Bridging the Gap

Many words are devoted to the concept of building bridges over the gulf' that exists between the of the practitioner and that of the academic in public administration. One hears from both managers of public organizations and theoreticians that if only they-meaning each other-understood what it was all about then jobs could be performed more effectively. To address this issue, a project was undertaken by the Georgia City-County Management Association, and the Institute of Government, University of Georgia, under the auspices of the ICMA/NASPAA Urban Management Education program. Before a proposal was submitted, considerable discussion ensued among representatives of the three groups regarding the directions the projects might take and how each group might profit most from the energy invested. Several basic assumptions emerged as the foundation for the relationships between the practitioners and the academics involved in the project. Assumption 1. There is a gulf between the academic and practitioner worlds. The extent of this gulf varies with the particular observer, but its existence is agreed upon by practically everyone. Academics are considered theoreticians, locked in ivory towers, who never address real world problems in the classroom or in their research projects. Practitioners are thought of as narrow of focus, atheoretical, and interested only in nuts, bolts, and manhole covers. It has been stated that the reason policy-makers had little faith in academic researchers was that

Bridging (networking · Faith · Government (linguistics · Meaning (existential · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Evaluation and Performance Assessment · Psychology · Public Administration · Public Policy and Administration Research

• The Rope Dance

  Neta Sher-Hadar, Neta Sher‐Hadar et al.•Administrative Theory & Praxis•2019

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