Description: Peter Ribbins, University of Birmingham, UK Administration as a field of study and practice, has been riven with fierce paradigm wars. This is a contest which has been fought out between unequal camps on several fronts of which the most crucial is that which separates the many who see administration as a science from the few who view it as an art. In this struggle Christopher Hodgkinson has long been, in Peter Burger's elegant phrase, with Thomas Greenfield, our leading humanistically orientated "condottiere of social perception". For two decades and more in a series of challenging books of which this latest is the most inclusive and important, he has revolutionised the thinking of practitioner and academic alike. He has reestablished the place of philosophy in the field and in doing so has rediscovered the significance of values in administration and the administrator as a moral actor. To paraphrase what Greenfield once said of one of his earlier books "no-one can read Administrative Philosophy: Values and Motivations in Administrative Life with its orchestrated and plangent credos, without knowing that this is a work of great moral architecture, profound and moving". It is also a work of great scholarship, subtle humour, dazzling wit and above all else of humane understanding.

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