Civil Servants and ‘Scientific Temper’: Scholarly Competence for Enactment of New Realities in Professionals’ Practice
Developing Public Managers for a Changing World
ISBN: 978-1-78635-080-0, eISBN: 978-1-78635-079-4
Publication date: 17 December 2016
Abstract
Purpose
The chapter questions the low demand for scholarly (scientific research) competence of civil servants through identifying practical and transformative uses of scientific knowledge in professionals’ practice, thus arguing for a particular type of scholarly competence in professional degree programs.
Design/methodoloy/approach
The chapter conceptually develops a theory of practitioners’ knowing in action that reframes use of scientific knowledge as part of practical inquiry.
Findings
The chapter formulates the notion of extended ‘scientific temper’ to open up spaces for reflection in the context of everyday professional practice and avoid the pitfalls of technical rationality. It argues for an ontological – as opposed to mere epistemological – dimension of knowing in action. It suggests that changes in practitioners’ stance in line with the extended ‘scientific temper’ enable specific uses of scientific knowledge and help achieve aims of emancipation and transformation.
Practical implications
The chapter sketches a list of scholarly competencies and principles of didactics of training scholarly competence of civil servants in line with the notion of extended ‘scientific temper’ and post-structuralist paradigms in science.
Originality/value
The chapter’s value lies in reconceptualising the use of scientific knowledge in relation to everyday professional practice in public administration.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
This chapter emerged as a side product of rethinking the curricula in the Bachelor and Master in Public Management programs at the University of Applied Science FH Campus Wien, Austria. The author thanks his close colleague Günter Horniak for his continued patience and co-operation, as well as his students who are a constant source of productive irritation and inspiration. Further the author thanks the organisers and participants of the panel ‘New Ways of Teaching Interpretively’ at the 10th international conference on Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) Policies and Their Publics: Discourses, Actors and Power, 8–10 July 2015, Lille, the Copenhagen Forum Annual Workshop Experimental Learning within Master Programmes, 4–6 November 2015, Copenhagen (particularly Petra Kanters, Monika Knassmüller, Frank Meier, Dorthe Pedersen and Christian Tangkjær for their useful feedback), the Working Group on Public Administration Education at the 24th international conference of Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee), 19–21 May 2016, Katarína Staroňová, Emília Sičáková-Beblavá, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and useful remarks.
Citation
Sedlacko, M. (2016), "Civil Servants and ‘Scientific Temper’: Scholarly Competence for Enactment of New Realities in Professionals’ Practice", Developing Public Managers for a Changing World (Critical Perspectives on International Public Sector Management, Vol. 5), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 61-82. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2045-794420160000005004
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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