Postmodernism in public administration (Reflections on Turkey's development plans after the 2000s)

The institutions and practices of the world that have been shaped by modern philosophy since the seventeenth century have been designed in a modernist line. The understanding of enlightenment and progress has developed rigid, fixed, and center-oriented; it has determined universal rules and directions for natural sciences, industry, culture-art, architecture or management sciences. Over time, this understanding has become totalitarian by assuming the superiority of 'for everyone, according to everyone'. Accordingly, modernism showed inadequacy when the changes experienced in the intellectual and practical world were added to this. Postmodern problematization, which emerged in the context of the inoperability of modernist laws, has created a new perspective regarding objection, addressing traditional unrest and producing new discourses. The postmodern situation shaped by the development of technology, globalization, the paradigm shift in natural sciences, wars, economic crises, instability, uncertainty, and disorder, has deeply affected societies, states, and therefore public administrators. In this context, it has been observed that the events, people, institutions, and structures affected by the awareness that social needs shape the rule-making of public administration are affected. It relates the transformation of public administration, which gained awareness of its existence in the modern period, to the postmodern period by abandoning universalist principles and turning to small narratives in the historical development line. In this respect, the thesis tries to show that public administrators knew principles that could not be generalized and cases that could not be explained even before postmodernism was addressed in the discipline. The aim of examining the emergence of movements in the claims of trends, theories, and paradigm shifts is to indicate the ineffectiveness of classical laws. The studies of some public administrators, in which they evaluated postmodernism in the context of a paradigm shift, are included. To observe the awareness and understanding of the routinized chaos, uncertainty, and disorganization of the state's spontaneous centralized and hierarchical nature, a content analysis and comparison of the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Development Plan of the Republic of Turkey was conducted as an example.