ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the dominant themes in the governance debate and their potential for providing the discipline with the theoretical tools necessary to understand and explain public administration in the twenty-first century. The core of H. George Frederickson's repositioning argument can be best described by comparing its theoretical orientation to that of political science, the discipline most closely associated with public administration. Frederickson suggests a theory of administration conjunction to help explain and understand the vexing problems of governance created by the rise of the disarticulated state. Frederickson suggests that the ability of administration conjunctions to impose order and coherence on public service provision depends upon several factors. These factors include the scope, strength, and duration of formal and informal agreements among interjurisdictional executive actors. New Public Management draws heavily from market theory, emphasizing self-interest and competition, neither of which is particularly good at explaining the interjurisdictional behavior of actors in conjunctions.
