Meaningful knowledge about public administration: Ontological and situated antecedents

Abstract

While scientific knowledge has become valuable in the making of national and global policies, the influence of Public Administration knowledge may be perceived as limited. This study aimed to understand what is necessary for Public Administration knowledge to be meaningful, and four antecedents for meaningful knowledge were identified. This article reports on the first two, namely an ontology that recognizes a dynamic, diverse, multi-connected and complex public administration, and a recognition that the quest for meaningful knowledge is situated within this reality. Firstly, a social ontology is proposed that recognizes an emergent, diverse, complex and multi-connected public administration reality. Secondly, it is argued that the situatedness of the quest for knowledge within the public administration reality is vital for articulating knowledge questions and making sense of them. The implication of the co-situatedness of scholars, administrators, politicians and citizens in the public administration reality is that all these inhabitants have an inter-connected stake in this co-constructed reality to inform their attempts at sense-making.

Keywords:

• Evidence
• knowledge
• meaningful knowledge
• ontology
• situated
• socially constructed
• social ontology
• value

Notes

1 I use “Public Administration” in referring to ‘the study of public administration’.

2 “Transcendent means that the source of being is beyond that which exists. Immanent means that the source of being is within that which exists”  Stout, 2012, p. 389).

3 Raadschelders uses “public administration” for referring to “the study of government and governance”  Raadschelders et al., 2015, p. 19). In this article, following a different convention  Rutgers, 2010, p. 3), I use “Public Administration” in referring to “the study of public administration.” When Raadschelders uses “government,” it means “public administration” within the context of this article.

4 ‘Co-sense-making’ refers to a collaborative “ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 409)

5 For example, through the author guidelines of scholarly journals as well as citation indexes such as Google Scholar.

6 This ability is a possibility opened up by situatedness. However, its realisation requires the presence of additional antecedents, which I will introduce as this argument proceeds.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacobus S. Wessels

Jacobus S. Wessels is a Research Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Management at the University of South Africa. His research focuses on meaningful knowledge about public administration.