Public Administration : Special Contemporary Problems and Challenges

Public Administration: special contemporary problems and challenges; opportunities and prospects; and status of theories, methods and approaches which is my contribution, is designed to: illustrate issues social scientists face; show simultaneously the boundless opportunities the discipline offers; and present the status of theories, methods and approaches. In sum, the basically descriptive-analytical study shows three points that: (a) Public Administration has been reluctantly accepted as discipline owing to its heavy methodological dependence on other sciences and its use of an eclectic approach; (b) the usefulness of terminological applications and semasiological analyses proves that poor terminology has been responsible for the exasperating semantical confusion surrounding the vexing question of whether public administration is a discipline and bewildering methodological and epistemological manifestations in the social sciences; and (c) most importantly, the three main concepts of theories, methods and approaches commonly used in the literature but hugely ill-defined, are examined separately for purposes of clarity and systematic analysis.