reality is socially constructed, it becomes difficult to determine what remains objectively true or independently existing. A strong constructivist position may therefore create epistemological difficulties for public administration.

17.2 Underestimation of material structures

Administrative institutions also operate through material resources, budgets, buildings, technology, coercive authority, and economic structures. A purely discursive interpretation may not fully explain these dimensions.

17.3 Problem of agency

The decentered subject raises the question of who actually produces institutional change. If individuals are heavily constituted by discourse and power, explaining deliberate political transformation becomes difficult. Fox and Miller themselves recognize this problem and note the difficulty of imagining social change without some concept of active agency.

17.4 Limited operational guidance

Governmentality is highly useful for critical analysis, but it is less clear how administrators should practically design institutions, allocate resources, or implement policies. Nevertheless, these limitations do not necessarily defeat the approach. They demonstrate that postmodern public administration is primarily a critical and interpretive framework, rather than a conventional administrative technique.

18. Relevance to Public Administration

The relevance of constructivism and governmentality becomes clear when examining contemporary administration. Modern governments increasingly rely on:

• databases;
• biometric identification;
• population statistics;
• risk assessment;
• performance indicators;
• algorithmic decision-making;
• surveillance;
• social welfare classifications;
• health categories;
• educational rankings;
• credit and financial profiles.

These systems do not merely record citizens. They organize people into administrative categories.

For example, a welfare administration may distinguish between:

eligible/ineligible → beneficiary/non-beneficiary → high-risk/low-risk

Such categories facilitate administrative action, but they also influence how individuals are perceived and treated. This is precisely the kind of phenomenon that governmentality seeks to make visible.

19. Conclusion

Nepal's administrative system contains numerous practices of classification, registration, documentation, surveillance, measurement, and categorization. Citizenship records, voter registration, social security, taxation, public examinations, demographic statistics, land registration, welfare schemes, and digital government services all require individuals to become administratively identifiable subjects. From a governmentality perspective, the important question is not merely whether these systems are legally authorized. It is also How do these administrative categories shape the relationship between citizens and government? Similarly, from a constructivist perspective, administrative institutions should not be viewed as completely fixed. Everyday practices of civil servants, courts, political actors, citizens, professional groups, and civil society continuously reproduce and modify administrative reality. Thus, This approach encourages a deeper question Are administrative institutions governing society, or are social practices continuously constructing what we call government? Fox and Miller's answer would suggest that both processes occur simultaneously.

Fox and Miller's treatment of constructivism and governmentality provides a distinctive postmodern interpretation of public administration. Constructivism begins by questioning the assumption that organizational and institutional realities exist independently of human interaction. Giddens's structuration theory deepens this argument by explaining institutions as recurring or recursive practices. Foucault's governmentality then shifts attention from formal structures of government to the techniques, rationalities, and forms of knowledge through which populations are governed.

The connection between the two concepts is fundamental. Constructivism explains how governmental reality is made; governmentality explains how that constructed reality governs. Ultimately, Fox and Miller ask public administration to become more reflexive about its own categories. Bureaucracy, institution, organization, citizen, population, normality, efficiency, and even the administrative subject should not automatically be accepted as natural and permanent realities. They should be examined as products of historically situated practices and discourses. The most significant implication is that what is socially constructed is not necessarily socially permanent. Since governmental practices are reproduced through human action, they can also become sites of democratic contestation and reconstruction. The authors therefore transform postmodernism from merely a critique of bureaucracy into an invitation to rethink how government itself is constituted.

[1] Radically contingent means that something is completely dependent on specific, unpredictable circumstances and has no underlying, necessary, or pre-determined reason to exist. It describes an existence or reality that lacks any grand, hidden necessity, divine blueprint, or logical guarantee things just happen to be this way, but they didn't have to be.

[2] Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press

[3] Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. University of California Press.