As long as the existence of public administration, there is discussion whether public administration should focus on practice or mainly be a purely scientific field. Opinions of public administration scholars are divided on the matter. Moreover, the question is whether public administration is a discipline in itself or part of other disciplines such as political science, law or the management sciences. This article shows how public administration scholars see the discipline and the developments therein, based on a survey among scholars. Dutch public administration scholars are compared with their European colleagues. There are major differences between the Netherlands and the rest of Europe with regard to the status of the discipline. Firstly, as a separate discipline, public administration in the Netherlands is more important in comparison with other European countries. In the rest of Europe, in particular political sciences play an important role. Secondly, regarding the tension within the discipline, the public administration in the Netherlands is developing less towards practitioners than public administration in other European countries.

This article examines whether there is a trade-off between publishing articles in international peer reviewed journals vis-à-vis national and professional work among scholars in the administrative and political sciences. A cluster analysis on their publications results in three publishing profiles: a professional profile, an international profile and a traditional profile. The professional profile author publishes a relatively high number of professional publications. The international profile author publishes a relatively high number of international peer-reviewed papers. The traditional author profile is characterized by a lower number of publications and a more balanced distribution of publications in both international and national categories. The profiles showcase that indeed there is a trade-off between publishing international scientific articles and publishing for practitioners, but only to some extent. Furthermore, the profiles are associated with the university where authors are employed and whether they got their Ph.D. at a Dutch university or abroad.

This article shows how top officials in ten European countries evaluate changes in the public sector based on a number of dimensions, such as quality, cost-efficiency, ethics, effectiveness and the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer. Senior public officials in the Netherlands are compared to their counterparts from 9 other European countries. The study is based on the large-scale academic COCOPS Top Executive Survey, and answers from 3,173 top public sector officials were used.
Results show that senior public officials in the Netherlands are very positive about changes in cost-efficiency and service quality in the public sector. Yet they are concerned about the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer and public trust in government. At the same time, senior public officials in the Netherlands appear to be among the most positive all nationalities about recent changes in how the public sector operates. Only with regard to changes in the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer are senior Dutch public officials considerably less optimistic.

This article examines government communication on two large-scale Belgian governmental reforms: the Federal Administration and the police forces. Using Lees-Marshment's typology of marketing processes, we identify the marketing of the changes by the Federal Administration as sales-oriented: a finished product or an expert-developed administrative reform project to be sold to the public. Declining enthusiasm for communication and growing product disagreement gradually forced this reform to disappear from the market. The police reform followed a market-oriented marketing process. It responded to public outrage. The Government merely reacted to external information. This explains why it failed to deal with a changed market situation. A content analysis of articles in both popular and quality newspapers examines the representation of both reforms in the media and seems to confirm our observations. This article shows that marketing reforms are extremely difficult when there is no shared understanding of the product to be marketed.

Good governance takes a central role in development policy. A considerable amount of development aid is used to support anti-corruption initiatives, democratisation, or the improvement of public administration. The number of governance indicators has grown tremendously, and these indicators appear to play an ever more important role in aid allocation. These indicators, however, are not value-free and reflect a certain view of good governance, one that is furthermore changing continuously. In this article, we first use the ever-expanding literature to explore how donors define ‘good governance’, and how it is measured. We subsequently analyse whether good governance really matters for development. Finally, we look at international experiences with good governance promotion, and the value tensions inherent to this process.