Speaking what truth to whom? The uneasy relationship between practitioner and academic knowledge in public administration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article reflects on the observation that no one group – practitioners, academics, or clients – can claim to possess the full truth on any question in public administration ( PA ). PA is enriched and afflicted by its practical nature; its students try to persuade colleagues and political and administrative elites of the truth of their findings. Most PA literature presents propositions as logical means to reach desired ends, but disagreement is possible and likely over means and ends. Beyond disagreements on values, many disciplines relevant to PA also ensure differing perspectives. We argue for varied methodologies that recognize stakeholder interests and which minimize methods of persuasion promising too much and ignoring important problems. Sommaire Cet article se penche sur le constat qu'il n'y a pas un seul groupe – qu'il s'agisse des praticiens, des universitaires ou des clients – qui puisse prétendre posséder toute la vérité sur une question quelconque en administration publique. L'administration publique est enrichie et affaiblie par sa nature pratique; ses étudiants essaient de persuader non seulement leurs collègues, mais aussi les élites politiques et administratives de la vérité de leurs conclusions. La plus grande partie de la documentation sur l'administration publique présente des propositions comme moyens logiques d'atteindre les fins souhaitées, mais la divergence d'opinions est possible et très probable à la fois sur les fins et les moyens. Au‐delà des divergences d'opinions sur les valeurs, les nombreuses disciplines pertinentes à l'administration publique assurent également des perspectives divergentes. Nous défendons diverses méthodologies qui reconnaissent les intérêts des parties prenantes et qui minimisent les méthodes de persuasion en promettant trop et en ignorant des problèmes importants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".