Examining the utility judgments of public and business administration instructors and understanding their professional identity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine if business and public administration have distinct identities based on perception of curriculum areas. Design/methodology/approach – PROSCAL, and algorithm for multidimensional scaling was used. Findings – Business and public administration faculties have different identities based on their perceptions of curriculum areas. Research limitations/implications – Relied on a maximum likelihood probability approach. The study should be replicated using other psychometric techniques, or be extended to other disciplines. Practical implications – Public administration is empirically validated as distinct from business administration and political science. Care must be taken when borrowing ideas from either field, though results indicate that communicating with business administration would be easier due to the shared space. Originality/value – It is one of the few (if not the only) papers using PROSCAL. It is one of the first to mathematically determine if groups were understanding and processing stimuli similarly enough to be compared.