Comparing public and private organizations has long been a favorite pastime of public administration, but such comparisons have often been self-serving. Most have stressed conceptual or normative arguments-oriented largely toward justifying the separate study of public administration. Few have undertaken to establish an empirical basis for their claims. One of the strongest cases made thus far against such comparative efforts is by Parker and Subramaniam (1964). They note particularly the lack of common standards of description and analysis typical of these comparisons, the tendency to compare &dquo;great conglomerations of miscellaneous phenomena,&dquo; and the absence of an agreed-upon model of an administrative organization. They might have, but did not, stress that nonempirical comparisons of this sort tend to appear in public administration tektbooks with the implicit but clear purpose of justifying special attention for public as distinct from other administrative settings.Self-interest is an inadequate ground for scholarly advocacy, particularly when such advocacy proceeds largely from at University of Ulster Library on May 16, 2015 aas.sagepub.com Downloaded from
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.