Public Administration: Traditions of Inquiry and Philosophies of Knowledge (Public Management and Change)

Great book! I’ve referenced it in various papers!

Cannot say enough about Riccucci's work here. Fantastic and accessible to even the neophyte.

It was realy in a good condition. I'm very pleased to buy it.

The media could not be loaded.  My last review was just removed for reasons I’m unsure. However, the correct cover of “Traditions of Inquiry and Philosophies of Knowledge” by Dr. Riccucci was printed on the wrong book, “The Crisis of Western Education” when I received it.

This is a must read for post-graduates and even advanced scholar for rationalizing quantititave, qualitative and mixed approaches in studying Public Administration. Though writing style is easy to understand.

I would like to rephrase the question "chicken or the egg" posed at the beginning of the chapter 4into "object or the number it represents"?To me the answer is clear-first there appeared the universe of objects, albeit without names and it must have looked like Alice’s forest of forgetfulness. Later humans gave names to these objects since only self-conscious beings can separate the objects of the outside world from themselves. After that humans could start counting these different objects and were able to devise system to write information about concrete countable objects, and abstract mathematical concepts . The last step was the “collection and analysis of data and the formulation of propositions from the emergent relationships ” (p.45).Thus the analysis of data is clearly the analysis of numbers that stand for real objects, and not theanalysis of the objects themselves. Just like a picture of a horse is not the horse itself, but rather acompilation of dots and lines that we agreed to accept as a true representation of a horse. And that is the area where a researcher can err, since when working with representations he is withdrawn from the concrete and is emerged into abstract where anything could potentially exist. In their exploration of the known universe humans cloak apparent chaos into apparent order governed by laws. In this, my view of the world tends to fluctuate somewhere between Positivism, Post positivism and Postmodernism. I hold great respect for the proponent of Postmodernism Michael Foucault. Foucault’s works could also be associated with the philosophical school of structuralism that basically taught that this world is chaos and the order is simply superimposed by our minds over it.Likewise I see greater merit in the deductive method, where the researcher moves from data to the theory and not the other way around. It seems to me that moving from theory to data could trick the researcher to unconsciously choose the evidence that supports his thesis and refutes all other possible explanations.As to the question of what scientific method, qualitative or the quantitative, suits social sciences the best - I tend to agree with the author that the ultimate goal of any researcher would be to determine what methods should suit him or her the best. “Progress is made with each piece of good , sound research, notwithstanding the methodology ”(p.63). If a researcher wants to know the average size of oranges produced by Florida he certainly would chose the quantitative method. If on the other hand he needs to know why customers prefer Greek over Florida oranges he certainly would rely on other qualitative criteria like taste and look (perhaps triangulated with such parameters as orange size, colour, price and vitamin composition). Parameters such as taste and look are clearly hard to accurately express and record at this stage of our scientific development, but nonetheless cannot be discounted as useless and subjective. Therefore both methods should not be opposed to each other, but rather complement each other to paint a fuller picture of the real world. And this certainly applies to public policy where as theauthor acknowledges there is a tendency “to make public administration more ‘scientific’, through the application of quantitatively based empirical research” (p.62 ) while so many aspects of our human existence are totally void of logic (love, tastes, character, traditions, morals). Total reliance on quantitative approach with disregard for qualitative one would lead the scientific community into a self-delusion of their ability to explain everything in this world while so many things are still considered random events or acts of god.We should never forget that social sciences examining societies are in fact examining individuals and therefore any study of social animals such as men should require a holistic approach when analysing theories, patterns and datum. At the same time the scientific world void of quantitative approach would simply turn into theology with its axioms and articles of faith.Quantitative data could describe events while qualitative one could try to explain the underlyingcauses of these events. For example data collected from national companies could tell us whetherwomen are underrepresented in management positions in big companies. But the underlyingquestion “why”” we face this situation cannot in all seriousness be answered by the simplisticmantra "because men run the world". Deeper analysis could reveal cultural obstaclesboth on part of those who hire and who are hired, family support in education and culturalpressures to conform to the dominant gender paradigm of the society. Many of these questionssimply cannot be answered by data alone but would require interviews, focus groups and deepunderstanding of the culture in question.Likewise when working on my Master’s Thesis I was trying to show that the internet played apivotal role in Moscow protests following Parliamentary elections of 2011. Data collected bystatistical agencies clearly showed that individuals who came to the streets to protest were predominantly middle aged Moscovites, educated and representative of the emerging middle class. They used the internet and particularly social networks to discuss electionresults coordinating protest details online as well. At the same time I was of an opinion that ifI limited my paper by this data alone, I would be creating a snapshot that could notaspire to be telling the whole story. And I would certainly fail in answering the question ‘why’ the protests had happened. I needed to create a movie of sorts where people were not static, but were flesh and blood with lives prior to and following the events. Thus I was compelled to use academic writing describing the overall situation in the country from various perspectives-all drawing the same conclusion that the civil unrest was imminent. I used works by sociologists, economists, historians and journalists to show the overall mood of the people who I already knew of from the quantitative research.Coupling qualitative data with quantitative one I had a full picture that painted a more realisticportrait of the events and could refute other possible explanations of the causes (such as sunactivity for example).ConclusionIn conducting research, just like in any other activity we should not forget the fact that for the large part the universe is still a great mystery to us. We can’t tell with absolute assuredness how the human race emerged and whether there is existence after this life as our religions preach. We do not know the size of the universe, what time is, and whether there are other intelligible beings out there. Our research into the natural laws could well be likened to the blind men touching an elephant. Things thought of as laws today, might well be ridiculed as prejudices and superstitions tomorrow. This period could be marked by future historians as not as the age or reason and science, but as the era of barbarism and ignorance. But science is not theology and it allows us to accept our mistakes and move forward in the quest for the truth. It allows us the luxury of Plato’s knowing that we do not know.