ABSTRACT
Public administration refers to two distinguishable but closely related activities: a professional practice, and an academic field which seeks to understand, develop, criticize, and improve that professional practice as well as to train individuals for that practice. The phenomena of public administration are also objects of study for purposes other than the development of public administration. A characteristic of public administration in recent decades has been a concern for the identity or legitimacy of the field. As public administration worries about its own identity, and especially as it does so against the backdrop of the social sciences and related fields of practice, it sometimes does so without clear memory or full appreciation of the recency of the present configuration and identities of disciplinary identities. Though the field of public administration is perennially concerned about the identity and security of the field, the future and identity seem secure even if the exact intellectual configuration cannot be precisely predicted.
