Some Evidence of a Pluralistic Discipline: A Narrative Analysis of Public Administration Symposia

Abstract

This article investigates the discipline of public administration as it is manifested in symposium articles published during the period 1985–99. What was the field trying to accomplish? The method of investigation is narrative analysis. Using specific discourse markers (method, substantive contents, and authorial intentions), the authors found a wide variety of purposes and projects in the symposia investigated. The condition of public administration, they conclude, is distinguished by a radical pluralism—a striking absence of any singular conception of public administration scholarship.

Examining the Evolution of the Field of Public Administration through a Bibliometric Analysis of Public Administration Review

“…It is not uncommon for emergent or interdisciplinary fields to seek signals to establish their identity (Adams et al ). The field of public administration is no stranger to this search for identity, having a robust literature with the objective to depict a common disciplinary narrative (see, e.g., Houston and Delevan ; Lan and Anders ; Meier ; Miller and Jaja ; Riccucci ; Wright ; Zalmanovitch ). One common marker of the development of a discipline or a field is a journal, which signals the cohesion of authors and topics around a novel area of inquiry (Sugimoto and Weingart ).…”

Understanding the Field of Public Affairs through the Lens of Ranked Ph.D. Programs in the United States

“…We identified 15 research topics in public affairs using a popular topic modeling algorithm. Different from adopting subjectively defined subfields in public administration or public affairs in the literature (Bingham & Bowen, ; Lan & Anders, ; Miller & Jaja, ), we let the publication text data speak for themselves, and therefore, the topics are more objectively derived. In addition, LDA allows each publication to simultaneously represent different topics in proportion to their relevance.…”

“…In addition, LDA allows each publication to simultaneously represent different topics in proportion to their relevance. The “one publication, one topic” approach in the past studies (Bingham & Bowen, ; Lan & Anders, ; Miller & Jaja, ) failed to take into account the interdisciplinary nature of public affairs research. For the topical results, it is no surprise to see that some of these topics overlap with the subfields of public administration discussed, for instance, in Lan and Anders (), as public administration is the key focus of a large number of policy schools and a key representation of the public affairs field as just discussed.…”

“…Efforts have been made to understand a narrower version of public affairs, i.e., public administration, mostly through the lens of publications at major public administration journals (Lan & Anders, 2000;Miller & Jaja, 2005;Ni, Sugimoto, & Robbin, 2017). There are also a small number of studies trying to profile public affairs programs either through faculty/staff/student publications in major public administration journals (Douglas, 1996;Legge & Devore, 1987) or degrees offered (Koven, Goetzke, & Brennan, 2008).…”

“…Second, using methods in big data/text mining, we provide an unbiased identification of topics in the field of public affairs, and based on that we show how different topics have evolved in public affairs research over the years. This approach has advantages over earlier topic identification efforts (Bingham & Bowen, ; Lan & Anders, ; Miller & Jaja, ) in terms of objectivity. Third, this research, to our best knowledge, is the only one that studies the clustering of U.S. public affairs schools based on research topics and hiring networks among them.…”