ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the basis for integrating power and agency into a more structured tool to understand public administration and management more generally. Existenzphilosophie, immanence, limit situations/boundary events, and transcendence all have potential to be valuable to the theory and practices of administration. Public administration has been “claimed” by political scientists, who commonly miss the managerial aspects of the profession. It has been claimed by business, which often misses the public or political aspects. Transcendence represents a shift out of immanence based on some experiential criteria. This introductory chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reviews some key concepts borrowed from the work of Karl Jaspers without doing a deep analysis of Jaspers’ philosophical approach. It focuses both on power and agency and how they impact experiences in the context of Jaspers’ work.
