Title: The Rich Diversity of the Public Administration Journals: Departments and Institutional Settings, Part 1
Abstract: INTRODUCTION Public administration is defined by those who write about it. In the 1920s, White (1926) and Willoughby (1927) defined public administration in the context of the good government and scientific management movements as well as the discipline of political science. By the 1960s, Waldo (1968:13) argued that, while public administration may have begun as part of political science, the field quickly expanded to include bits and pieces of other fields of study, including history, sociology, and economics; see, also. Stillman (1980:4). The changing beliefs about what is public administration and speculations about the implications of the new beliefs never would have occurred had the sources of knowledge about practice and theory not broadened significantly. Who are the authors and where do they come from--public administration departments, government, the private sector, specialists from political science, business or other fields and disciplines? What we perceive and believe about our roots, contemporary or historical, may not always reflect reality. Rubin (1993) has argued that business leaders were not the reformers in public budgeting, a long-held conception, but instead the real reformers came from the ranks of government and academia, especially schools of accountancy. Arguments supporting various claims tend to be levied with little reflection on the wide literary basis that is the legacy of public administration, relegating the arguments to disputes over ethereal or theoretical preconceptions rather than debates about literary reality and heritage. Based on a cursory overview of the literature written within the past fifty years, clearly several of the contributors to public administration journals have come from areas and fields outside public administration, including sociology, business, psychology, and economics. For example, the authors of some of the great public administration debates were first and foremost sociologists, psychologists, economists, and political scientists, as well as public administrators, including Herbert Simon, Robert Dahl, Dwight Waldo, Edward Banfield, Chris Argyris, Vincent Ostrom, and Robert Golembiewski. Such boundary spanning scholars continue to define contemporary public administration. The researchers write their stories, present their analyses or argue their findings in the context of their own educational and practical experiences which often transcend into other disciplines and fields. Reflecting on the disciplinary diversity of the literature used to educate public administration students, this study will examine the academic and institutional backgrounds of the authors that contribute to what many consider to be the central domain of that literature, the refereed public administration journals. To set up the analysis, the research question is presented. This discussion is followed by an explanation of the method and the several sources and types of data in the analysis. The findings are based on a set of evidence that is representative of the field generally rather than any one subfield (e.g., public budgeting) and the interpretation is not necessarily biased to any one theoretical perspective (e.g., public choice theory or democratic administration). The evidence characterizes the contemporary authors that have published material in the leading refereed public administration journals, hence defining the current legacy of public administration. Third, the question is reflected on in detail. Lastly, some concluding remarks are presented. RESEARCH QUESTION To what extent are public administration scholars reaching out to social science and using its methods and theory (McCurdy and Cleary, 1984:54)? The question regards the definition and interdisciplinary character of public administration. Arguably, public administration scholars are the individuals most directly responsible for governmental bureaucracies general guidance regarding problems that span the breadth of the social sciences. …
Publication Year: 1997
Publication Date: 1997-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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