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Public Administration, Cognitive Competence, and the Public Interest

University of Missouri

Public administration, if it is to become a discipline capable of developing cumulative knowledge about the phenomena with which it is concerned, needs to recognize the importance of epistemology for its cognitive competence and of an ethic, the public interest as the means to evaluate success from failure and the important from the trivial. Schools of public administration may well ask themselves why we have not learned more from our cases and look to the example of the teaching hospitals, where cases do lead to advances in useful knowledge. Public administration as a practical discipline has the great advantage of being able both to develop explanatory theory and to test it in action.

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