Article Contentsp. 409p. 410p. 411p. 412p. 413p. 414p. 415Issue Table of ContentsPublic Administration Review, Vol. 56, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1996), pp. 409-500Front Matter [pp. 424-478]Public AdministrationWhat Makes Public Administration a Science? Or, Are Its "Big Questions" Really Big? [pp. 409-415]The Big Questions of Public Administration in a Democracy [pp. 416-423]Education and Publication in Public AdministrationProfessional Certification in Public Management: A Status Report and Proposal [pp. 425-432]Faculty, Graduate Student, and Graduate Productivity in Public Administration and Public Affairs Programs, 1986-1993 [pp. 433-440]Knowledge and Theory Development in Public Administration: The Role of Doctoral Education and Research [pp. 441-452]Women, Research, and Mentorship in Public Administration [pp. 453-458]MethodologyPublic Administration as a Science of the Artificial: A Methodology for Prescription [pp. 459-466]Representative Bureaucracy: An Estimation of the Reliability and Validity of the Nachmias-Rosenbloom MV Index [pp. 467-477]CommunicationChina's New Civil Service: What the Emperor Is Wearing and Why [pp. 479-484]Response to Lam and Chan [pp. 485-486]Response to Lam and Chan [p. 486]Book ReviewsThe New Sciences of Administration: Chaos and Quantum Theory [pp. 487-491]Review: Chaos as Opportunity: Grounding a Positive Vision of Management and Society in the New Physics [pp. 491-494]Review: The New Paradigm in Science and Public Administration [pp. 495-499]Back Matter [pp. 500-500]What Makes Public Administration a Science? Or, Are Its "Big Questions" Really Big?Author(s): Francis X. Neumann, Jr.Source: Public Administration Review, Vol. 56, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1996), pp. 409-415Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Society for PublicAdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/977039Accessed: 18/06/2009 18:16Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] Publishing and American Society for Public Administration are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Public Administration Review.http://www.jstor.orgWhat Makes Public Administraion a Science? Or, Are Its "Big QuesIons" Really Big? Francis X. Neumann, Jr., U.S. Air Force (Retired) What are the appropriate basic research questions public adminis- tration must address if it is to aspire to the status of a science? It is the philosophical nature of the true sciences that those basic questions concern the essential character and origins of their core subject matters. Neumann proposes that the appropriate research questions for public administration, those at the level which defines the discipline, must concern the structure and dynamics of the public organization. Within the physical sciences, a new paradigm is emerging that views natural systems as nonlinear, complex, and "chaotic. " This new view of open systems now obliges public administrators to readdress the dynamics of their own artificial systems-the public organizations. Thus, such basic questions as those which relate to organizational theory, public management, and the relationship of the public organiza- tion to its environment now need to be revisited under the con- cepts of complexity and chaos. In his recent essay in the Public Administration Review, "The Big Questions of Public Manage- ment," Robert Behn (1995) has asked us to con- sider which "big questions" are to be of central importance for public management. His nomination of three suitable big questions involves more than the simple academic exercise of setting a future research agenda. Far more important is what the nature of those questions means both to public management and to the larger discipline of public administration. Professor Behn is absolutely correct when he states that "any field of science is defined by the big ques- tions it asks" (p. 314). By way of example, he cites certain specialized areas within the broad field of physics. The big questions in cosmology, for exam- ple, concern the nature of the Big Bang origins of the universe, while in theoretical (or particle) physics, the big questions concern the basic composition of matter and energy. Equally important, "the big ques- tions about physics are what make it a science" (p. 314). It is immediately apparent that Behn's big ques- tions in physics concern either the basic nature of things or their origins. Surely, such questions are on their very face important and worthy of investiga- tion, but what is it about them that makes them big questions? Why should the scientific character of an entire field of study or discipline be defined by such questions? Giuliano Toraldo di Francia (1981) has perhaps given the answers in his analysis of the place that the physical sciences occupy within the modern culture. Public Administration Review * September/October 1996, Vol. 56, No. 5 409He suggests that the reason that mankind must attempt to answer big questions is philosophical, in that they point right to the core of what it means to be a thinking human being. The ascertainment of the factual structure of the envi- ronment in which we live constitutes cosmology in a broad sense. Cosmology has always been associated with [physics], especially today. Etymologically it refers to the birth of the universe. This supreme problem is cer- tainly always present in the minds of scientists.... But today very great