ABSTRACT
A small but vociferous group of critical scientists has conducted a concerted attack on how public managers acquire knowledge. The implication is that more use of science among managers and in public administration curricula can cure what ails public administration: namely an alleged deficit of valid knowledge. The major alternate means of acquiring knowledge that managers use is story-telling, in written form: the case study and descriptive narratives. A manager is challenged to explain why she would accept five different reports on an event rather than a single scientific report. It is to the eternal credit of managers that despite the pressures of a scientific culture and a rationalist/scientist education, they have stayed realistic. The primacy of structural elements of the story as points of contact between worlds experienced by different subjects and their primacy as referents for validity questions becomes explicit in the words of a senior foreign service manager recounting a biographical anecdote.
