In my contribution to the first edition of this book, I started out by contextualising the question of why the paradigmatic debate in South Africa was largely ignored by a substantive amount of scholars in South Africa during the years since the first inception of the discipline in South Africa, from about 1967, up to and including the last years of the last millennium in 1999. (Schwella in Wessels and Pauw 1999: 333–355.)

Setting the scene

Since then it seems that the debate has been taking more seriously by a selected group of academics, political office bearers and professionals. Evidence for this will be presented later in this book.

In the referred to previous contribution, I argued that the then generally accepted generic administrative process approach, which was introduced to South African public administration by Cloete (1967) in his work Introduction to Public Administration originally published in Afrikaans as Inleiding tot die Publieke Administrasie, was reductionist, prone to reification and becoming increasingly irrelevant for the changing South African governance and administrative reality. I also argued that, irrespective of these deficiencies, the South African public administration academic community presented limited criticism or innovation in respect of this increasingly deficient paradigm. Some provisional hypothetical explanations for why the challenges of the deficient approach were not taken up academically were also advanced. These explanations, briefly repeated, stated:

• • That at the time of the dominance of the administrative process approach, public administration academics were generally of the same type as the government of the day and shared the political opinions of the previous South African government. Hubbel (1992: 2–3) calls this situation ‘the in-bred nature of South African public administration’.

• • That the generic administrative process approach gained the dominance it did because it provided a relatively uncomplicated safe house for the discipline during highly turbulent times.

In this regard, I argued that the pre-democratic South African governments were not noted for their tolerance of criticism and dissident points of view. Although I am not of the opinion that a more critical stand from the side of the academic discipline would have led to direct or dramatic repression by the then South African state institutions, especially because the people involved were very close to government decision-makers, other reactions might have been possible.