ABSTRACT
Contemplating bureaucracies could be facilitated, if practice involvement were experienced by more public administration (and other) specialists in more than a single country. This chapter suggests that greater openness could be—and should be—obtained by opening doors. Indeed, it can be suggested that contemplating bureaucracies might well benefit from opening the door between public administration practices in differing countries—and locations within countries. Do we really think that the Canadians, the Australians, and the British—or the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Chinese, and the ancient Romans, who had massive bureaucracies—had no systematic thoughts about how to administer? Even university professorial practices and identities are limited by a one-nation perspective; as a single example, the practice of giving grades in each class differs from the English practice of combining lectures without grading but with anonymous examiners evaluating final examinations. There are significant dichotomies beyond the so-called signature dichotomy of public administration practice and theory.
