Topics in Public Administration
Perspectives from Computational Social Sciences and Corpus Linguistics

This Element provides novel insights into the public administration discipline using computational social sciences and corpus linguistics.

Richard M. Walker (Author), Jiasheng Zhang (Author), Yanto Chandra (Author)

9781009378710, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 January 2025

108 pages
22.9 x 15.1 x 0.7 cm, 0.16 kg

This inductive examination of the topics in the public administration literature using computational social science and corpus linguistics (17 journals, N=12,760 articles, 1991–2019) reveals a new landscape of public administration topics, changes in topics over time and their distribution: • Topic modelling of the stock of the whole corpus identifies 50 topics: the top ten topics included health care, federal government, performance management, environmental regulation, HRM and networks and accounted for just over a third of scholarship between 1991–2019. • Focal topics identified in individual journals identified similarities with popular topics in the whole corpus – networks, health care, HRM – and less frequently examined topics including gender and diversity and partnerships. • Analysis of topics over time shows a substantial flow in topics moving from a country and practice focus in the early stages of our study period to concepts such as governance, networks and citizens in the late stages (2015–2019).

1. Introduction
2. Methods and analytical procedure
3. Topics in public administration
4. Changes in topics in public administration
5. Geography of topics in public administration
6. Conclusions
Appendix
References.

Subject Areas: Organizational theory & behaviour [KJU]