Advancing knowledge in public administration: why religion matters

Abstract

This editorial makes the case that religion is a significant influence on public administration (PA) and religious factors should usefully be considered in researching PA, for purposes of both advancing knowledge and drawing practical implications. The starting point for our argument is the assumption that context does matter for PA, and religion is a neglected part of the context. Religion – broadly defined as a set of coherent answers to the core existential questions that confront any human group and pertain to the relationship of the human to the divine and their codification in creedal forms, and involving a ritual dimension and piety – is interwoven with societal, cultural, political and administrative elements, which constitutes the context that affects PA in a given jurisdiction. Including religious factors in PA studies would therefore contribute to the advancement of the field. The influence of religion has so far been overlooked in PA research. It is worth examining why religion has been overlooked in PA, at least the English-language literature, for a better understanding of the contribution that can derive from encompassing religious factors into theory and empirical research about PA. One reason lies in narrow interpretations of secularisation, which has at times been seen – in the West – as an irreversible trend in history. This consideration may have driven away the attention of PA scholars to religious factors. We would counter that these narrow interpretations do not consider that, first, processes of secularisation have occurred in a differential way around the world. Societies in the Asia Pacific region, for instance, may have secularised less than the West. In addition, secularisation may flow and ebb over time rather than linearly growing. Second – and more crucial, is that secularity is compatible with religion and religiously informed consciences still playing a role as social forces. Another reason for overlooking religion is that religious factors may fit problematically into certain epistemological approaches, like forms of neo-positivism, which have been ascendant in recent decades. We counter that this need not be the case, and that there is room in the field of PA – which is interdisciplinary and characterised by epistemological and methodological pluralism – for researching the influence of religion on key aspects of PA through a multitude of approaches and methods. Thus, the influence of religion on PA could and should be investigated more systematically, thereby adding to our capacity of generating knowledge to address PA-problems. In a recent contribution to this purpose (Ongaro & Tantardini, 2023 to our knowledge, the only book-length scholarly work devoted to this topic, although a number of journal articles and book chapters have been published that address different specific theoretical and empirical aspects of the relationship between religion and PA), we work out a theoretical framing of the relationship between religion and PA, and organise available ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 2023, VOL. 45, NO. 1, 1–6 https://doi.org/10.1080/23276665.2022.2155858