Globalized world, globalized research, version 20.20

It is not “new” to argue that comparative public administration research is the poor cousin of public administration and public management research. We may not have a plethora of comparative research on China, Australia/New Zealand, India, and Eastern Europe, but research output certainly is increasing. Meanwhile, our research on the rest of the developing world lags behind. We may “know” that American and European concerns dominate our discipline’s headlines, but we also know—or at least we should know—that the world’s poorest, most disadvantaged, and most disenfranchised economies are where our discipline’s intellectual conscience and, perhaps our moral conscience as a field, must head.

Living in the West, we revel in our modernization. We are fascinated by our globalization, by our borderless worlds and by our paperless offices. We electronically deliver public services to our citizens and we strive to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and, maybe for some of us, equity as well. We refashion and update our rule of law and reflect on changing political, administrative, and legal boundaries. We debate collaborative governance, explore performance management, and reconsider ethics, accountability, and intergovernmental relations. We debate because our Western world appears not only most important, but also limitless in scope. We tell ourselves that we are not self-infatuated, but instead that we are simple respondents to the call of science, to the call of intellectual life.