My instution (CIDE, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas) is celebrating its 40th anniversary of being founded, and as a result, we have been organizing a series of events around this theme. Last week, we had Dr. Barry Bozeman (one of the foremost founders of the public administration research field, and a very widely cited scholar) speak at CIDE on “Integrative Publicness”. I livetweeted his talk, for the most part, but there were obviously a few parts that I missed.
Bozeman spoke about a broad spectrum of publicness (as opposed to the traditional private/public divide we often focus on when studying organizations). While widely known as an organization theorist, Bozeman actually has a background in psychology and was one of the first scholars who wrote about (and used) experimental approaches in public administration scholarship. A recent co-authored article of his (Walker et al, 2013) uses an experimental research design to analyze public ownership and performance (An Experimental Assessment of Public Ownership and Performance: Comparing perceptions in East Asia and the United States)
Barry Bozeman habla sobre publicness pic.twitter.com/5hQKDHDcdr
— EDGAR E RAMIREZ (@edgareramirez) October 9, 2014
The “Publicness Forest” an overview of Bozeman’s intellectual trajectory – hes moving towards integrative Publicness pic.twitter.com/aQZAxIi2ON
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) October 9, 2014
It was very neat to have Barry Bozeman at CIDE and have discussions like the one we had on experiments.
I ask Bozeman “what questions in public administration are NOT suited for experimental methods”. says PA studies “mundane things” #CIDE40
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) October 9, 2014
As someone who uses experiments in his research, I can understand where Bozeman’s statement comes from. I think some scholars tend to see public administration as fluffier than political science, for example. I don’t agree with that view. To be quite honest, I think political science has become a bit obsessed with experiments, and I wouldn’t be surprised if public administration also does this. But development economics, political psychology and political science, in general, have made strides that are worth discussing and examining in more detail. But I do believe public administration scholars are moving forward in a number of areas, organization science being one of the most relevant ones.
Barry Bozeman gave a really nice lecture on how to study organizations, and he is a role model in how we can present an intellectual trajectory. I look forward to reading more of his work (even though I’ve already read a lot of it during my formative years).
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