How Effective is Public Management Research? An Analysis of Scope and Methodology
How Effective is Public Management Research? An Analysis of Scope and Methodology
David W. Pitts Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Georgia State University 14 Marietta St. NW Ste. 328 Atlanta, GA 30303 404.413.0111 404.413.0104 FAX pitts@gsu.edu
Paper prepared for presentation at the 9th Public Management Research Conference, Tucson, Arizona, October 25-27, 2007. The author thanks Sergio Fernandez for assistance in developing the coding instrument and Ravtosh Bal and Lauren Edwards for research assistance. The author accepts all responsibility for errors and omissions.
Introduction Public management research grapples with a number of difficult issues. It is a new field, with developing norms and approaches to research, and there has been little examination of the progress it has made in advancing knowledge. Nomenclature concerns have prevented a coherent analysis of public management research, since much of what many would consider “public management” has historically been classified as public administration or public policy research. In this paper, I analyze public management as a field of scholarship and offer some definitional boundaries for consideration. Using a sample of public management research, I analyze the scope and methodology employed by a set of scholars and assess the breadth, depth, and quality of the research. I pose and answer eleven questions about public management research: six pertaining to its scope and content, and five concerning its research methods. In the following sections, I define public management’s scope and content and outline some key methodological issues in public management research. After formulating some key research questions, I discuss the data and method used in the study, followed by a discussion of the findings. I close with a discussion and implications for future work.
Defining Public Management: Scope and Content Lynn (1996) argues that public management as a field did not begin as an area of
David W. Pitts Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Georgia State University 14 Marietta St. NW Ste. 328 Atlanta, GA 30303 404.413.0111 404.413.0104 FAX pitts@gsu.edu
Paper prepared for presentation at the 9th Public Management Research Conference, Tucson, Arizona, October 25-27, 2007. The author thanks Sergio Fernandez for assistance in developing the coding instrument and Ravtosh Bal and Lauren Edwards for research assistance. The author accepts all responsibility for errors and omissions.
Introduction Public management research grapples with a number of difficult issues. It is a new field, with developing norms and approaches to research, and there has been little examination of the progress it has made in advancing knowledge. Nomenclature concerns have prevented a coherent analysis of public management research, since much of what many would consider “public management” has historically been classified as public administration or public policy research. In this paper, I analyze public management as a field of scholarship and offer some definitional boundaries for consideration. Using a sample of public management research, I analyze the scope and methodology employed by a set of scholars and assess the breadth, depth, and quality of the research. I pose and answer eleven questions about public management research: six pertaining to its scope and content, and five concerning its research methods. In the following sections, I define public management’s scope and content and outline some key methodological issues in public management research. After formulating some key research questions, I discuss the data and method used in the study, followed by a discussion of the findings. I close with a discussion and implications for future work.
Defining Public Management: Scope and Content Lynn (1996) argues that public management as a field did not begin as an area of