Public Administration in Italy: The Science and the Profession

This introduction chapter outlines the contribution made by this volume. This book is about two distinct yet complementary definitions of ‘public administration’. First, as a subject of scholarly inquiry, public administration can be defined as an interdisciplinary field of study, the interdisciplinary study of the configuration and functioning of public administrative systems. On an equal footing and in an equally constitutive way, public administration can be defined as a profession. The combination of these two notions of public administration frames and informs this volume dedicated to public administration in Italy, which correspondingly unfolds in two parts. The first part of the volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective and proposes a set of chapters which introduce the reader to how public administration in Italy has been studied, by highlighting the contribution of historiography, administrative law, management, economics, social psychology, political science and public policy, epistemology and other disciplinary perspectives to the study of Italian public administration. Jointly, this first set of chapters offers the reader an appreciation of how public administration in its different disciplinary dimensions has been investigated by the Italian scholarly community. The second set of chapters shifts the focus on public administration interpreted as a profession, as something which is practised daily; the second part of the volume analyses key traits of the governance, regulation, leadership and management, as well as the role of oversight and judiciary bodies, in the practice of public servants’ daily work.