Big Questions for a Significant Public Administration

Big questions/big issues and bridges between practitioners and academics are the themes that emerged from the recent "Building Bridges Tour" of the Public Administration Review editors (Stivers 2000). The editors conclude that a focus on the big questions of public administration is meaningful to both academics and practicing professionals. In a democracy, "big questions" tackle issues that not only engage and energize practitioners and academics, but also have meaning for large numbers of citizens. Public administration must be a profession and a field of inquiry in service to society at large. The biggest challenge to success in identifying and engaging big questions is our habit of focusing too closely on instrumental issues of day-to-day operations of public-sector organizations. Big questions must not focus on instrumental questions, but on the consequences and value for the larger society in which public administration is embedded. How public administration affects society should be the overarching focus from which big questions are derived. The focus must be understanding the role of public administration in influencing society historically and understanding its use to shape society in the future. The most important values in our society derive from its democratic and capitalistic character. Both require a strong state to exist, but they achieve greatest success by providing the institutional context for action outside government--action by individuals, businesses, civic associations, and nonprofit organizations. To be consequential in society, perhaps even significant, public administration must address questions at this level, which are ultimately questions of institutional performance measured at the jurisdictional level. This was achieved during the Progressive Era, when just-emerging, self-conscious public administration successfully addressed the infrastructure and public-health barriers to the growth of cities and industry and attacked corruption in government. However, the pull toward public-agency-level instrumentality is powerful in our field. Sometimes this focus on the doing of public administration is stated unambiguously, as in Behn's (1995) three big questions of public management (micromanagement, motivation, and measurement), characteristic of those who focus on organizational-level phenomena and public management. In other cases, the focus is less obvious, though it remains. For example, Frederickson (1999) sees the field making progress by focusing on how public administrators of functional systems overcome the disarticulation and fragmentation that is characteristic of the modern state, drawing on theories of governance, networks, and administrative conjunction to improve understanding. The focus remains on the operations of agency-level public administrators, expanded to include nongovernmental actors affecting public affairs. In another example, the Priority Issues Task Force of the National Academy of Public Administration proposes "the transformation of governance" as its defining focus for the next several years, seeing three elements in this transformation: "(1) the growing complexity of relationships between government and civil society, in pursuit of public purposes; (2) the shifting of national responsibilities both in the direction of international bodies and systems and in the direction of states, localities, and community-based institutions; and (3) the need for greater capacity to manage these relationships" (NAPA 2000, 2). Again, the focus is how changes in societal factors affect the agency-level activities of public administration. Kettl's (2000) analysis of public administration at the millennium explicitly sets administrative ideas in a context of competing political theories derived from Hamilton, Jefferson, Wilson, and Madison. However, the focus remains on the management of agencies, with progress expected through greater theoretical tigon Public administration is seen as embedded in political culture, but not as a force that also shapes society. …