The Public Administration Review and Ongoing Struggles for Connectedness

Abstract

Facilitation of connectedness has been a fundamental role of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the Public Administration Review (PAR) throughout their six decades of professional service. Together, they have sought to link practitioners and academicians across subfields and varied levels of activities. As a foremost refereed journal, PAR has sought to encourage the linking of practice and theory through timely publication of methodologically disciplined research, informed analyses and commentaries, and constructive literature reviews and correspondence. These responsibilities have been persistently challenging. ASPA and PAR have served a dynamic field that has made some wrong turns and had others forced on it, resulting in failed autonomy, followed by increasing partisan politicization of governments and reduced reliance on professionally expert administration. For ASPA, it has created leadership and membership problems. For PAR, it has sometimes exacerbated difficulties in connecting practitioners and academicians, but it has also created more shared concerns as important subjects of inquiry. Challenges now are to serve both enduring and new spheres of the field that are afforded by international and domestic developments. Both ASPA and PAR are striving to do that. Globalization of public administration opens a world of opportunities today. Localization, as a fundamental of constitutional democracy, is a priority internationally, presenting an engaging paradox of global attention to both place and planet. That is linked in this commentary to the classic democracy‐bureaucracy quandary that has constructively challenged public administration. While arrays of other important subjects, old and new, need to command attention in PAR, these are linked in this analysis to today's theory and practice of interdependent facilitative states to assess how the journal serves its responsibilities.

It's About Time: Catching Method Up to Meaning-The Usefulness of Narrative Inquiry in Public Administration Research

“…Furthermore, this discussion becomes quite relevant to the ongoing aspiration to connect practitioners and academicians in the field, which is so excellently described by Chester Newland (2000) in his review of PAR's efforts to stay relevant to both. Quality research may also depend on engaging practitioners as stakeholders in the research, according to the nature of the problem and the purposes of the research.…”

Cooperative inquiry for learning and connectedness

“…Despite this imperative, professional schools have not been immune to the academe-practice disconnect. The specific manifestations of the disconnect have been well documented in the management field (Barley, Meyer, and Gash 1988;Bolton and Stolcis 2003;Feeney 2000;Huff 2000;Newland 2000;Reynolds and Vince 2004;Rynes, Bartunek, and Daft 2001).…”

Good Work, Honestly Done: ASPA at 70

“…In summarizing Mosher's points, one vision of the American Society for Public Administration emerges. It would be an elite group of academicians and practitioners emulating the European model, with a class of high‐level generalist administrators sharing thoughtful insights at the intersection of administration and policy (Newland 2000, 24). A competing notion held by Louis Brownlow was that ASPA should be a generalist, membership‐based association bringing together all those engaged in public service.…”