A research agenda for public administration and public sector management

The study of human history teaches us that much of life is analogous to a palimpsest. The original aims and older versions of political and administrative systems remain, but are constantly overlain by new ideas and novel approaches (see for example, Cunliffe, 2017). Old ideologies wither to be replaced by contemporary creeds, our understanding of them either aided or distorted by the methodologies deployed in science and social science; there are few eternal verities, but much that is recycled. The technological revolutions of recent generations produce immense amounts of data and new knowledge and this in turn drives social and political change. It has been this way in human society for millennia; it is the human condition. For example, the domestication of horses on the Pontic-Caspian steppe (modern Kazakhstan) sometime in the fourth or fifth millennia BC allowed the development of pastoralism to accelerate; thereafter population growth led to the evolution of early political systems (Cunliffe, 2017). Then came the development of militia and of cavalry, and from this vast armies of conquest (Cunliffe, 2017, 76; 469–70). These exported religions, technologies and political structures. There was both mimetic and coercive isomorphism across societies and cultures. They also evolved and exported the concept of the state and of administration. As Herson (1957/2013, 61) noted in relation to ancient Imperial China: