He believed that politicians should be accountable to the people and that political administration should be treated as a science, and its practitioners given authority to address issues in their respective fields.
Using Kuhn's terminology, Vincent Ostrom (1974, 14; 18) argued that Public Administration faced a paradigmatic crisis because of the proliferation of prevailing theories, the methodological experimentation, the explicit discontent among scholars, the large amount of philosophical speculation, and the debate surrounding fundamental epistemological issues.
In the Scandinavian countries (Beck Jorgenson 1996) and the Netherlands (Kickert 1996), an identity crisis existed as well, which was, as elsewhere, related to the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of the study.
The Dutch emeritus Van Braam recently (1998) observed that the scientific authority of Public Administration will continue to be seriously challenged as long as we cannot agree on the core that constitutes the study.
While for practical reasons many accept the coexistence of various core concepts, Van Braam argues—more strongly than Perry—that such will not lead to a coherent and theoretically unified study (p. 49).