Still like ships that pass in the night? The relationship between public administration and management studies

In recent times, research on public management has grown rapidly. Nevertheless, despite the expansion of attention to management in the public sector, many important questions about the state of public administration research remain unanswered. One of the most salient of these questions concerns the relationship between public administration and generic management research. In particular, to what extent, and in what ways, is public administration research connected with developments in mainstream management and organization studies. In this article, we use bibliographic methods to explore the place of the generic management literature within the intellectual structure of public administration. Our findings suggest that the influence of generic management theories on certain public administration journals and scholars has grown in recent years, although management scholars appear to be uninterested in public administration articles. Further analysis of the subject matter in published articles is suggestive of the possibility that the emergence of the “New Public Management” has played an important role in re-shaping the connections between the two fields of study.