Don’t exclude real practitioners with the imaginary ones: A comment on Azfar Nisar’s “Practitioner as the imaginary father of public administration”

Abstract

Abstract Azfar Nisar (2020) asserts that the public administration research community is obsessed with serving an idealized image of public administration practitioners. He suggests that researchers should stop trying to serve the imaginary practitioner, and instead engage directly with the public. I have a different suggestion; that researchers should engage with real practitioners, rather than imaginary ones