Government and Public Administration: Challenges to and Need For Connecting Knowledge

TLDR

Public administration research seeks to understand government, yet the rapid expansion of governmental scope and academic specialization has left knowledge fragmented with few efforts to integrate across disciplines. The study calls for creating metaframeworks and metalanguages that better link compartmentalized knowledge of government. The authors propose a pluralist perspective that unifies four major approaches to knowledge integration in public administration.

Abstract

The material object of the study of public administration is to acquire knowledge about government. As government's role and position in society has grown to historically unprecedented levels—as is clear when comparing current size of personnel, expenditure, number of laws and regulations and so forth to those of a 100 years ago—so has academic specialization grown. Efforts to connect these specialized bodies of knowledge both among the various specializations within the study of public administration, as well as among the various disciplines who study government from their particular formal object, are few and far between. More attention needs to be paid to developing and providing metaframeworks and metalanguages on the basis of which compartmentalized knowledge about government can be linked better. The pluralist perspective upon knowledge integration developed in this article serves as an umbrella for the four groups of approaches under which most theories-in-use can be categorized. But, the challenges to such knowledge integration are several.