Eastern and western philosophies: Rethinking the foundations of public administration

Abstract

This is the editorial introduction to the special issue ‘Eastern and Western Philosophies: Rethinking the Foundations of Public Administration’. This special issue pursues an important direction of inquiry in the relationship between philosophy and public administration by mobilising in a combined way both eastern and western philosophies to revisit foundational issues in public administration. The papers published in this special issue show that, by deploying in a combined way eastern and western philosophical perspectives, key problems and issues in PA get addressed and can be critically revisited in their ontological or epistemological foundations, illuminated from novel angles, and even outright advanced by having philosophical thinking supplementing and complementing social scientific thinking in and for PA. This editorial introduction concludes by outlining four directions of inquiry for connecting philosophy and PA, thereby delineating a research agenda to more closely bring philosophical thinking into public administration.

Introduction

Philosophical thought can be profoundly beneficial for the development of public governance, public management, public policy and public administration (hereafter collectively referred to as PA). However, over the recent decades it has only limitedly been applied (albeit with a few important exceptions: e.g., Lynch and Cruise, 2006; Ongaro, 2020; Riccucci, 2010), and a whole range of themes, from ontological questions to political philosophical debates, tend to receive only scant attention, if any, in the field of PA. When they have been applied, it is mostly western philosophies that have found their way into the scant literature on the topic (at least the English language one).

This special issue pursues an important direction of inquiry in the relationship between philosophy and PA by mobilising in a combined way both eastern and western philosophies to revisit foundational issues in PA (thereby following up on a call to develop such dialogue across philosophical traditions, see Ongaro, 2021). We argue this is a distinctive and notable contribution, which fills a gap (long overdue) and enables to take a truly global perspective to the study of the contribution of philosophical thinking to PA. We notice ours is a global, not globalist, perspective: that is, a perspective which is sensitive to cultural and, indeed, philosophical differences across civilisations, and at the same time strives to connect diverse perspectives into fruitful, mutually enriching dialogues, avoiding the risks of isolation and ‘civilizational siloing’ (on the significance of this approach for contemporary PA, see also Ongaro and Sancino, 2023) and along the way, we argue, also enables to rediscover the ‘common humanity’ underlying context-sensitive solutions in a perspective which conceives of public administration as, also, a form of practical humanism (Biancu and Ongaro, 2025).

The next section outlines the overall contribution provided by the special issue. The subsequent section draws some lessons for rethinking some of the foundations of PA based on the insights of these contributions: the ultimate purpose (and the title) of this special issue. The final section furnishes further elements for developing a research agenda on bringing philosophy in a more encompassing way into PA (and PA into philosophy).

The contribution of this special issue

This special issue combines eastern and western perspectives in manifold ways: by bringing to the fore both western philosophies (including Critical Realism; Personalism; and Pragmatism) and eastern philosophies (including Confucianism and neo Confucianism) to rethink and reframe PA issues and challenges, also in a conjoined way (that is, by integrating philosophies, eastern and western, to complement and mutually strengthen each other); by having eastern and western scholars to contribute, not just in the panel of authors of the special issue as a whole, but also working together by co-authoring (notably the contribution focusing the topic of public value from the standpoint of Critical Realism, a philosophical stream which thereby comes to be vetted from different cultural-cognitive angles); by appraising the influence of philosophical thinking on modern and contemporary PA through a systematic literature review which encompasses all works (held in the database Web of Science) published over a timeline of over a hundred years.

Specifically, Tong revisits an ancient idea which has roots both in eastern and in western political-philosophical thinking, namely the idea of the random selection from the population of representatives, for inclusion in public decision-making processes: the deliberative mini-publics (Tong, 2025, this issue). Tong then elaborates a sophisticated application of this idea to both Confucian political meritocracy (likely the most prominent political philosophical alternative to liberal democracy) and to Confucian democracy (a major attempt to combine Confucianism and liberal democracy in the design of public governance). The paper develops this idea and its application specifically by focusing a key PA problem, namely the selection and promotion of public servants. The work argues (normatively) about the benefits of deliberative mini-publics to overcome potential downsides of both Confucian political meritocracy – like the risk of ‘groupthink’ and impermeability of the bureaucracy to insights and feedback coming from the broader society – and Confucian democracy – like the risk of polarisation impinging on cohesiveness of society at large and the bureaucracy specifically.

Ongaro et al. (2025, this issue) revisit a western philosophy, namely Personalism, and apply it to another major PA problem, namely the co-creation of public value. The authors detect and dissect the lineages between the theorisation of key notions elaborated in this philosophical stream – the notions of common good, active citizenship, relational freedom, and intermediate communities – and the notions of, respectively, public value, value co-creation, collaboration, and participatory public policy, showing how those philosophical concepts underpin much of the notions employed and the theorising occurring in the co-creation of public value literature, albeit their influence is hardly detected and recognised. This way, the work by Ongaro et al. (2025) aims to make a broader argument, namely, to show how philosophical perspectives can provide ontological grounding in the conception of the human nature and the nature of human freedom for making sense of PA problems. Specifically, a relational (as opposed to a libertarian) notion of freedom is here found to be able to underpin and make sense of the collaborative processes that enable the co-creation of public value, as well as to show some of the roots of the very conception of public value in the (more ancient) notion of common good.

Yifeng Ni and Ning Liu (2025, this issue) aim at integrating two philosophical perspectives, one eastern, namely Wang Yangming’s interpretation of the Xin Xue school of thought which initiated during the Song Dynasty in China and provided a counterpoint to the then dominant Li Xue school, and one western, namely William James’s philosophy of Pragmatism, for tackling a meta-theoretical issue in PA, namely the theory-practice divide. The two philosophical perspectives are combined in what the authors refer to as the ‘virtuous-pragmatic approach’, whose main thrust is offering a novel and different perspective to tackle a major issue in public administration (and possibly across the humanities and social sciences more at large), namely the ‘theory-practice’ divide, which can be expressed – in simple yet to-the-point terms – as the lack of use by practitioners of academic publications: the ‘non-usefulness’ of scholarly / academic-generated knowledge for the practice of public administration. The virtuous-pragmatic approach also further combines insights from western and eastern perspectives in the very fabric of the approach that is being proposed to the attention of scholars and practitioners alike, thereby providing a case in point about the fruitfulness of combining – and even integrating – eastern and western philosophical approaches: this is one of the overarching aims and a key thrust of this special issue.

A contribution co-authored by a western and an eastern scholar, Ongaro and Yang (2025, this issue), after briefly reviewing the contribution of three western philosophies to PA - namely Pragmatism, Constructivism-Relativism, and (Neo-)Positivism – proposes and discusses the contribution that a fourth philosophical approach, namely Critical Realism, can provide to an important PA problem, namely the theorisation of the creation of public value. To this purpose, the paper revisits the growing literature on public value and shows how four main approaches to the theorisation of public value present in the literature can be read in an integrated way by applying the lens of Critical Realism to make sense of them, notably through the morphogenetic approach proposed by the Philosopher Margaret Archer.

Ryan (2025) addresses a public policy and administration problem, namely that of the use of nudges in public policy, and aims at theoretically demonstrating that nudges can create negative epistemic externalities, notably undermining trust on the part of the agents in their epistemic environment in general and in the ‘nudger’ – namely the state or other public institution – in particular.

Finally, in the most classical ‘last but not least’, the contribution by Tang et al. (2025) develops a systematic literature review to appraise the influence of philosophical thinking on modern and contemporary PA. They do so through an impressively encompassing literature review. They develop in full the backwards mapping approach to the study of philosophy and PA (delineated in Ongaro, 2020: pp. 18-20 in particular), namely, the approach of detecting the philosophical influences on the extant PA literature. The work by Tang et al. (2025) scouts the Web of Science database, one of the largest databases of scientific works (journal articles), to find references to works published in philosophy journals in all the PA journal articles published since the year 1900 and up to 2022. They ultimately detect 3548 PA journal articles (out of 58,633 published in the reference period) which have been influenced by philosophy, in the sense that they cite at least one article published in a philosophy journal. They then identify the topics of the PA articles that cite philosophy articles that appear more frequently: at the top we find ‘wicked issues’, followed by ‘job satisfaction, leadership and motivation’, then topics related to ‘innovation’, followed by ‘co-production, PPPs and networks’, and then ‘democracy, citizen, legitimacy’. They also contrast with the topics of all PA articles published (i.e. irrespective of whether they reference or not philosophy works), and it emerges the latter topics are quite different (the only sub-topic that remains the same is ‘job satisfaction’, which evidently can be tackled both on an ‘exclusively social scientific ground’ or else in relation to issues of values and ethics which involve a philosophical dimension). It appears that when philosophy is brought into the picture, it is for addressing ‘specific’ PA themes which are not the same as the most often studied PA topics (although they all are, we may well argue, very relevant ones). They also detect - amongst other findings – a trend to an increase on the part of PA articles to cite philosophy articles, albeit with the qualification that ethics (which can be seen as a branch of philosophy) appears to do the lion’s share as the branch of philosophy most cited in PA articles.

Rethinking the foundations of public administration

The papers published in this special issue show that, by deploying in a combined way eastern and western philosophical perspectives, key problems and issues in PA get addressed and can be critically revisited in their ontological or epistemological foundations, illuminated from novel angles, and even outright advanced by having philosophical thinking supplementing and complementing social scientific thinking in and for PA.

For example, the range of options for addressing a key issue like the selection and promotion of public servants – how to recruit and promote/demote staff in the civil service - gets expanded through the application of the political philosophical idea of the random selection from the entire population of a pool of representatives – the deliberative mini-publics – which are then included in decision making processes. The effects of such reform of public personnel management may then, if decided upon by decision-makers and eventually implemented, be at a later moment studied empirically through ‘standard’ social science approaches to gauge its effects. Public administration and public management are as much about proposing new systems for administering and managing the public sector (that is, they are concerned with administrative doctrines for the reform of the public sector, ideas which have an inherently normative dimension) as they are about studying the effects of the extant systems once these are factually brought about and get into existence. The normative dimension in PA, which positivist stances in the study of PA may have pretended to have expunged or sidelined, remains central: the normative dimension is indeed constitutive of PA and it re-gains centre stage via the rediscovery and application of political philosophy in and for PA (Ongaro, 2025, chapter 4) .

The adoption of a philosophical perspective also provides other avenues to revisit the very foundations of PA – where PA is considered both as a science and as a profession (as well as an art and a form of humanism, see Ongaro, 2022). First and foremost, philosophy can provide the grounding of key concepts in the field, like that of public value. As we have seen, philosophies such as Critical Realism and Personalism can provide the theoretical framing for integrating a range of theories of public value, and for enabling to appreciate the underpinning ontological premises of phenomena like the processes of co-creation of public value. Similarly, a philosophical perspective may lead to critically querying the implications of widely used tools in public policy and administration, like the approach of nudging.

Philosophy – and notably a combination of eastern and western philosophical perspectives – can also enable to tackle, or at least furnish a theoretical angle from which to reconsider, meta-theoretical issues like the theory-practice divide. Indeed, such metatheoretical issues can probably be tackled only by adopting also a philosophical perspective: they are inherently philosophical, as they concern the very nature – the ontology and the epistemology - of the field.

Finally, from the viewpoint of cross-disciplinarity in the academia, and notably the connection of PA to disciplines like philosophy, which in the classifications adopted within the academia fall under the label of the humanities disciplines (Ongaro et al., 2025), this special issue provides highly valuable tools like a systematic, and very ample, bibliometric analysis enabling to appreciate the extent of the philosophical influences on the PA publications that have been published in article format between such a long time span like the period 1900-2022.

A research programme

This special issue has mobilised a number of philosophical perspectives. It has shown how the application of one or, ideally, more than one philosophical perspective utilised in a combined way can enable to shed light on PA problems and issues. The contributions in this special issue are examples – indeed exemplars, we would argue, at the very least for the courage shown by the authors in embarking into such an intellectual venture – of how philosophical thinking can be valuable and useful in the field of PA.

Most of the papers in this special issue can be seen as instances of the approach that can be qualified as philosophy for PA: mobilising one or more philosophies to address key problems and issues in PA. These contributions instantiate, pursue and further this approach, by analysing how one or more philosophical streams can be employed for tackling different PA topics, issues and research questions. They have extended some of the earlier work in this area, which already points out the importance of philosophical thought, such as Confucian thought in the East Asian context, as the moral foundation of bureaucratic practices and organizational culture (Chen and Hsieh, 2017; Frederickson, 2002; Im et al., 2013; Lin and Huang, 2014; Neo et al., 2022; Van der Wal and Yang, 2015). These papers show that philosophical perspectives are fundamental not only to personnel management, but also to the thinking of policies, such as environmental, technology, and science policies, the boundary of regulatory governance, and the practices of public participation and public-private partnership. Indeed, this special issue also points to streams of Confucianism as being relevant for PA not just as a moral philosophy but also as a political philosophy.

In a complementary fashion, the contribution by Li Tang et al. is an exemplar of another approach in connecting philosophy and PA, namely that of mapping backwards from PA works to philosophy, that is, they focus on tracing the philosophical influences on PA scholarly works, and they detect, amongst other things, that when philosophical knowledge is employed, it is in view of addressing certain relevant PA themes and problems – in other words, some PA themes may be deemed to be more ‘amenable’ to the application of philosophical perspectives than others, and they identify the most frequent ones (Tang et al., 2025).

Two further approaches may be envisaged in interconnecting philosophy and PA (an overall framework mapping and analysing these four directions of inquiry for connecting philosophy and PA is wrought out in Ongaro, 2025). One approach lies in detecting the level of consistency between PA doctrines for reform (one can think of the doctrines of reform placed under the label of the New Public Management, or the New Public Governance, or the Neo-Weberian State, and so forth) and their philosophical (often implicit) underpinnings. This approach is about aligning philosophy and PA - it focuses on detecting and making explicit the (philosophical) ideational bases of administrative doctrines about how to reform the public sector.

Finally, and perhaps most ambitiously, times may be ripe for working out a philosophy proper of PA fit for the epoch in which we live: this is the approach of philosophy of PA, aimed at delineating the contours of a philosophy of PA for the 21^st century. This endeavour cannot be more timely, as the world is wrestling with many global governance concerns, the morality of public leadership, and the appropriate boundary of state-society and state-economy relationship.

We hope the contributions in this special issue may prompt more and more scholars and practitioners to contribute to a movement aimed at connecting more closely philosophy and PA, along all the directions of inquiry here spelt out – and to translating this also into the teaching of philosophy and PA (Ongaro, 2019), a topic which is gaining traction (as an important example, we notice that the latest Subject Benchmark Statement of the Quality Assurance Agency of the UK explicitly mentions ‘Philosophy of PA’ as one of the listed content subfields to be included in public policy and administration higher education programmes). Connecting philosophy and PA may benefit – we think – both the field of philosophy and, definitely so, the field of PA.