Public administration scholars as a source of knowledge for federal practitioners: Barriers to communication in the federal environment

This dissertation reports on the results of a sequential exploratory analysis of the barriers to communication between the public administration scholarly community and the Federal public administration practitioner community, focused on the particular barriers encountered in regard to the topic of results management. In sequential exploratory analysis, qualitative analysis precedes quantitative analysis and is the focal point of the overall approach. The foundation for the qualitative component of the study is an analysis of relevant barriers to communication identified in three levels of academic literature: general science, management research, and public administration research. The focus of this literature analysis is the development of a comprehensive inventory of the barriers to communication that inhibit knowledge transfer between the academic and practitioner communities.; The contents of inventory of barriers from the literature are then compared to data collected from interviews of academic researchers and Federal practitioners. Interview subjects were selected from three populations of interest: public administration academic researchers, subject matter expert practitioners, and practitioners in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with current job responsibilities requiring knowledge of results management. Quantitative data are used to supplement the comparison of research and interview findings, and to provide additional descriptive support to key themes identified in the interviews.; The results of the analysis show that there are barriers to the communication of useful knowledge from the academic community to the practitioner community that have been overlooked or insufficiently explored in the academic literature. Most barriers identified in the literature arose from conditions in the scholarly community that make academic knowledge inaccessible, incomprehensible, or insignificant to practitioners. The results of this study show that there are additional barriers arising from the unique conditions of the Federal practitioner environment and related to the practice of results management that create further distance between academics and practitioners, hindering the transfer of useful knowledge. Because of this greater distance, which I call the increased insularity of the practitioner community, actions taken by the academic community to improve the significance, comprehensibility or accessibility of the academic content will likely be insufficient to bridge the gap between the two communities.