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This chapter’s focus is on the study of public management itself, rather than on this field’s substantive concerns. The issue is how to conceive of good work within this field of study, where the functional role of such work is to contribute to research knowledge or to education about public management. In approaching this issue, I examine the argument that the form of the study of management should be that of a design science. I then elaborate and offer a qualified endorsement of this argument.1 Design science approaches to the study of management are fairly elusive. Herbert Simon discussed the idea of design science in his Sciences of the Artificial . More recently, van Aken, a management professor in the Netherlands, published a much-cited article in 2004 that elucidated the idea of a design science approach to the study of management.2 Van Aken’s article is not about the design process, but rather about properties of domain knowledge, where the domain is management. Van Aken described the form of such domain knowledge as grounded, field-tested heuristic technological rules.Van Aken’s argument, though abstract, can serve as a reference point for a design science approach to the study of public management. On Domain Knowledge in Management: Van Aken’s Account I begin with an exposition of van Aken’s“Management Research Based on the Paradigm of the Design Sciences: The Quest for Field-Tested and Grounded Technological Rules.” He presented “design science” as a label for a distinctive approach to carrying out the research function of fields of management. An important facet of this approach (like any approach to carrying out a function) 219 11 The Study of Public Management: Reference Points for a Design Science Approach michael barzelay is its characteristic goals. Under the design science approach, the goal of research is to remedy deficiencies in formal expert knowledge about classes of problems.The handling of particular problems falls outside the immediate concerns of a design science approach to research. Van Aken characterized formal expert knowledge in terms of grounded and field-tested heuristic technological rules about classes of problems. All the component terms built into this expression are helpful in coming to grips with the idea of a design science approach to the study of management: we simply have to cope with the expression’s elongated string of nouns and adjectives . A coping strategy is to break the formula down into two pieces. The phrase “heuristic technological rules about classes of problems” corresponds to the idea of formal expert knowledge; this idea points to the kind of knowledge sought. The adjectives “grounded and field-tested” point to the quality of formal expert knowledge sought. Let’s consider each part of van Aken’s overall formulation in turn. As noted, the phrase “heuristic technological rules about classes of problems ” is the design science approach’s expert term for “formal expert knowledge .” From this standpoint, what is not formal expert knowledge? Three concepts are useful as contrast cases. One is ordinary, or layman’s, knowledge, which is not expert. A second is tacit, or personal, craft knowledge, which may be expert, but is not formal. A third is formal expert knowledge about theoretical objects in the study of society (for example, culture, exchange rate movements , and revolutions). Mentioning these contrast cases is not intended to deprecate them in any way.Tacit,or personal,craft knowledge plays a necessary role in the handling of particular challenges in managing organizations, businesses , or programs. Equally, under the design science approach, formal expert knowledge about theoretical objects in the study of society plays a role in research about heuristic technological rules.Van Aken retrieved the concept of“technological rules” from a modest line of philosophical analysis written in the mid1960s ,concerned with comparing scientific,technological,and other categories of knowledge. The pursuit of technological knowledge was seen as directed toward establishing stable norms of successful human behavior.3 Technological rules were defined as algorithms, that is, instructions to perform a finite number of acts in a given order to accomplish a given aim.Van Aken used the concept of technological rules to press the point that a design science approach to developing management theory is not the same as an explanatory social science approach to developing organization theory. Technological knowledge about management and explanatory theories of organizations were framed as categorically different bodies of knowledge, whatever their common sources. 220 michael barzelay [3.15.197.123] Project MUSE (2024...

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