The Future of the Study of Public Administration: Embedding Research Object and Methodology in Epistemology and Ontology

• 成果类型: Editorial Material
• 署名作者: Raadschelders, Jos C. N.
• 署名单位: University System of Ohio; Ohio State University
• 刊物名称: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-3352
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02433.x
• 发表日期: 2011
• 页码: 916-924
• 关键词: management; dilemmas; science; issues; work

摘要

What should be done to advance the study of public administration? A strong argument is advanced by outgoing PAR managing editor Jos C. N. Raadschelders that the field benefits significantly from greater attention to ontology and epistemology. To be sure, empirical, evidence-based research has its place, but its basis and the meaning of findings seldom are questioned. Why? Many public administration scholars seek scientificness through a disciplinary type of methodology. However, working within an inherently interdisciplinary field, public administration scholars cannot reduce the complex, wicked problems of society and government to mere empirical measurement. The author lays out five critical challenges confronting today's public administration-both its study and research-requiring the field's urgent attention in order to meet the comprehensive and rapidly expanding needs of specialists and generalists, practitioners and academicians, as well as the general public. Education has two purposes: on the one hand to form the mind, on the other to train the citizen. The Athenians concentrated on the former, the Spartans on the latter. The Spartans won, but the Athenians were remembered. -Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook, 1931 [The] materialistic basis [of science] has directed attention to things as opposed to values. -Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925 One of the chief practical obstacles to the development of social inquiry is the existing division of social phenomena into a number of compartmentalized and supposedly independent non-interacting fields, as in the different provinces assigned, for example to economics, politics, jurisprudence, morals, anthropology, etc .... It is legitimate to suggest that there is an urgent need for breaking down these conceptual barriers so as to promote cross-fertilization of ideas. -John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938 A disciplinary field can hardly attain the sophisticated level of scholarship which is worthy of graduate education if it is not capable of critically developing from within itself its epistemological foundations. -Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, The New Science of Organizations, 1981