Trajectories of public administration and administrative history in Australia: Rectifying a curious blight?

Abstract

Anyone who has taught courses or conducted research under the rubric of 'public administration' must have been troubled more or less frequently by two characteristics of his 'field' - its nebulous scope and its lack of any distinctive technique. He must have felt himself a Jack of all trades as he pottered amateurishly about, now on the fringes of administrative law, now at the margins of accounting and budgeting, and then at the edges of industrial relations and occupational psychology. As a teacher, how often did he face a class of public servants, each more expert and experienced in some specialty than he was in any?