BURIED ACADEMIC TREASURES

When we were attending the most recent Southeastern Conference for Public Administration in Memphis (SECOPA), we sat in on a number of sessions in which researchers were given the opportunity to share their work.

We came away with lots of notes on a yellow legal pad, one of which we underlined several times. It was a quote from one of the presenters who said: “We have lots of research that leads to no results.”

As some of you know, we’ve written a book with Don Kettl to help academically trained researchers write in a way that would be understandable by decision makers who could make use of their findings. But the keys to writing well are only a small part of the picture. Elected and appointed officials have the capacity to ignore nearly anything, no matter how well written it is.

This is more than just a frustration to researchers, it’s a gigantic loss to the world of public administration. We spend lots of time reading through reports and frequently come across nuggets of insights that we believe could help make improvements in nearly every public sector endeavor from human resources to budgeting to performance management to procurement and on and on. We, and others, can do our best to get attention for this kind of information, but that doesn’t mean that the decision makers have the time or the inclination to take steps toward taking advantage of great ideas.

We don’t want to place the blame for the disconnect between academia and practitioners on either party. To one degree or the other they’re both at fault, with taxpayers and the people who rely on government services – and that’s pretty much everybody except for people who have gone off the grid – as the losers.

Following, from our experience, are six reasons we believe that it’s difficult to close the gap between the world of research and the realm of utility. The first three are aimed at government leaders, the last three have academics in mind.

For Government Leaders:

• Politics trumps information. When a politician gets elected to office by advocating popular policies, there’s little likelihood that new research that indicates that they’ve been taking a misguided path will be met with great enthusiasm.

  
  

• We live in a world of information overload. It’s understandable that with all the elegant research being done, it’s probably impossible to get to even a fraction of it – even if there’s a support staff to do so.

  
  

• Academics don’t universally agree about much anything.  It’s easy to find two reports about the same topic that come to differing conclusions. So just because a glittery new piece of research advocates a particular policy, it can be difficult to follow along when there’s equally persuasive evidence to the contrary.

For Academics

•  For professional reasons a great deal of valuable research appears primarily in academic journals, which can be an overwhelmingly expensive proposition. It’s not a rare event for us to come across a study that we’d like to share with the world, but when it’s behind a journal’s firewall, and the cost to purchase it is prohibitive, we just move along and find something else to write about. When it comes to public sector decision makers, information that’s hidden behind a firewall may not ever be utilized.

  
  

• There can sometimes be a tendency to do research for its own value and leave it to others to figure out what kinds of policy decisions it can lead to. Busy folks in the public sector need to know what to do with even the most compelling data, not just to be faced with charts and graphs with no actionable items addressed.

  
  

• As we suggest in the book, it’s important to write for the audience. Whatever new research says will be ignored by policy makers if it’s aimed only at an audience of other academics. 

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