Public administration of administration

Public administration, in Dwight Waldo's terms, has become a profession. With that achievement, an examination of the methodological infrastructure of the profession is merited. Every profession rests on an infrastructure of research and research methods on which the profession's practitioners base their day-today activities. This article will argue that public administration has ignored its technical side and that, given the types of problems dealt with by both academics and practitioners, a serious upgrading of methodological skills is needed. We hope to provide a road map, useful to both methodologists and nonmethodologists, for developing those skills.