ABSTRACT
Chapter 14 considers possible transition strategies for public administration that might be put in place for now to begin an evolution toward the concepts of adaptive administration. Proposed strategies involve more comprehensive ways for administrators to track and monitor daily operations in order to respond more effectively to changes that are taking place. On a temporary basis, a custom, practice-oriented knowledge base may be developed by each administrator, by applying reasonably-available techniques. As explained, the key measures of operations to be used for this knowledge base may be drawn from the discussions presented in this book. An ongoing approach to personal issue-spotting may be used by administrators to prepare surveys of organizational status in response to the constant changes that are affecting organizations. Issue-spotting combined with intuition and experience may temporarily take on the functions of theory generators. The materials in this volume may then be used to help spot key issues and develop planned interventions. At the same time, there is an opportunity for theory-developers to prepare and evaluate a wide range of types of theory generators, and to share these results throughout the public administration community for assessment and use. The materials presented here may be used as a starting point for such efforts.
