Can the Voices of Practitioners Be Further Amplified in Public Administration Review?

• Author: Kevin R. Kosar
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12767
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

Can the Voices of Practitioners Be Further Amplif‌i ed in Public Administration Review? 323

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 3, pp. 323–324. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12767.

Kevin R. Kosar is a senior fellow

at the R Street Institute, a think-tank

in Washington, DC. He co-directs the

Legislative Branch Capacity Working Group

and edits LegBranch.com .

E-mail: kkosar@rstreet.org

Perspective

J ames L. Perry ’ s “Amplifying the Voices of

Practitioners in PA R ” (March/April 2017) was a

very welcome read. So many academic journals

are just that—academic.

But not Public Administration Review ( PAR ), which

has long valued the perspective of those who toil

in the fields of government. Such has been the case

since the PAR ’s inception in 1940, when a former

Civil Service Commission employee, Leonard White,

became PAR ’s first editor, and chose the content.

The journal understands the value of practitioners’

firsthand experience, which too many research

publications treat as worthless anecdotes.

PAR realizes that social science fails when it is

ignorant of significant variables affecting the

phenomena it studies. Part of the practitioner

“wisdom” that Perry hails is the awareness of variables

and dynamics which are not readily visible to

scholars. Before I went to work as a civil servant on

Capitol Hill, for example, I did not fully appreciate

the diverse ways that institutions and their cultures

interplay to foster or hinder agency performance.

Nor did I grasp how the shared memories of long-

time civil servants affect their willingness to accept

workplace reforms.

The creation of new types of pieces for publication

has been important to this effort.

PAR ’s “Theory to Practice,” “Administrative Profiles,”

“Commentaries,” “Perspectives,” and “Evidence in

Public Administration” all have injected working

public administrators into PAR ’s pages.

Yet for all of PAR ’s innovation, Perry reports that solo-

authored PAR articles by practitioners are few, and

co-authored pieces comprised only 10 percent of the

articles published in 2016. He is quite right that a big

reason why is that the notion of what constitutes an

article has changed.

“Much has changed since the first days of PAR ,

foremost the highly differentiated nature of

the research enterprise. The standards for good

science, using both quantitative and qualitative

methods, have advanced far beyond what passed

for good science in the 1940s. It has become

increasingly difficult for practitioners to be

scholars, too.”

PAR values broad-mindedness about what is worthy

intellectual content. I got my start in PAR in 2005

when then-editor Richard Stillman invited me to

publish an interview with New York University ’ s

Lawrence Mead, who had won the Brownlow

prize for Government Matters: Welfare Reform in

Wisconsin (Princeton University Press, 2004). It

was the first of eight essays I published in PAR

between 2006 and 2010. I did a few interviews,

some book reviews, and a retro-review of Edward

C. Banfield ’ s Government Project (Glencoe, IL: Free

Press, 1951).

I did these types of pieces because they were fun to do.

What a treat it was to phone public administration

eminence Michael Lipsky and to discuss the 30th

anniversary of his Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas

of the Individual in Public Services (Russell Sage

Foundation, 2010). How remarkable it was to

enter the old headquarters of the Washington Post

to interview Rajiv Chandrasekaran about public

administration in the American green zone in Iraq.

For certain, I should add, appearing in the same

pages graced by giants like Dwight Waldo and Louis

Brownlow was gratifying.

Writing these pieces was not easy—I usually read

two or more books before writing each essay, and

the interview pieces required drafting questions and

working through transcripts. But they were far less

arduous to complete than publishing a standard PAR

article, which, appropriately, goes through rigorous

peer review and need bring new data or evidence to

long-running intellectual debates.

Kevin R. Kosar

R Street Institute

Can the Voices of Practitioners Be Further Amplified in

Public Administration Review?