Research is very prominent in modern life. It affects people, money, time, debates, and decisions in more or less every sphere of life, including that of public life. For many years now, research in Public Administration has been a highly debated issue. The question ‘Why can't we resolve the research issue in Public Administration?’, asked in 1984 by McCurdy and Cleary, started a new debate in a series of articles in the international journal Public Administration Review, which has now already stretched over a decade. The theme of Public Administration research has also been touched on in other academic journals as well as in various books.

Some of the participants in these discussions are very critical of Public Administration research, as is demonstrated in the following statements:

• ■ ‘[it] has fallen short of its potential effectiveness’ (Mosher 1956: 178);

• ■ ‘scholars … have a difficult time coming to grips with the nature of research and its role in the field’ (McCurdy and Cleary 1984: 49);

• ■ ‘[research] is still dominated by efforts to conceptualize researchable problems, delineate possible areas of inquiry, and describe objects for study’ (Stallings and Ferris 1988: 583) public administration research is engaged in little theory testing’ (Houston and Delevan 1990: 678);

• ■ ‘Public administration showed both low conformity to mainstream research and low quality’ (Adams and White 1994: 575);

• ■ ‘too many practitioner projects…without much in the way of a research design or attention to rigorous methods continue to be written’ (Cleary 1992: 60);

• ■ ‘methods… are often not justified by context …They are imposed in an arbitrary fashion without regard to what would be just or lawful’ (Bell 1994: 325);

• ■ ‘the failure of public administration to develop a solid research base is related to that stage of an academic career when a researcher is first trained in the research process’ (McCurdy and Cleary 1984: 49); and

• ■ ‘unless there is a turnaround in the quality of research, the future of Public Administration as an academic discipline in South Africa is not a rosy one’ (Cameron and McLaverty 2008: 94).