The Study of Public Administration in the United States

Abstract

The study of public administration in the United States is large in terms of the number of academic programmes, the range of journal publications, and the number of scholars. Its scholarship attracts attention from all over the globe. At the same time it is a public administration that is clearly embedded in a specific national culture, just as anywhere else. Three of the main challenges include the strong increase of quantitative‐statistical methods, the decline of practitioner authors, and substantive specialization to the extent that generalists' perspectives are losing ground.

Trends in the Study of Public Administration: Empirical and Qualitative Observations from Public Administration Review, 2000–2009

“…Recently, an article was published on the limited influence of Max Weber in and on German public administration (Seibel 2010). The British journal Public Administration carried articles by Siffin (1956) and Raadschelders (forthcoming) on American public administration.…”

Exploring a new model of public administration in a digital age: automation, digitization and transparency

“…An organizational structure indistinctively displays, at multiple levels of granularity, all entities referenced by the (enacted) deeds. For example, the bureaucracy of the United States can be visualized through an organizational structure with a federal government divided in departments, the departments subdivided in units, the units segmented in subunits… (Raadschelders, 2011) Tasks and processes are rarely or never represented in the organizational structure, but are assumed to be implicitly subsumed in the government decision-making.…”

“…For example, the description of the department of health and human services (DHHS) at a certain level of the government bureaucracy of the United States (Cf. Raadschelders, 2011) is also the presentation of the DHHS as the administration under governance at that level of reasoning. At a similar level, the administration under governance would be the DHS (for a public service related to the department of homeland security), etc.…”

Craft and Capacity in the Public Service

“…Public administration has been variously characterized as an art, craft, or science and often a combination of all three (Raadschelders ). For Raadschelders (:143), conceiving of public administration as craft highlights the importance of ‘intuition, tacit knowledge and experiential knowledge’. Like other creative endeavours, he notes that while such traits can be studied, ‘they cannot be transmitted via the usual pedagogical means’.…”