Two Roads to Nowhere: Appraising 30 Years of Public Administration Research
本文反思公共行政研究三十年发展，指出当前研究分为纯理论分析和无理论分析两种路径，均未能为学科做出贡献，主张回归理论指导的实证研究。
The celebration of the 30 th anniversary for this journal is a good opportunity to reflect on the development of public administration research during this time period.This brief essay will argue that much of current public administration research falls into one of two different approaches, one of which offers an almost completely theoretical analysis of public institutions whereas the other delivers largely atheoretical analyses.Neither of these two approaches is able to deliver a contribution to public administration as an academic discipline.Such contributions, we suggest, can only come from theoretically informed empirical study of the practice of public administration.Or, as Christopher Pollitt has argued, public administration needs to return to thinking about the "big picture" rather than the fragments that dominate much of the contemporary work in the discipline (Pollitt, 2016).