Don't reinvent the wheel: the search for an identity for public administration

Abstract

For many years, public administration has suffered from an identity crisis. This article argues that public administration's identity actually exists in the form of abandoned and often neglected fragments of well-established knowledge. We advocate reassembling these fragments and arranging them using a logic that will crystallize an identity for public administration. Our approach is based on viewing public administration as a social science of results, not a profession relying on a generic viewpoint. We maintain that there is a trialectic system of relationships among three pillars of public administration: the political, the legal and the managerial. The interrelationships between these pillars generate configurations, temporary arrangements geared toward certain issues. At any given time, one pillar may be emphasized over the other two. Such variations should not be viewed as a crisis of identity. Rather, this article suggests a research agenda for examining the identity of the field through longitudinal historical studies in which configurations may be identified in order to determine the conditions and circumstances that led to the variations in emphasis among the pillars. The more knowledge that is accumulated, the better we will be able to develop a reasonable approach for public administration and free it from oft-repeated cries of identity crisis.Points for practitionersPractitioners should be aware of the logic presented in this article. A logic that views the identity of public administration not in generic terms, but rather as a field of inquiry that is influential and consequential. It should be regarded as a social science of results that politicians use to solve citizens' problems. Hence, in democracies, the three pillars, the legal, the managerial and the political, interact constantly, constituting a range of public administration configurations. Configurative cyclicality should be regarded as public administration's normal, natural state of being. Normality means that a temporary configuration of the three basic pillars of the field does not testify to a crisis of identity, but constitutes an interim variation of interrelationships under special circumstances and conditions.