Public Administration Theory Network Conference Articles

For the first time in its existence, now nearly a quarter of a century, the Public Administration Theory Network (also known as PAT-Net) met last June in Europe. The Network's membership has grown increasingly international over the last decade or so: scholars from Asia, Australia, South America, Europe, and the United States have engaged in conversations and exchanged papers with one another at conferences, including one in Sydney, Australia, in the summer of 1999. The 2001 conference, hosted by Leiden University in The Netherlands, was especially notable in that, for the first time, those who attended from countries other than the United States outnumbered the Americans. Public Administration Review is pleased to feature the work of four European scholars from last summer's conference. Many American members of the Network have published in PAR, so PAT-Net is no stranger to its pages. (PAT-Net sponsors its own quarterly journal, Administrative Theory and Praxis, which features scholarly articles and lively debate by members and non-members.) But the international flavor of last summer's conference seems especially worthy of note by PAR's broad audience. It may seem that this is particularly the case since September 11, but the increasing relevance of perspectives from abroad and the need to internationalize the conversation in American public administration have been on the minds of the editors and editorial board for some time. We hope to continue to develop PAR's international dimensions and to promote additional dialogue and collaboration between scholars and practitioners inside and outside the United States. The four papers from the Leiden conference presented in this issue give a hint of the excitement that awaits Americans who take the opportunity to compare their own knowledge and experience of public administration and policy with research results from abroad. Each of the articles takes up an issue or problem that is important to public administration wherever on the globe it is found. Topics such as public-private partnerships, information technology, city management, and social policy for the elderly reveal new dimensions and open up new ways of thinking when encountered in contexts other than one's own. In considering the dynamics of public administration and policy from other angles, PAR readers have the opportunity to reflect on how these studies reveal both sameness and difference from the American administrative experience. In this symposium, Barbara Czamiawska offers an intriguing take on city management; in this case, managing the city of Warsaw in a post-Communist era, a challenge that entailed forging a new institutional order, translating ideas like self-government, the budget, and effective management into terms that worked in a newly capitalistic and democratic political economy. For Warsaw, the problem became one of simultaneously and remembering: forgetting involved getting rid of the old Communist ways; remembering meant cementing new ways of doing things within existing administrative systems and reanimating traditions from pre-Communist days. The transformation of those systems ran into a conflict between rational-legalistic and pragmatist perspectives, the first focused on structures and rules of conduct, the second on practices and emergent opportunities. Czarniawska argues that by relying on automorphism, or self-imitation, Warsaw's approach enabled but also constrained the evolution of its organizational forms and practices. …

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