SOURCE: "The Crisis of Identity in the Study of Public Administration: Woodrow Wilson," in Polity, Vol. IX, No. 3, Spring, 1977, pp. 321-343.

In the following essay, Kirwan surveys contemporary public administration theories and, finding many of them unusable and impractical, argues for a return to the ideas Wilson articulated in his writings, specifically the essay "The Study of Administration."

A re-examination of Woodrow Wilson's "The Study of Administration" requires an explanation. For this essay, which gave birth to public administration as an indepen-dent field of study, is famous for distinguishing administration from politics, a distinction discredited now for over a generation. Dwight Waldo regards it as "a seriously erroneous description of reality and as a deficient, even pernicious, prescription for action." Yet, as the bulk of "public administration-is-suffering-an-identity-crisis" literature testifies, its presence haunts us still. The reason why can be discovered by considering the orientation which allegedly replaced it...