Epistemology and Methodology in Public Administration

Course content

The course is designed to put forward the place of public administration discipline within social sciences and humanities, which are dominant explanatory types of social reality, in the context of the theory of science and methodology. This place will be determined both internally via the paradigms concerned and externally from the perspectives of critical theory and historical materialism. In this course, on the one hand main characteristics of these scientific paradigms, on the other hand in line with the results rendered from the debates, the issue that whether public administration is science or not will be discussed. Methodological difference of this course is that, social sciences and humanities are not considered general abstract theories, but they are handled within the framework of the historical conditions from which they emerged. In this regard, general epistemology debate will be made on historical-economic ground. The place of public administration discipline will be analyzed historically in the context of administrative reality as a dependent variable of capitalist social reality (or formation). Furthermore, the place of the discipline, considering the discussions concerned in terms of public administration discipline in Turkey, will be problematised in the context of material bases (or substance) of the theory of science in Turkey.