UNITES / PROFESSEURS :: History of ideas in administrative sciences

History of ideas in administrative sciences

Responsable: Prof. Fritz Sager

The normative-analytical divide in 20th century public administration
thought. A history of ideas of US-American and Continental European
administrative science

Public administration research takes on different forms in Europe and
the USA. In our project, we test the hypothesis that due to their
differing roots, US-American administrative science has a fundamentally
normative and prescriptive orientation towards betterment of public
administration throughout the various concepts it produced in the 20th
century, while the European focus is primarily analytical, i.e. oriented
towards better understanding of public administration. Our research
design consists of the analysis of the mutual perception of
administrative research in and from the USA and Europe in a historical
perspective from the beginning of the American study of public
administration and the German Verwaltungsrecht as scientific disciplines
at the end of the 19th century until today.