Paradigm 5 : The public Administration As Public Administration
With a paradigmatic focus of organization theory and management science, and a paradigmatic locus of the public interest as it relates to public affairs, public administration at last is intellectually prepared for the building of an institutionally autonomous educational curriculum that can develop the epistemological uniqueness of the field. One is that the field is burgeoning. Between 1970 and 1971 alone, undergraduate enrollments in public administration increased 36 percent, and between 1971 and 1972 graduate enrollments went up 50 percent. 2 A second trend is institutional. Public administration programs normally still are lodged in political science departments. With a plurality of public administration programs still being conducted in political science departments, we can infer that political science currently dominates the field intellectually as well as institutionally ; in brief, the arrangement represent the fulfillment of fulfillment of Gaus’ statement on a theory of public administration being simply a theory of politics. Unfortunately, locating public administration programs in political science departments has its costs.