The Public Administration Review and Ongoing Struggles for Connectedness

• Date: 01 January 2000
• Author: Chester A. Newland
• Published date: 01 January 2000
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/0033-3352.00059

20 Public Administration Review • January/February 2000, Vol. 60, No. 1

Chet Newland is past national president of ASPA (1981–1982) and past

editor in chief of

PAR

(1984–1990). He is a fellow and past trustee of the

National Academy of Public Administration, and is an honorary member of

the International City/County Management Association. He was the initial

director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, and served twice as

director of the Federal Executive Institute. He is a teacher at the University of

Southern California, where he is the Duggan Distinguished Professor of Pub-

lic Administration.

Chester A. Newland

University of Southern California

The

Public Administration Review

and Ongoing

Struggles for Connectedness

Facilitation of connectedness has been a fundamental role of the American Society for Public

Administration (ASPA) and the

Public Administration Review (PAR)

throughout their six decades of

professional service. Together, they have sought to link practitioners and academicians across

subfields and varied levels of activities. As a foremost refereed journal,

PAR

has sought to encour-

age the linking of practice and theory through timely publication of methodologically disciplined

research, informed analyses and commentaries, and constructive literature reviews and corre-

spondence. These responsibilities have been persistently challenging. ASPA and

PAR

have served

a dynamic field that has made some wrong turns and had others forced on it, resulting in failed

autonomy, followed by increasing partisan politicization of governments and reduced reliance on

professionally expert administration. For ASPA, it has created leadership and membership prob-

lems. For

PAR

, it has sometimes exacerbated difficulties in connecting practitioners and academi-

cians, but it has also created more shared concerns as important subjects of inquiry. Challenges

now are to serve both enduring and new spheres of the field that are afforded by international

and domestic developments. Both ASPA and

PAR

are striving to do that. Globalization of public

administration opens a world of opportunities today. Localization, as a fundamental of constitu-

tional democracy, is a priority internationally, presenting an engaging paradox of global attention

to both place and planet. That is linked in this commentary to the classic democracy–bureaucracy

quandary that has constructively challenged public administration. While arrays of other impor-

tant subjects, old and new, need to command attention in

PAR

, these are linked in this analysis to

today’s theory and practice of interdependent facilitative states to assess how the journal serves its

responsibilities.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the Public Administra-

tion Review, this commentary focuses on contemporary

challenges to the journal in terms of its parent organiza-

tion, the American Society for Public Administration, and

today’s dynamic, colossal field that both the Society and

the Review seek to serve. In this challenging era, both

ASPA and PAR continue, in part, on the principal course

set by their founders: “to advance the science, processes,

and art of public administration.” In significant respects,

however, today’s conditions differ from those to which

ASPA’s founders and many of a subsequent generation

aspired: a distinctively autonomous field at the core of

governments, led by professionally expert administrators;

the Society as the inclusive, chief organization, provid-

ing connectedness among senior and younger practitio-

ners and academicians; and PA R as the journal of record

of a relatively clearly bounded field of professionally

linked inquiry and practice.

Public administration, as conceived in the pre-World War

II period and developed more than two decades beyond,

briefly reached autonomy. That failed, and some construc-

tive outcomes have followed, particularly escape from self-

imposed, crippling insularity. However, some positive prac-

PAR

and Ongoing Struggles for Connectedness 21

tices associated with that era have largely eroded. Most

notable has been a considerable displacement of profes-

sionally expert public administrators. Outside local coun-

cil-manager governments, most high-level positions in

American government and other public organizations are

now filled by partisan appointees, including many policy/

administration amateurs, and by others from varied fields

and disciplines who contribute vitally, but without much

connectedness among them through identification with a

shared field of civic duty and public service.

ASPA now struggles among many companion and com-

peting organizations to maintain a membership of 55 per-

cent of its 18,000-member high of two decades ago. In

this changed and somewhat more focused condition, how-

ever, it continues as the principal networking organiza-

tion across levels of American government, among non-

governmental public-service professionals and, to some

extent, internationally. PAR continues as the leading public

administration journal in some key respects, especially

as a broad linking medium, but it is now joined by many

publishing and communications outlets, functioning in

an era of fast-changing, multiplying technologies. To

come even close to discerning today’s “record” of public

administration and its essential cognate disciplines and

fields, one must track a bewildering yet encouraging ar-

ray of books, journals, governmental issuances, electronic

communications, and other sources—at varied levels from

local to global.

Positive roles remain, and new ones are open for ASPA

and PAR—not despite these problems, but through oppor-

tunities they afford. Chiefly, these are roles of engagement

in ongoing struggles for professional connectedness, both

internationally and domestically within the United States.

Anniversary publications in and about PAR in the past

have been extensive at 25-year intervals (Hawley and

Weintraub; PAR 25th Anniversary issue, March 1965; PAR

50th Anniversary issues, 1990). But critiques of PAR, ASPA,

and the field they serve have not been limited to anniver-

saries; introspection has characterized the Review through-

out its existence, especially with respect to definition and

boundaries of the field. All of that extensive literature is

readily available and, except for a few references, is not

repeated here (see compiled PAR indexes: Gawthrop and

Gawthrop 1980; Yeager 1995). Instead, this commentary

deals chiefly and briefly with developments that reflect

the journal’s roles in balancing some ongoing searches for

syntheses (and synthesis) in the field, while encouraging

differentiation in subjects and methods of theory-linked

and practice-connected research—and facilitating effec-

tive publication and readership.

This commentary is in two parts. The first reviews de-

velopments that have impacted ASPA and PAR . The sec-

ond discusses two seeming paradoxes, conjoined here as

an example of the challenges to the field and the difficul-

ties of journal leadership: the enduringly familiar struggle

to reconcile constitutional democracy and bureaucracy,

and the early twenty-first century challenge to value and

reconcile place and planet.

The first paradox has been analyzed extensively through-

out PAR’s years, including useful studies of instrumental

and constitutive roles of professional administrators in the

1990s. Yet book-length studies by such public administra-

tion giants as Waldo (1977), F. C. Mosher (1968), and

Redford (1969) were required early-on to search through

this quandary for synthesis and its shifting limits; that

search continued in the 1990s with scholarly books by Cook

(1996), Elkin and Soltan (1993), Richardson (1997), and

Spicer (1995), all reviewed in PAR (Morgan 1998). Such

realities—challenges of depth and scope—demonstrate

much about PAR’s roles and limits to reasonable expecta-

tions of a journal.

The more recent paradox of place and planet is now

similarly fundamental and challenging. In the 1990s, con-

siderable theory and practice in the field of public admin-

istration tended toward what may be termed interdepen-

dent facilitative states in an era of localization and glo-

balization. The extent to which PAR’s contents have re-

flected these tendencies to value both place and globally

shared experience and standards illustrates the difficul-

ties of searching a recently emerging subject for synthesis

within the limits of one professional journal. This is a rea-

son, along with importance of the subject, for selection of

this contemporary paradox and its linkage for enlarged

perspective with its classic predecessor as an example of

challenges for ASPA, PAR, and the field.

As experienced readers would expect, a study of the

Review’s articles of the past decade reveals several that

deal with the first paradox and fewer that relate to contem-

porary facilitative-state notions, aside from important stud-

ies that touch on values of place/localization/civicness.

Also, as long-time readers know, PAR articles related to

these challenges stretch far back before the 1990s. Where

near-consensus is found respecting democracy/bureau-

cracy, dissatisfaction about conclusions nonetheless re-

mains. Given these realities—and alternative, basic jour-

nal responsibilities to publish refereed research work on a

vast range of detailed subjects—how is it practical to bring

useful focus, except through books and reports, to ongo-

ing searches for syntheses on fundamentals? Consider for

comparison another example barely discussed here:

struggles in PAR’s pages over research methods and re-

lated theories—so extensive and sometimes fiercely joined

as to arouse complaints of battle fatigue and longings for

armistice across generations of the Review’s readers. On a

substantive paradox of the proportions of place and planet,

can ASPA and PA R reasonably contribute to a search for