ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a comparative typology that aims to advance our understanding of what it means to be a "good" public administrator as well as the "proper" role of public administration in society. It describes a variety of critiques that challenge the legitimacy logic of each Tradition based on both its own internal expectations and according to competing logics. The chapter analyses how key scholars seek either to integrate or to conciliate the logics to improve legitimacy. It explores dialectical analyses to understand developmental processes both within Traditions and among Traditions, suggesting that theoretically, the Collaborative Tradition represents a dialectical synthesis of the Constitutional and Discretionary Traditions of governance. MacIntyre notes that choices among traditions and traditions themselves change due to confrontation with new situations that reveal the tradition's limitations. The Constitutional and Discretionary Traditions share the political ontology of liberalism, albeit with differing emphases.
