Travis A. Whetsell

Theory-Pluralism in Public Administration Epistemology, Legitimacy, and Method

Neopragmatists in public administration (PA) consistently argue that neopragmatism upgrades regular pragmatism. This claim rests on the contention that pragmatism is host to epistemic foundationalism, which undercuts legitimacy in PA. This article provides a new refutation of the upgrade claim, dissolving the hard-link constructed between epistemology and legitimacy by articulating theory-pluralism in research methods. Haack’s “Analytic Framework” is advanced as a useful conceptualization of epistemic debates in PA, and Laudan’s philosophy of science is advanced to provide a productive conceptualization of PA’s theory competition. Theory-pluralism is then applied to a variety of research areas in PA, demonstrating the need for an approach that harmonizes PA’s competing research traditions under the broader goal of problem resolution in PA.

Reconciling the Varieties of Pragmatism in Public Administration

Pragmatism has become a topic of growing discussion in public administration, as demonstrated by ongoing debate within the pages of Administration & Society. Karen Evans recently argued that the pervasive influence of logical positivism has produced a public administration, dominated by an ethically vacuous overemphasis on efficiency. Keith Snider recently responded to Evans by pointing toward confusion arising from debates between competing varieties of pragmatism, arguing that calls for pragmatism may produce unintended consequences under the present paradigm. However, this debate has the potential to produce a more intellectually experienced and mature public administration. Moreover, American pragmatism is uniquely appropriate as a philosophy of public administration in its dual academic/practitioner roles.

The Dynamics of Positivism in the Study of Public Administration A Brief Intellectual History and Reappraisal

This article explores the development of three features of positivism from the 1800s to the present: the unity of science, the verification criterion of meaning, and the empiricist observation language. The development of these features is demonstrated in the mid-20th century public administration (PA) literature and in the self-reflective literature of the last three decades. Contemporary positivism has been substantially moderated: The verification criterion of meaning has been abandoned, but the unity of science remains a presupposition, and the empiricist observation language remains an important tool. By presenting this intellectual history, some clarity may be added to the philosophical discourse in PA.

Openness and Impact of Leading Scientific Countries

The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier national-level full and fractional paper counts as well as accompanying field-weighted citation counts. Then we collected information from Elsevier on the percent of all internationally coauthored papers for each country, as well as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) measures of the international mobility of the scientific workforce in 2013, and conducted a principle component analysis that produced an openness index. We added data from the OECD on government budget allocation on research and development (GBARD) for 2011 to tie in the public spending that contributed to the 2013 output. We found that openness among advanced science systems is strongly correlated with impact—the more internationally engaged a nation is in terms of coauthorships and researcher mobility, the higher the impact of scientific work. The results have important implications for policy making around investment, as well as the flows of students, researchers, and technical workers.

Conceptualizing the Landscape of Decision Making for Complex Problem Solving

ABSTRACT Complex problem resolution often involves the need for a pragmatic integration of knowledge from stakeholders with competing epistemic claims. The decision-making process regarding complex problem resolution is characterized by four basic sources of knowledge: disciplines, societies, organizations, and individuals. From the perspective of the public administration, we conceptualize the structure of the interactions between the disciplines and other sources of knowledge potentially relevant to the resolution of a public problem. To aid this exercise we examine a series of cases that we believe represent relevant aspects of complex problem resolution. We describe these basic interactions as collaborative, agnostic, or adversarial. This is a reorientation to the knowledge at play in the problem at hand. The study of public administration is well suited as a body of knowledge to address complex problems because it has a rich history of cooperation with other disciplines, practitioners, and stakeholders in the public.