Institutional Research Standards and Faculty Incentives : Exploring the Effects on Public Administration Scholarship

Calls for academic rigor in public administration scholarship are often greeted by equally vociferous calls for research that is relevant to practitioners. Whether couched as rigor v. relevance or theory v. practice - the nature of public administration scholarship has long been one of the field's big questions. This paper uses original data to explore an important but understudied component of public administration scholarship; namely, the influence departmental and institutional performance standards (i.e., tenure and promotion standards, annual performance standards) have on the forms of scholarship (i.e., discovery, integration, application, and teaching) public administration faculty produce. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for public administration scholarship