Public Administration Studies: The Digital Trajectory

This paper asks how Information and Communi-cation Technology (ICT) will influence Public Admin-istration (PA) as an academic discipline in the near future, both in research and teaching. After looking at current ICT phenomena - from AI to gaming - and how PA has taken them up, two critical, interlinked phenomena are then analyzed: MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and their effects, including a review of how the Covid-19 pandemic pushed this kind of teaching, and the current ability of algorithms to write a certain type of texts. These may have the effect to strongly enforce, even lock in, current epis-temological tendencies of PA, but they may also give rise to an altogether different kind of development of scholarly inquiry in the discipline and beyond.

How to make an entrepreneurial state: Why innovation needs bureaucracy

A ground-breaking account which shows how the public sector must adapt, but also persevere, in order to advance technology and innovation From self-driving cars to smart grids, governments are experimenting with new technologies to significantly change the way we live. Innovation has become vitally important to states across the world. Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo explore how public bodies pursue innovation, looking at how new policies are designed and implemented. Spanning Europe, the USA and Asia, the authors show how different institutions finance new technologies and share cutting-edge information. They argue for the importance of 'agile stability', demonstrating that in order to successfully innovate, state organizations have to move nimbly like start-ups and yet ensure stability at the same time. And that, particularly in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments need both long-term policy and dynamic capabilities to handle crises. This vital account explores the complex and often contradictory positions of innovating public bodies-and shows how they can overcome financial and political resistance to change for the good of us all. © 2022 Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo.

Public policy during COVID-19: Challenges for public administration and policy research in central and eastern Europe

The authors of this text decided to prepare a short article, with the aim to induce further discussion and to orient ongoing and future research efforts in Central and Eastern Europe but also worldwide. The article uses the method of a multi-country case study as the basis for proposing several critical research (and policy) challenges for our region - but many of them of a world-wide character. Four countries are covered by our thumbnail informative sketches - the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and the Slovak Republic. The final part of this article proposes a set of questions suggested by the CEE experience with COVID-19 for future research. Such research will both be necessary and interesting for scholarship and policy in the region, and - as a particularly interesting context and area - helpful, one hopes, for questions and answers globally, concerning the pandemic, as well as public administration and policy as a whole. © 2020 Juraj Nemec, Wolfgang Drechsler, Gyorgy Hajnal, published by Sciendo.