What makes public administration a science? Or, are its ''big questions'' really big?

What are the appropriate basic research questions public administration must address if it is to aspire to the status of a science? It is the philosophical nature of the true sciences that those basic questions concern the essential character and origins of their core subject matters. Neumann proposes that the appropriate research question for public administration, those at the level which definer the discipline, must concern the structure and dynamics of the public organization. Within the physical sciences, a new paradigm is emerging that views natural systems as nonlinear, complex, and ''chaotic.'' This new view of open systems now obliges public administrators to readdress the dynamics of their own artificial systems-the public organizations. Thus, such basic questions as those which relate to organizational theory, public management and the relationship of the public organization to its environment now need to be revisited under the concepts of complexity and chaos.