PA 9300

This course examines current issues in the development of knowledge and its use in the public service professions. Students examine how the philosophy of the social sciences have shaped research questions and provided the justifications for knowledge claims.

Four major knowledge frameworks on scholar-practitioners in public administration are considered:

1. positivist claims to achieve a science of administration;
2. interpretive approaches to understanding the experiences of public service practitioners from their own perspectives;
3. pragmatist sensitivity to the contingency of culture-laden linguistic description of human experience; and
4. the post-traditional contestation of the modern (Newtonian) worldview and purposive rationality.