| Sumario: | A commentary on R. Behn's “The Big Questions of Public Management,” which appeared in Public Administration Review, vol. 55, July/August 1995, pp. 313-324. The writer considers the appropriate basic research questions that must be addressed by public administration if it is to aspire to the status of a science. He proposes that the appropriate research questions for public administration must concern the structure and dynamics of the public organization rather than the issues of application suggested by Behn. He notes that within the physical sciences, a new paradigm is emerging that views natural systems as nonlinear, complex, and “chaotic,”—a view that obliges public administrators to readdress the dynamics of their own artificial systems and revisit such basic questions as those that relate to organizational theory, public management, and the relationship of the public organization to its environment. The issue of whether such professional “cardinal sins” as ignorance, fear, and hubris have prevented those in the public administration academic field from addressing the field's big questions is discussed.
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