Discourses of public administration in postcommunist transition: The case of Estonia

The purpose of this study is to examine global and local discourses that have constituted public administration in postcommunist Estonia with the aim of exploring the potential for creating a more context-bound practice of public administration. The aim of this research is to identify the vocabularies which constitute public administration in the dominant discursive regimes of "transition," and search for alternative representations in the marginalized accounts of postcommunist transformation.;This research adopts a discursive approach for exploring the issues of transition in former socialist states. By drawing on perspectives critical of the orthodoxy of "transition" including cultural studies, anthropology, discourse studies, critical development studies, and postcolonialism, this project calls into question the prominent "transition" paradigm, and investigates its consequences for the field of public administration.;This research is grounded in the poststructuralist research tradition and is inspired by the linguistic turn in social sciences. It utilizes critical discourse analysis (CDA), Foucauldian discourse analysis, and deconstructionism to address the primary research question: What is the role of public administration in postcommunist social change in Estonia? Investigation of this issue is driven by CDA's concern with the relations between discourse, critique, power, and ideology, Foucault's notion of "problematization," and deconstructive analysis of binary oppositions.;Overall, the study finds that postcommunist social change in Estonia has been constructed and normalized as "transition" in the prevailing narratives of public administration. The prevailing problematizations of postcommunist transformation in Estonia have constructed the role of public administration through the economic, managerialist, Europeanization, and technocratic discourses. The dominant discursive practices shape the identities of public administrators as "accountants," "plant managers," "therapists," and "inspectors." However, this study also finds that there are alternative problematizations of postcommunist transformation in Estonia which have given rise to the ecological, democratic, and normative discursive regimes. These suppressed groups of statements influence the subjectivity of public officials as "problem-solvers," "reconcilers," and "moral actors," and have a potential to reconceptualize the role of public administration beyond the "transition" paradigm.