Digital Public Administration: Revisiting Identity Crisis for the Adaptation of New Technologies

Recent technological advancements have undoubtedly made significant contributions to ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of public services and preventing red tape. However, as has been examined through artificial intelligence in this study, it has also brought along some questions in the discipline of public administration, especially within the framework of legitimacy and values. Nonetheless, in order to adapt these new technological techniques to public administration in a sustainable way, perhaps paradoxically, previous dichotomies and crises in the discipline may be illuminative. Therefore, the study analyzes the direction of the digital transformation of public administration through politics-administration, fact-value dichotomies and identity crisis. In the study, along with the benefits of digital transformation and especially artificial intelligence applications, their risks for public administration are also discussed in detail. Afterward, the approaches of two leading figures of public administration, Herbert Simon and Dwight Waldo, were revisited in order to provide a framework for a correct approach to identity crises that today's public administration may face with digital transformation. For this reason, the arguments of both names have been put forward through the literature in the study. Then, the question of how to properly adapt professions for artificial intelligence to public administration was answered.