Practitioner Envy and Construction of the Other in Public Administration

Research in public administration: Reflections on theory and practice: Edited by Jay D. White and Guy B. Adams, Sage Publications (1994), 280 pp., £12.95

The issue of proper research and theory development in public administration has been raised again by Howard E. McCurdy and Robert E. Cleary in their article, Why Can't We Resolve Research Issue in Public Administration? They express concern for lack of adequate research being done at dissertation level and cite research findings suggesting that very few of recent dissertations meet criteria that conventionally define careful, systematic study in social sciences. These criteria include purpose, validity, testability, causality, topical importance, and cutting edge significance. By not meeting these criteria, they feel that current dissertation research is not advancing knowledge in our field.' Following their prescriptions for theory building could lead to conclusion that histories, descriptions of administrative experiences, reports of action research projects, political theories, philosophical analyses, and social critiques will not contribute significantly to growth of knowledge in public administration. This type of research normally does not satisfy criteria of validity, testability, and causality. Nevertheless, this type of research has contributed significantly to our knowledge of public administration. Although Cleary and McCurdy may recognize historical importance of descriptions and critiques for generating ideas about public administration, they claim: A field that promotes descriptions and critiques still needs research. . . . [and] Someone has to publicly expose descriptions and critiques to standards of scientific verification before they become 'usable knowledge.' They allow that case studies can contribute to verification of concepts or critiques, provided that they are consciously used to do so, especially in combination with other cases or studies, but they remind us about validity problems of studies in general. 2 Cleary and McCurdy advocate a mainstream social science approach: belief that the social sciences differ in degree and not in kind from more well established natural sciences, and that best way to achieve scientific success is to emulate logic and methodology of natural sciences.3 This is evidenced by their adherence to criteria of validity, testability, and causality; their call for testing of ideas generated by descriptions and critiques; and by their appeal to Kerlinger's Foundations of Behavioral Research to identify criteria for quality research in behavioral sciences.4 But serious questions have been raised about

A key goal of public policy and public administration research is to inform policy decisions. It is not clear, however, to what extent this is the case. In this study, therefore, citations from policy documents to public policy and administration research were analyzed to identify which research contributed most to policy reports and decisions. Additionally, we identified which policy institutions used research literature more than others to justify their policy decisions. Our findings show that think tanks use public policy and administration research literature more often than governmental organizations when justifying policy reports and decisions.

Research in public administration and public management has distinctive features that influence the choices and application of research methods. Periods of change and upheaval in the public sector provide ample opportunities and cases for research, but the standard methodologies for researching in the social sciences can be difficult to follow in the complex world of the public sector. In a dynamic political environment, the focus lies on solving social problems whilst also using methodological principles needed for doing scientifically sound research. Research Methods in Public Administration and Public Management represents a comprehensive guide to doing and using research in public management and administration. It is impressively succinct but covering a wide variety of research strategies including among others: action research, hypotheses, sampling, case selection, questionnaires, interviewing, desk research, prescription and research ethics. This textbook does not bog the nascent researcher down in the theory but does provide numerous international examples and practical exercises to illuminate the research journey. Sandra Van Thiel guides us through the theory, operationalization and research design process before explaining the tools required to carry-out impactful research. This concise textbook will be core reading for those studying research methods and/or carrying out research on public management and administration.

Research in Public Administration and Public Management has distinctive features that influence the choices and application of research methods. The standard methodologies for researching from the social sciences can be difficult to follow in the complex world of the public sector. In a dynamic political context, the focus lies on solving societal problems whilst also using methodological principles to do scientifically sound research. The second edition of Research Methods in Public Administration and Public Management represents a comprehensive guide to undertaking and using research in Public Management and Administration. It is succinct but covers a wide variety of research strategies, including action research, experiments, case studies, desk research, systematic literature reviews and more. It pays attention to issues of design, sampling, research ethics and data management. This textbook does explain the role of theory, but also offers many international examples and practical exercises. It takes the reader through the journey of research, starting with the problem definition, choice of theory, research design options and tools to achieve impactful research. New and revised material includes, but is not limited to: A closer look at popular methods like the experiment and the systematic literature review; A deeper examination of research ethics and data management; New examples from a wide range of countries; Updated ‘Further Reading’ material and additional useful websites. This exciting new edition will be core reading for students at all levels as well as practitioners who are carrying out research on Public Management and Administration.

This article focused on the management discourse after the Korean War and reviewed it focusing on the process of introducing public administration studies. In previous literature, the knowledge of public administration, which was introduced in earnest with US-Korea technical cooperation, was identified only by the influence of American public administration studies, but in this article, it was examined that it was related to studies in Japan as well as in the United States.BRSocial scientists who studied public administration during this period developed two major administrative theories, emphasizing the utility and significance of management in common. One was to understand that politics and administration are inseparable based on the expansion of the function of modern states and the existence of administration-led plans and policies, and to pay attention to the political functions through public administration. The other was to emphasize the uniqueness of public administration and the managerial aspect.BRFrom the postwar period to the early 1960s, knowledge of public administration as a management discourse grew its influence through public official education. American scholar Fred W. Riggs introduced administrative perception based on tradition-modernity dichotomy to Korea and influenced public administration research. The coup forces, who paid attention to the managerial function of public administration, tried to spread management-oriented administrative ideas and attitudes to all public officials, and incorporated management theory into both the subject and the system by establishing the Bureau of administrative management. This aspect was based on the intention of the coup forces to use management discourse as a technology of rule for economic growth and modernization.

Academic expertise is a key pillar of governance processes around the world. A goal of policy and public sector actors is to draw on research to improve decision making, and correspondingly, a goal of public policy and public administration researchers is to provide relevant expertise. It is not clear, however, to what extent these goals are achieved. This study uses the Overton database to analyse the influence of public policy and administration research on policy documents (broadly defined as documents published by policy and public sector organisations). It considers which research is cited by policy documents and which organisations cite research more than others to justify their decisions. The findings show that measuring the influence of academic expertise is not straightforward conceptually or methodologically. However, they emphasise the role of different organisation types for achieving a greater correspondence between research and policy. Specifically, our study shows that think tanks use public policy and administration research more often than government organisations when justifying decisions. The findings provide insight into the utility of new policy databases in illuminating how academic experts can influence the ideas and actions of policy and public sector actors.

ABSTRACTIn recent times, research on public management has grown rapidly. Nevertheless, despite the expansion of attention to management in the public sector, many important questions about the state of public administration research remain unanswered. One of the most salient of these questions concerns the relationship between public administration and generic management research. In particular, to what extent, and in what ways, is public administration research connected with developments in mainstream management and organization studies. In this article, we use bibliographic methods to explore the place of the generic management literature within the intellectual structure of public administration. Our findings suggest that the influence of generic management theories on certain public administration journals and scholars has grown in recent years, although management scholars appear to be uninterested in public administration articles. Further analysis of the subject matter in published articles is suggestive of the possibility that the emergence of the “New Public Management” has played an important role in re-shaping the connections between the two fields of study.

The notion of resilience is rapidly gaining influence in public administration practice and research, but a more comprehensive resilience research agenda in public administration is yet to emerge. This article aims to clarify how experiences and potential contributions from social‐ecological resilience research can inform resilience studies in public administration. By contrasting key components of the resilience paradigm and its policy prescriptions with established findings from public administration research, a set of key shortcomings of social‐ecological resilience thinking are identified: (1) deterministic systems models; (2) simplified accounts of politics and policy; and (3) a lack of systematic and generalizable empirical studies. To avoid these shortcomings, it is suggested that public administration resilience studies should explore multiple and competing models for how resilience can be generated; analyse trade‐offs between resilience and other values of public administration; avoid systems theoretical resilience models; and apply the notion of resilience in areas beyond crisis management.

Recently, there have been a variety of arguments voiced to encourage that more attention be given to the role qualitative methods can play in mixed methods research in public policy and public administration. This article discusses these claims and describes the benefits of qualitative approaches, and how qualitative research methods can be leveraged to strengthen mixed methods research in public administration. We also provide a guide for improving the credibility of mixed methods research through increasing transparency and discussions of all methodological decisions. This study is based on a systematic content analysis of 186 mixed methods studies published in public policy and public administration journals between 2010 and 2018. We found that findings from the quantitative methods dominated the mixed methods studies, little diversity in data collection and analysis methods, and frequent failure to integrate insights from both methods. We also analyzed the 36 qualitative‐dominant studies in the sample, and illuminated seven different ways that authors of qualitative‐dominant studies leveraged the qualitative strand to strengthen mixed methods research. We developed lessons from our analysis of the qualitative‐dominant articles on how to incorporate qualitative methods in a thoughtful manner, articulate a role for each strand, and effectively support findings with one or more strands.

Kenneth Kernaghan and Canadian Public Administration: Editor's Note and Remembrances

Public administration has become the main force for society as well as the government. Given the relevance and urgency of public administration research, this research aims to present publications on public administration research from the Scopus database using bibliometric analysis. The method of this research is qualitative methods using Publish or Perish by Harzing for citations in the form of metrics, Microsoft Excel for frequency analysis, and VOS viewer for data visualization with period time 2010–2021. Based on the research results, the publications on public administration research have been consistently increasing since 2015 with 656 citations. The most popular keywords identified in the document set are development, drug administration, food and practice, China, impact, public administration review and state, application, public administration research, big data, future, case, evolution, and efficiency. The relevance of public administration research probably lies in striking the right balance between application and theory development. On the one hand, public administration research should expose researchers to real-life managerial challenges and give them the necessary tools to implement policy successfully. On the other hand, it should also expose public administration researchers to critical thinking and empower them to engage in governance and societal challenges, propose theoretical solutions and build new theories.

Public administration in the recent years has become a very dynamic and vast domain owing to evolving challenges. Our study aims to comparatively evaluate the changing discourse in public administration research in general and ‘Public Administration and Development’ (PAD) in particular. For this purpose, we have taken research articles from nine journals of public administration domain for the period of 2010–2022. We have used the text‐mining based approach of Dynamic Topic Modelling to understand the evolution of topics in public administration research. This is followed by the Named Entity Recognition (NER) to discover the geographic importance given in public administration research vis‐à‐vis PAD. We have used the measure of ‘Jaccard similarity’ to compare the changing discourse of PAD with respect to other journals. We have found that topics on approaches to governance, organization performance and health were always on the priority in literature. We have also found that topic coverage in PAD is more diverse and niche compared to the overall trends in public administration research. NER findings suggest that public administration research is more Euro‐North American centric while PAD has pan‐continental presence with focus on developing countries.

This article gives a broad overview of Turkish public administration research over the past 20 years and Turkey’s current situation of public administration education. It presents descriptive findings and discusses, compares, and contrasts them with previous research in the United States and Turkey. It examines public administration theory, research, and education together because, in an integrated body of scholarship, the three should reflect each other. Evidence in this study illustrates that the field of public administration in Turkey is quite different from American public administration, but that the elements of theory, research, and teaching are consonant with each other.

In this article, we describe and explore the topics, methods, and author arrangements of the English language literature on public administration in East and Southeast Asia. Articles in the review are for the period 1999-2009 and were identified in the Web of Science. Searches identified 309 articles in the disciplinary area of public administration. The emphasis of scholarly attention is on East Asia—China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. Four major characteristics of this literature are noted. First, it is comparative in nature. Second, it focuses on system and regime change, as well as policies, as the major topics and units of analysis. Thirdly, it is primarily based on normative argumentation, and where it is empirical, it typically relies on secondary data. Fourth, it is largely interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on many disciplines and scholars from around the globe, but it is dominated by scholars based in English language speaking countries. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the public administration discipline and research in the region.