Teaching public administration

Introduction

This journal has witnessed and contributed to some of the key debates in the discipline over a period of more than 30 years. In this article, the aim is to identify and explore some of the key themes to emerge during the past two decades. Like any ‘greatest hits’ compilation there are some obvious candidates for inclusion together with some that have faded from fashion but are nonetheless worthy of renewed attention. There are also numerous excellent articles that could not be included here because the exercise is by definition a selective one. In this piece, each of the selected themes will be reviewed in the light of issues raised in particular papers. The specific papers are brought together in an online form for individual attention. The aim of this approach is twofold: first, to facilitate reflection upon the contribution of the journal; and, second, to encourage critical attention to the current state and future direction of the discipline of public administration itself. During the review period discussed herein, the discipline has moved from a relatively insular concern with British administration to a greater openness in relation to the value of international experience. This is reflected in the coverage of the journal during this time.

Selecting themes such as ‘local government’, ‘health’, ‘civil service’ or ‘public and private’ has been deliberately avoided. Of course, the journal has made a valuable addition to our understanding of such service-based and sectoral areas, but the aim has been instead to identify cross-cutting themes that allow the reader to dig a little deeper and also assist the understanding of just where the journal has made its own distinctive contribution.

Teaching methods and pedagogy

Consistent with its title, the journal focused, especially in its early years, on aspects of teaching methods largely neglected elsewhere. Many other disciplinary journals have turned their attentions increasingly to research rather than teaching under the growing pressures of the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise and Research Excellence Framework. This has, perhaps, been regrettable: teaching is the prime interest of students after all. Yet, the journal has maintained its pedagogical interests. Shepherd (1998) provides an early review of how public administration and distance learning may go together, something that has since become more, rather than less relevant especially, one might add, for courses offered internationally. Donald (2003) recounts how web-based learning may provide an ‘electronic setting’ for teaching human resources (HR) to public service and third sector students in the USA. There has also been a readiness to engage with theoretical as well as practical issues in identifying new ways of teaching the discipline, such as Barr’s attempt (2002) to apply aspects of cultural theory to the subject. Less abstract was the discussion by Ellison (2006) on writing skills, particularly the development of authoritative writing for students of the discipline.

From the early years of the journal (such as Greenwood et al., 1997) there have also been debates about matters that were once contested but are now taken for granted, such as the introduction of modular course structures and semester-based academic years. The fragmentation that may be associated with such structures, the possibility of repetition and the lack of academic progression are matters that remain important but are now little discussed, again regrettably. Within the broad category of pedagogy, the journal has also been unique in providing detail about certain specific issues: Coatham (2006), for instance, considered how project management could be taught to students of housing, while Jones (2007) contributed a thoughtful piece on how citizenship is to be taught at school level, a topic made more contentious by the different understandings of what ‘citizenship’ may mean along with its difficult translation into the classroom.

Public service training

If the view is taken that public administration exists to inform practice as well as to contribute to academic research, then it follows that the discipline must also serve to inform training for such practice. This has been a strength of the journal over the long term. Early discussions are provided by Duggett (1996), who considered civil service training, and Huque and Lee (1996) who examined public service training in the context of Hong Kong. It is interesting that both these pieces have ‘change’ or ‘changing’ in their titles; it would have been impossible when they were written to envisage just how enormous such changes would turn out to be. Liddle (2000) considered the training needs of managers in the then fairly new regional development agencies (RDAs), especially in relation to regeneration. More recently, Joyce and Coxhead (2012) have provided a considered discussion of training and development for public service leaders. They pose the question of whether the UK civil service needs university courses at all and, if so, what their required characteristics are, arguing for a change in the ‘design and delivery’ of what higher education offers together with an emphasis upon experiential and practical learning. In such a context it might be asked where criticality fits in and how we can build in the capacity for practitioners to adopt the questioning approach that ultimately informs good practice. Anyone who has had the experience of providing management development training in the unglamorous surroundings of a local council training department on a rainy November afternoon can plausibly argue that practitioner training requires two things to be both critical and successful: first, enough space and freedom to explore and develop the tools of learning (for instance, in a whole day session) and, second, demonstrable and visible commitment from senior management.

Importantly, the focus of the journal has increasingly moved beyond the UK alone, a positive aspect in the light of the reputation of public administration as a relatively parochial UK/USA discipline. Scott (2001), for instance, examines training needs in an Australian context. Kayuni (2009) considers the training of public servants in Malawi, also making some relevant comments on the development of public administration as a discipline. Copus and Altherr (2012) make an interesting contribution to the role of universities in senior management and executive development, citing empirical case studies from England and Germany. Knassmuller and Veit (2016) review the training of senior civil servants in a wider group of European countries. Murphy et al., (2013) use a case study drawn from their own experience in the Nottingham area to consider the collaboration that is possible between practitioners and academics, beginning perhaps with a discrete consultancy project before evolving into a fuller relationship. Godwin and Meek (2016), from their experience in the USA, have considered the phenomenon of the ‘scholarly practitioner’, specifically the question of how research, practice and theory may be integrated at postgraduate level.

Cairney (2015) has posed the related but difficult question of how policy theory can impact upon policy making, another facet of the academic–practitioner link. Partly, he says, it is a matter of transforming the language used in policy theory so that it connects with those involved in practice, but one might add that this again raises the question of just what policy theorists and policy makers expect from each other. Cairney, in effect, provokes the question of whether theorists, in working with policy makers, should abandon theory and emphasise practice. However, in doing this, theorists cut the ground from beneath their own feet when practitioners ask: what have you got to tell us? We are the ones who know about practice!

Decentralisation and devolution

A recurring theme in public service theory and practice is that of decentralisation, latterly falling under the rubric of devolution or decentring but, essentially, denoting the same move away from centralised command-and-control structures, whether this is within public organisations, across different sectors or, indeed, within the national body politic. Wettenhall (1996) explored the language of decentralisation in an early discussion of this topic. Stevens and Wright (2002) offer one of the few papers to examine regional governance in the UK as a whole, providing a typology that serves as a very useful starting point for researchers in this area.

As devolution has brought more settled institutional arrangements to Scotland, Wales and – to some extent – Northern Ireland, there has been a greater degree of interest in its politically uncertain place within England. In this respect, Atkinson (2000) looked at the tensions of devolution at the start of the New Labour years, introducing some instructive European comparisons alongside the crucial question of English regional identity. The allegedly strong regional identity of North-East England is discussed by Atkinson, although many of the academic (and New Labour) assumptions about the region would subsequently be challenged by the 2004 referendum vote that generated a 78% ‘no’ vote for an elected regional assembly in the North-East. Elcock (2009) offered an analysis of the failure of the 2004 referendum to approve the devolution plan, a failure that resulted in the withdrawal of possible devolution plans for the rest of England. Since then, the rise of combined authorities in England, the creation of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ and the election in 2017 of the first ‘metro mayors’ to oversee the leadership of groups of local councils have put devolution in a different form back into mainstream political discourse.

Digging beneath the surface, Elcock questioned the strength of ‘English regional cultures and identities’ (2009: 17) when viewed across different English regions and wonders whether any push towards real English regionalism and decentralisation will come from the centre or from the regions themselves. At present, it is necessary to conclude that it is unlikely to come from either despite the Conservative government talking during 2015–2017 of its commitment to devolution.

Ethics

The ethical dimensions of public administration and of the work of public servants constitute another recurring theme, located within the context of rapid change in the public sector environment in the developed world together with the challenges faced by societies in the transition to democracy. Chapman (2003) provided a broad review of values and ethics within administrative systems, while several papers in the 2005 special issue, which arose from a one-day conference on this theme, explicitly considered the ethical dimension of public service. These included contributions from practitioners; see, for example, Jones and Coutts (2005). Behrens (2005), on behalf of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, has looked specifically at the ethical framework for local government, including the links between organisational culture and ethics, a matter that has rather faded from political attention in recent years. Elcock (2012) has taken a different tack, looking at how public service values have increasingly been transformed into business values, and using an impressive lineage of thinkers from Kant through to Rawls and latterly Sandel to remind us of the values of public service and the importance of – a word seldom heard in public administration – morality.

Ethics are also a key aspect of research activity in the contexts of both higher education and public service. Brown and Agius (2012) examine research governance in both universities and the NHS, in particular the question of gaining ethical approval and preparing the next generation of students for their own research practice.

Ethics as a whole remains a rich area for comparative and cross-cultural analysis of practice. In this respect, Pallai and Gregor (2016) report the findings of a survey of civil servants who have been through an integrity and ethics programme in Hungary, while both Louw (1998) and Kanyane (2004) address ethical issues in South Africa. This is an area to which the journal is highly likely to return in future given the political convulsions of the moment.

What is public administration?

It is hard to think of many areas of scholarship that have spent so much time ruminating on what they are, with such inconclusive results. Public administration is a subject derived from a tradition of descriptive and largely institutional study rooted in law rather than in the social sciences or business. In practice, its remit has changed so much that it is hardly recognisable. This self-obsession can seem narcissistic but, in truth, such uncertainty is inevitable: Public administration (as a term, and as an area of both study and practice) has developed into public management, which may or may not be the same thing. The journal has contributed to serious debates about this (Fenwick and McMillan, 2014). The public sector itself, which the discipline takes as its focus of study, has changed fundamentally in relation to both the private and voluntary community sectors.

Jones (2012) has considered the question of where public administration has gone, given its disappearance as a discrete topic at undergraduate level in the UK. Greenwood’s early review (1999) incorporates a concern with the proper boundaries of the subject (as it moved from the social sciences to the broader realm of business and management) and attention to the separate topic of how it is to be taught, bringing in our first theme discussed above. Ringeling (2015) has asked the critical question of just what constitutes the ‘public’ in public administration. These matters are very far from being resolved.

Through it all there is the massive theme of change. Rosenbaum’s paper on ‘critical issues’ for public administration (2014) links the pervasive political criticism of government and the public service sector to the lack of confidence in public administration itself, a crucial point that might encourage us to be more assertive about the value (and values) of government intervention. A review of this period reveals immense patterns of change with regard to what public administration is, what administrators do, what constitutes the ‘public’ element, whether administrators have become managers and whether, at the end of all this, there remain any fundamental differences at all between the public and the private spheres.

Conclusion: Key themes

In closing, it should be added that several papers throughout these years – most recently, articles gathered in volume 31, issue 1 (2013) – have considered the relevance of Master of Public Administration (MPA) programmes, a topic that cuts across the themes of management development and pedagogy and raises enduring questions about the role of higher education in meeting the needs of practice audiences. Academics may largely see themselves as somehow capable of providing more than prescribed training, yet are not always equipped to translate this ‘more’ into what practitioners want (and are willing to pay for). This is an unresolved question but an important one; this journal is surely the right place to find a resolution of the relationship between the academic and the practical, with contributions from practitioners as well as scholars.

Some of the themes reviewed above – such as that of regional devolution, and the international dimension – can certainly be found in other academic journals too, so it is reasonable to ask: what then is the distinctive contribution of Teaching Public Administration? The concern with practicality – teaching methods, training and policy applications – remains a particular strength, as we have seen. Moreover, the debate about ‘what is public administration?’ and the sometimes heated debates witnessed at conferences about whether the discipline properly resides within a business school environment or a social and political science context prompt a relatively unexplored theme: who teaches public administration? The growing number of social scientists employed within business schools, perhaps for good academic reasons or perhaps because they have followed the most promising areas for employment, brings with it a criticality to the discipline (and to the business school concerned) and also, perhaps, a greater openness in relation to experience beyond the UK that was largely absent in the early years of this journal and, indeed, in relation to the discipline itself. Thus, public administration may be taught by staff with backgrounds in politics and in public policy more than in the early days of the journal. It would be useful, in assessing future prospects, to know just who teaches public administration today: are such teachers from public service backgrounds? Are they men or women? What is their own disciplinary training? This would impact significantly on several of our selected themes, including pedagogy and the question to which we keep returning: just what is public administration?