LIST OF PANELS

The public policy/management academy’s intellectual history includes proclamations about its “constitution” as well as manifestos about how research and scholarship should be done. Notable examples are Lasswell and McDougal’s (1943) Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Training in the Public Interest”; Herbert Simon’s (1946) “Proverbs of Administration”; Shangraw and Crow’s (1989) “Public Administration as a Design Science”; Mark Moore’s (1995) Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government; Laurence Lynn’s (1996) Public Management as Art, Science, and Profession; and Eugene Bardach’s (2004) “The Extrapolation Problem: How to Learn from the Experience of Others”. There is a recent upsurge in scholarship that re-examines this history and provides counter-statements to it – both backward and forward-looking in character, including William Dunn’s (2018) Pragmatism and the Origins of the Policy Sciences; Alasdair Roberts’s “The Aims of Public Administration: Reviving the Classical View; Melvin Dubnick’s (2018) “Demons, Spirits, and Elephants: Reflections on the Failure of Public Administration Theory”; and Michael Barzelay’s (2019) Public Management as Design-Oriented Professional Discipline. This panel will examine and assess frames, theories, methodologies, and literary styles for conducting such “forensic history” of the field, as well as their implications of substantive work for research and teaching. Among the more specific issues that could be explored is how to balance historicist and presentist perspectives; how to represent purposive theories; and how to access and use accounts of standards for argument and presentation from such humanities fields as philosophy, rhetoric, and literary criticism.  The panel could be either a round-table involving such authors as listed above, or as a forum for new work; or a hybrid. Alternatively, IPPA could offer two panels, one being the round-table, followed by another being for new work.

The public policy/management academy’s intellectual history includes proclamations about its “constitution” as well as manifestos about how research and scholarship should be done. Notable examples are Lasswell and McDougal’s (1943) Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Training in the Public Interest”; Herbert Simon’s (1946) “Proverbs of Administration”; Shangraw and Crow’s (1989) “Public Administration as a Design Science”; “The Extrapolation Problem: How to Learn from the Experience of Others”. There is a recent upsurge in scholarship that re-examines this history and provides counter-statements to it – both backward and forward-looking in character, including William Dunn’s (2018) Pragmatism and the Origins of the Policy Sciences; Alasdair Roberts’s “The Aims of Public Administration: Reviving the Classical View; and Melvin Dubnick’s (2018) “Demons, Spirits, and Elephants: Reflections on the Failure of Public Administration Theory”. This panel will examine and assess frames, theories, methodologies, and literary styles for conducting such “forensic history” of the field, as well as their implications of substantive work for research and teaching. Among the more specific issues that could be explored is how to balance historicist and presentist perspectives; how to represent purposive theories; and how to access and use accounts of standards for argument and presentation from such humanities fields as philosophy, rhetoric, and literary criticism.  Papers that examine a historical proclamation or manifesto in the form of a single publication, or a school of thought with multiple authors, or an author over a career, are particularly welcome, as are papers that examine works of intellectual or forensic history itself. Writings examining authors and forensic history that are specific to other settings than the US Academy are particularly welcome.