Redressing Information Inequality through Social Justice Research: The Case of Environmental Justice

INTRODUCTION A 2004 symposium issue of the International Journal of Public Administration explored the maturation of the field of public administration. In this issue Richard Johnson criticized the discipline for taking a narrow approach to questions of diversity and social equity by concentrating on issues of race and gender. He suggested the discipline refocus its efforts to include class-related (Johnson, 2004) Other authors have documented the extent to which public administration has focused on race and gender while neglecting social class (and sexual orientation). Oldfield, Chandler, and Johnson (2004) conducted a four country review (Australia, Brazil, Canada, United States) of public administration literature and found nearly all the social equity articles focused on race and gender with little attention to social class. The explanations offered for the lack of on social class range from class bias in higher education to the of public administration. These authors have argued that low-income families are the most underrepresented group at major universities. This is true among both students and faculty, few of whom have significant personal experience with issues of social class (Oldfield, Chandler, & Johnson, 2004, p. 165-166) The authors also argue that because professionalization [of public administration] promotes and responds to the needs of the state, it can and often does set the permissible limits of scholarly debate. Consequently, there is an almost total neglect of (or relative silence about) the distribution of wealth in a society of unequal social classes? (Johnson, 2003, p. 512). While community activists often find this frustrating, understanding the source of the problem is essential to reframing appeals for greater attention to issues of social equity. Another possible explanation for this blind spot of public administration on the subject of social class is that the concept, whatever its explanatory power, does not constitute a strategic variable in our system of government. To put the matter indelicately, it is illegal to discriminate against someone because of race, but it isn't illegal to discriminate against someone who is poor. Public administrators understand (better than most) that race is a political and legal trump card. By comparison, social class is an interesting phenomenon, but not a potent category. Racial discrimination comes prepackaged with its own sense of urgency and a readily apparent range of solutions. Given these background facts, public administration researchers, particularly those who target a practitioner audience, might be forgiven if they respond more eagerly to what the law problematizes than to what it tacitly permits. But as Oldfield, Candler, & Johnson (2004) suggest, the American Society for Public Administration Code of Ethics exhorts researchers to take a proactive approach to issues of social class and inequity and urges them to work to improve and change laws and policies that are counterproductive or obsolete. Understanding this problematic relationship between the legal environment and professional ethics of public administration allows social activists to better focus their organizing and lobbying activities. Finally, the lack of social class also has its roots in the general state of public administration. Streib and Roch (2005) reviewed critiques of public administration and identified hard and soft barriers to strengthening public administration research. These barriers, or boundaries, limit the quality of methods used in public administration research (p. 38). Hard boundaries include lack of available data to support a study and lack of adequate funding to develop resources/data sets. Soft boundaries include as a low priority, low-quality dissertations and doctoral training ineffectiveness. Streib and Roch do not explicitly define appropriate topics, but cite observations about the need for long-term studies of administrative phenomena. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.