Emphasizing the Intrinsic Purpose of Public Administration: A Way Out of the Identity Crisis?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a long-standing discussion, often framed in terms of a crisis, in the literature about the identity of public administration. One of the most salient roots of this alleged crisis is the ideological and political questioning of the role of public administration. We argue in this paper that a way of strengthening the identity of public administration is to reconnect to the fundamental question of its purpose. In order to answer this question, we explore the concept of purpose and relate it to the philosophical and political theoretical discussions about the purpose of the state. We find two kinds of purposes, which we term the instrumentalistic and the intrinsic. If public administration is assigned an intrumentalistic purpose, it is assessed as valuable if the consequences are valuable. If it is assigned an intrinsic purpose, it is assessed as valuable in itself. We conclude that the instrumentalistic purpose of public administration dominates contemporary discourse, and that this contributes to the identity crisis. The article ends with a suggestion that the intrinsic purpose of public administration be given a more salient position in the discussion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.092 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".