Doctoral Programs in Public Administration: An Outsider's Perspective

administration. The paper is divided into two sections. In the first, confusion over whether public administration refers to practice in the public sector or to the study of the public sector is noted. Since the study of the public sector seems to be the only defensible role for a doctoral program in the field, firsthand knowledge of practice is not sufficient as a method of study at the doctoral level.2 A qualitatively different form of knowledge, with different skills and training, is required for the study of public administration. The second section deals with assumptions about the core problems of the field. The practical problems of day-to-day activity in the public sector do not automatically produce significant questions for meaningful scholarly examination. A distinction between the form and content of human conduct based upon the work of the German sociologist Georg Simmel is presented as a device for identifying the types of problems central to doctoral study in this field.3 The perspective taken in this paper is that of the outsider. It may seem that someone with neither background in managing public agencies nor an academic degree in public administration (the author's graduate degrees are in sociology) would have nothing useful to say about doctoral education in the field. After all, how can an outsider understand our problems? But Merton argues that by this reasoning: