A century of Public Administration: Traveling through time and topics
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Author | Rick Vogel,Fabian Hattke |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12831 |
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE
A century of Public Administration: Traveling
through time and topics
Rick Vogel
1
| Fabian Hattke
1,2
1
Department of Socioeconomics, Universität
Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
2
Department of Administration and
Organization Theory, University of Bergen,
Bergen, Norway
Correspondence
Rick Vogel, Universität Hamburg, Department
of Socioeconomics, Chair of Public
Management, Faculty of Business, Economics
and Social Sciences, Von-Melle-Park 9, 20146
Hamburg, Germany.
Email: Rick.Vogel@uni-hamburg.de
Funding information
Open access funding enabled and organized
by Projekt DEAL. WOA Institution:
UNIVERSITAET HAMBURG. Blended DEAL:
Projekt DEAL.
Abstract
Public Administration (PA) has been a unique witness and
protagonist of scholarship in the field of public administra-
tion over the course of an entire century. On the occasion
of the journal's 100th anniversary, we conduct a systematic
analysis of the publication history using bibliometric
methods enhanced by natural language processing. The
findings show how disciplinary influences, geographical set-
tings, and methodological orientations have changed over
time. In our main analysis, we extract 63 thematic clusters
on the basis of linguistic similarities and track their evolu-
tion through five eras of PA scholarship. Overall, the results
show both the journal's strong British roots and its evolve-
ment toward an increasingly international, interdisciplinary,
and dynamic community. The findings also indicate the
state of the field as a “fragmented adhocracy,”with chang-
ing modes of differentiation over time.
1|INTRODUCTION
Ever since the Royal Society launched the Philosophical Transactions in 1665 to inform about the work and achieve-
ments of scientists throughout Europe, scholarly journals have become important catalysts in the development of
academic fields and disciplines (Price, 1963). Today, writing for publication in peer-reviewed journals is an almost
ubiquitous practice in academia. Such journals have long expanded from their original function of disseminating
knowledge among readers and engaging them in critical discourse. Through peer review, particularly for journals at
the top of the rankings, professional reputation is allocated and academic careers are boosted or broken. For these
Received: 30 November 2021 Revised: 13 January 2022 Accepted: 13 January 2022
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12831
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2022 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Public Admin. 2022;100:17–40. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm 17
and other important functions, self-reflections on the evolution of an academic field should not, and cannot, miss the
role of the community's most influential journals, and often it is a journal's anniversary that gives the occasion for
such “belly button pieces”(Raadschelders, 2011, p. 917) in the first place (Kumar et al., 2020; Ni et al., 2017).
In the field of public administration, the eponymous journal—Public Administration (PA)—is the longest-running
outlet, celebrating its 100th volume in 2022. We are not aware of any other journal in the field that would invite us
for a longer travel backward in time to when the field took its early roots. PA is thus a unique witness and protago-
nist of the field's development over the course of an entire century, and its archives are a treasure for those who
want to discover this history. Of course, PA reflects only one trajectory in the much broader history of the field, as
there are many other important journals, each with its own tradition and profile. Although the audience of PA has
become increasingly global over the past decades, its British roots and European tradition are impossible to miss.
Public administration journals thus make a case for the “situatedness of knowledge”(Mannheim, 1936), as they dis-
seminate knowledge that is embedded in particular sociohistorical contexts. Such contingencies do not only emerge
from the changing social organization of scholarship, but also from the field's deep engagement and co-evolution
with administrative practice.
This embeddedness of knowledge production into particular historical, geographical, cultural, and institutional
contexts is a root cause for the fragmentation of public administration as an academic field. If there is any point of
integration, it is the object of study, that is, governmental organizations, the public sector more comprehensively,
and the public realm at large (Pollitt, 2010). Scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds study this object and
bring in various professional habits and standards, notably from political science, public policy, management, eco-
nomics, sociology, and law (Hustedt et al., 2020). The degree of reputational control by defining overarching goals
and standards is rather low, as scholars have high autonomy in setting research priorities and evaluation criteria
within their subcommunities. At the same time, public administration scholars have multiple audiences beyond aca-
demia, including policymakers, public managers, consultants, etc., representing a broad range of interests and
awarding different forms of reputation. This plurality of internal and external stakeholders gives rise to a reputational
work organization that has been referred to as “fragmented adhocracy”(Whitley, 1984), with high levels of task
uncertainty and low levels of interdependence among subcommunities.
The fragmentation or, more positively termed, plurality of public administration scholarship makes it both worth-
while and challenging to study one of its core journals, and to study it over a period of 100 years. In addition to the
sheer size of the body of knowledge that has accumulated in the archives of PA, the fragmentation of the field makes
it difficult for single researchers to maintain a comprehensive overview. Each member of the community has an idio-
syncratic perspective on the field and its history; a perspective that has been shaped in the academic socialization
and is imbued with a particular zeitgeist. Looking back on an endeavor that began 100 years ago without bringing too
many personal views and contemporary perspectives in is thus not a trivial pursuit.
We address this challenge by applying a systematic, computer-aided approach to literature reviewing, which
expands bibliometrics (Zupic & Čater, 2014) into natural language processing (NLP; Manning & Schütze, 2005). Our
approach can be referred to as “NLP-enhanced bibliometrics”(Atanassova et al., 2019), combining methods from the
broad portfolio of large-scale text analytics. Of course, advanced methods of text mining do not suspend all personal
views and prior knowledge, particularly in the calibration of the methods and interpretation of results (Hannigan
et al., 2019). However, such methods first and foremost give voice to others than those who apply them: the thou-
sands of authors who have contributed to PA over the years. Through their writing and citing behaviors, they have
collectively yet unintendedly drawn the “big picture”of scholarship that our methods extract from the journal's text
corpus. Our analysis might be considered a grassroots approach, as all authors had the same chance to contribute to
the picture, irrespectively of whether they were published in the inaugural volume of 1923 or in one of the more
recent volumes. Nonetheless, the authors still remain the “unsung heroes”in our study because our analytical focus
is primarily on the use of language, rather than on renowned scholars and their seminal works.
The goal of this article is, hence, to identify and indicate the major lines of development in the journal's publica-
tion history. We seek to identify the changing topics published in PA, but given the sociohistorical situatedness of
18 VOGEL AND HATTKE
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