Year:    2014

Author:    Bohne, Eberhard

Die Verwaltung, Vol. 47 (2014), Iss. 2 : pp. 159–195

Abstract

Subject, Methodological Foundations, and Theoretical Framework of the Study of Public Administration

There has been a long-standing controversy over whether the study of public administration is a self-contained academic discipline or whether there are only different disciplines which are concerned with various aspects of public administration from their specific disciplinary perspectives, e.g. sociology, political science, law etc. People deny that the study of public administration has a definable subject and methodological and theoretical foundations of its own. This study opens first with a survey of the concepts of public administration in different disciplines, after which public administration will be conceptualized as a formal institution. This is followed by a presentation of the managerial, political and legal perspectives of the study of public administration and its character as an integrative discipline of its own. From a methodological perspective, a distinction is made between the study of public administration as an empirical-analytical discipline and a normative discipline. Public administration as an empirical-analytical study follows the requirements of critical rationalism but relaxes the rigidity of the falsification criterion with several administrative paradigms. With respect to normative reasoning in the study of public administration, criteria of intersubjective controllability will be developed on the basis of the syllogistic reasoning model. Finally, a theoretical framework is presented to be used in the study of public administration. It is based on actor-centred institutionalism and combines other theoretical social science approaches as modules for empirical analyses within the theoretical framework.