Public Administration Studies: The Digital Trajectory

Abstract

This paper asks how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will influence Public Administration (PA) as an academic discipline in the near future, both in research and teaching. After looking at current ICT phenomena — from AI to gaming — and how PA has taken them up, two critical, interlinked phenomena are then analyzed: MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and their effects, including a review of how the Covid-19 pandemic pushed this kind of teaching, and the current ability of algorithms to write a certain type of texts. These may have the effect to strongly enforce, even lock in, current epistemological tendencies of PA, but they may also give rise to an altogether different kind of development of scholarly inquiry in the discipline and beyond.