An academic program for public affairs in Austria

Abstract

Since the mid-2000s a need for well-educated public affairs professionals emerged in Austria. In 2006, the University of Vienna established a postgraduate Master of Arts program with an specialization in public affairs. The extra-occupational program runs for four semesters with a workload of 120 ECTS-points. The program consists not of practical training only, but is founded upon a theoretical framework. It successfully integrates real world, experiential, learning into higher education. To graduate students have to write a master thesis and pass a final examination.The professionalization of industrial sectors is strongly related with the proper training of new entrants, ideally at an academic level. Over the last 35 years in Austria, there have been attempts by both professional associations and universities to institutionalize the academic education for communication disciplines. In most cases professional associations took the initiative. In cooperation with the University of Vienna, the public affairs industry established the first academic program for public affairs in the German-speaking world.Such a program faces various challenges: education for public affairs means educating for complexity; the political and economic environments are in constant progress; and societal acceptance for public affairs is -at best -ambivalent.This article examines the background for an academic education for public affairs, details the curriculum of the Viennese public affairs program and highlights some findings from a survey of the program's alumni.

Bringing science to practice: Designing an integrated academic education program for public affairs

“…Griffin and Thurber (2015) present different possible modules ranging from assessment of the political environment to ethics, and also include direct lobbying and coalition building. Wippersberg, Wagner, and Lojka (2015) report from Austria, where an extensive postgraduate program on public affairs of 2 years was developed at the University of Vienna. It consisted of small course units representing different fields of knowledge and skills.…”

Non-Market Strategy Literature Review: The Government Relations Component

“…the importance of Government as a major non-market forceand the need to correctly moderate and strategically interact with it to produce aligned results, there are several recent references from scholars and practitioners (Foundation for Public Affairs, 2017;Bonardi and Bergh, 2015;Lawton, Doh, and Rajwani, 2014;Heinz, 2014;KPMG, 2014). Therefore, new approaches and tools are being developed to specifically help the strategic thinking process and effective implementation in this field, as some recent initiatives in this direction indicate (Navarro, 2019;Wippersberg, Wagner and Lojka, 2015;Scott, 2015). This is particularly important in a constantly evolving scenario such as represented by the non-market environment, where companies need to be prepared to innovate and be flexible to identify new trends and engage them before they happen (McGrath, 2013), even if this represents pursuing to develop other core competencies instead of relying on current ones.…”