ABSTRACT
Jeffrey Weber recently observed that ‘the academic discipline of public administration is drifting and largely ignored, because so often the ideas are stale and impractical for they are based on a faulty understanding of existence’ (Weber 2005: 266). Weber is just one of the many voices calling for a reinvigoration of public administration theory; Jan-Erik Lane highlighted the already long simmering dissatisfaction of theorists in 1993 when he wrote ‘public administration as an academic discipline has more or less crumbled during the recent decades . . . replacing it there is now a proliferation of concepts, frameworks and theories’ (Lane 1993: vii).
