Legitimacy and Public Administration

Abstract

Legitimacy claims can only be made and processes of legitimation can only unfold in a specified context. This article uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the social field to name this context and to analyze the construction of the bureaucratic or public administrative field in the United States. Field is meant in a triple sense—public administration as a general, institutionalized field in the structure of government; public administration as a professional field; and public administration as an academic field of study. Thus, rather than the bureaucratic field, the relationship of these bureaucratic field s or an “ensemble of fields” is analyzed to consider how each field both bounds its own legitimation struggles and draws from other fields for symbolic resources—what Bourdieu called symbolic capital —to establish its legitimacy and position. The multifield quality of public administration is used to show how the nature of the general bureaucratic field is distinct from other fields insofar as it purports to represent a universal, general interest. This difference is used to theorize a distinction between “general” and “specific” legitimation processes.