Professional Public Administration: A Synthesis of an Inchoate Concept

The term profession is found throughout the scholarly literature; despite frequent
use of the term, there exists little or no means of providing a common conception of the
term. Consequently, calls for increasing professionalization of public administration
appear to be premature. Therefore, this dissertation utilizes inductive research to generate
theory, which synthesizes the inchoate concept of the professional public administrator.
The motivation to pursue this line of inquiry stems from a personal need to weigh
in on the perennial debate about what skills, knowledge, and information should be
communicated to future generations of public administration thinkers and practitioners.
To that end, this research will provide a theoretical framework grounded in the literature,
which federates the term professional and the professional concept in such a way that
purposeful debates can be had. It is, as will be shown, an attempt to link understanding
and interpretation.