Public Management: Recovering Designs through Case Study Research

How could academic disciplines like Public Management provide experience-based knowledge that practitioners would rate as profoundly relevant when they are planning, implementing, evaluating, or scaling up an endeavor? This strongly aspirational question is addressed in this book by Michael Barzelay and collaborators. Their core proposal calls upon case study researchers in disciplines like Public Management to adopt this book’s proposed research practice, titled Design Recovery in Cases (DRC).The book codifies the DRC Research Practice’s methodological heuristics for its several research process elements: conceiving cases as endeavors, characterizing them, explaining their system behaviors and process outcomes, and drawing lessons about how endeavors of the kind could possibly work. These heuristics are fully exemplified in three original case studies.Critically engaging with Herbert Simon’s idea of disciplines concerned with artificial phenomena, Michael Barzelay and Alan Love show what it would mean for disciplines like Public Management to take a stand that they are endeavor-centered disciplines. All told, the book makes the affirmative case that Public Management can cumulatively develop knowledge that is original, rigorous, and relevant to practice, while exemplifying endeavor-centered academic disciplines in the academy.