Cynthia J. McSwain’s research while affiliated with George Washington University and other places

A key issue facing scholarly communities devoted to theoretical dialogue and innovation is how closely to relate to the mainstream orthodoxy in their field. The rise and demise of Deming’s Total Quality Management suggests that radically innovative approaches to organization and management will typically be distorted by the currently hegemonic, underlying pattern of consciousness. Until consciousness shifts, attempts to introduce theory-led innovation are futile. The movement of capitalism into its late modernist stages, however, has begun to reveal that this pattern is changing. The very contradiction that is eroding the normative discourse on which current institutions are founded, by generating a pervasive market ethos is also, paradoxically, working to undercut the integrity of this same market ideology for social life. If the public administration theory community maintains a stance marginal to the mainstream of the field, it will be in an optimal position to offer alternatives–especially those conducive to civil society–and optimize their potential for effect when consciousness opens a venue for the new.

This paper describes the key concepts of a transformational theory of organizations and discusses its validity as a practical conceptual framework. The authors argue that transformational theory, based largely on the theories of the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, provides a way of conceptualizing organizational process by clarifying and grounding a number of critical innovations of organizational practice. The authors characterize transformational theory's basic assumptions—the ontological commitment, the epistemological commitment, praxis, the theory of social relationships-and highlight the distinctive nature of these assumptions compared to more traditional organization theories.

Social theory seems to be moving toward what Charles Perrow has called the "garbage can paradigm" of deconstructionism, while at the social level, the trend seems to be toward a technicist social order of hyperrelativism. By building on the school of public administration which the article identifies as the traditionalist, the field can raise a renewed image of public administration that can serve as a protection against the potentially destructive consequences of technicism.

The interpretivist perspective is rapidly growing in acceptance and influence in the feld of organization and management. This perspective has important implications for the field of administrative ethics that have not yet been sufficiently acknowledged. Traditionally, administrative ethics appears to have assumed an objectivist epistemological and legalistic ethical perspective, and interpretivism seems to imply epistemological subjectivism and ethical relativism as alternatives. Using Jung's theory of the unconscious as a foundation, an ethical perspective is developed indicating that through the vehicle of human relationship one can find stable points of reference for moral action in the requisities of the personal development of the actors involved in the situation, and hence, this perspective avoids the trap of ethical relativism to which interpretivism is vulnerable. Lying, cheating, and stealing are used as examples and the case of the Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke is presented as an illustration of how the approach applies in organizational situations.