Articles by Glenn School faculty Dr. Charles Wise, Dr. Trevor Brown and Dr. Stephanie Moulton were published in December 2010 in a special issue of Public Administration Review about the future of public administration in 2020. Public Administration Review is a well-respected journal in the field of public administration scholarship. The articles consider the opportunities and challenges facing the field in the next ten years.
Wise, who is the founding director of the Glen School, predicts that the line between the “publicness” and “privateness” of organizations will continue to blur, resulting in an increasingly complex system of organizations and “a greater variety of hybrid organizations located in the middle of the publicness-privateness continuum.”
Brown, the Glenn School's associate director for Academic Affairs and Research, explains that public managers have unprecedented access to information that can help them to develop public sector strategy. Scholars and analysts, argues Brown, must provide public managers with sound theories from many disciplines that explain “how to use information to guide decision making and planning.”
Moulton, an assistant professor at the Glenn School, argues that how the public administration field understands the public—either as an input or an outcome –is “perhaps the most important determinant of where we will end up in 2020.” She challenges public administration scholars to ask, “[W]hat institutional, economic, and political configurations are most likely to lead to desired public outcomes,” rather than envisioning the public as a constraint to organizational behavior.
Wise, Brown, and Moulton were each invited to submit an article for the special issue.
