Public administration and modernism revisited: a maquette of narrative construction

Twenty years ago, Hindy Schachter (1989) posed a question about the foundation we use to structure the Public Administration theory narrative. Would an approach based on an art model, rather than the more common science model, produce a narrative with less distortion? This essay employs a definition of modernism developed by Thomas Vargish and Delo Mook outside the purview of public administration and a famous M. C. Escher lithograph as a basis for proposing an alternate way to construct the narrative. It then applies the alternative approach to Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo.