Exploring administrative evil, the ethics of dissent, and guerrilla government in <italic>The Good Place</italic>.

AbstractThis article uses the comedy television series <italic>The Good Place</italic> as a starting point to theoretically explore the value of guerrilla government as a measure to disrupt administrative evil. Drawing from the literature of administrative evil and Rosemary O’Leary’s work on the ethics of dissent and guerrilla government, this article considers the personal ethics and organizational cultural motivations for dissent as well as how administrators work to disrupt administrative evil while navigating through various strategies including loyalty, neglect, voice, and exit. This article demonstrates how popular media can be used as a means of theorizing for public administration scholars as well as a space where ideas related to public administration can apply existing theories in a method that can be engaging to mainstream audiences. The paper concludes with a proposed model of how administrative evil and guerrilla government may be conceptualized to interact with one another as well as potential areas of opportunity for administrators to practice dissent within the broader maze of bureaucracy administrative evil can become lost amongst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]