LAUSR

The celebration of the thirtieth anniversary for this journal is a good opportunity to reflect on the development of public administration research during this time period. This brief essay will argue that much of current public administration research falls into one of two different approaches, one of which offers an almost completely theoretical analysis of public institutions whereas the other delivers largely atheoretical analyses. Neither of these two approaches is able to deliver a contribution to public administration as an academic discipline. Such contributions, we suggest, can only come from theoretically informed empirical study of the practice of public administration. Or, as Christopher Pollitt has argued, public administration needs to return to thinking about the “big picture” rather than the fragments that dominate much of the contemporary work in the discipline (Pollitt 2016). One approach is populated by scholars with only very marginal attention to empirical detail, values, or institutional complexities. Instead, this approach builds on deductive rational choice or public choice theory where public institutions are seen as arenas for utility-maximizing public servants and managers. Much of this literature reads as if the author had never visited a public organization, other than perhaps to get a driver’s license, and certainly had not spent any time observing closely what happens in those organizations and how real-world public administrators practice their craft. The other approach embraces the complexities and ambiguities of public sector organizations and their staff, so much so that it either fails to use theory to make sense of their empirical data or displays a lack of interest in discussing their findings in more generalizable terms. Research drawing on this approach will generate indepth case studies with only scant attention to the degree to which results challenge our conceptual understanding of the issues under scrutiny. The absence of theory here may not be so much managerial theories as a concern with the inherently political nature of public administration. Especially with the emphasis on management in public administration during the past several decades, it may be easy to forget that these organizations are embedded in a political context. The disappointing outcome of this state of affairs is that neither of the two dominant strands of research is conducive to an understanding of real-world public administration in a conceptual and an empirical perspective. Both fail in confronting theory with empirical observation. Both fail in fostering public administration research that