Professors Megan LePere-Schloop (Ohio State University) and Rebecca Nesbit (University of Georgia) have won the 2021 Felice Davidson Perlmutter Award. The title of the winning paper is: “The Nexus of Public Administration and Nonprofit Studies: An Empirical Mapping of Research Topics and Knowledge Integration.”
The award from the Theory, Issues, Boundaries Section (TIBS) of ARNOVA recognizes the profound contribution that Felice gave to both TIBS and ARNOVA, with a special emphasis on the interplay between theory and practice. The 2021 Perlmutter Award recognizes current research that represents strong promise for contribution to our knowledge of theory, issues, and/or boundaries.
Paper abstract:
The interdisciplinary fields of public administration (PA) and nonprofit studies (Nonprofit) overlap in important ways but the nature and extent of their knowledge integration is undertheorized and empirically unclear. We adapt Rafols and Meyer’s framework of interdisciplinary research integration and conduct an empirical analysis of articles published between 2009-2019 in the three core Nonprofit journals and the forty-two journals designated as “Public Administration” by the Web of Science citation database (n = 18,332). We show that PA articles cite Nonprofit journals at a low but consistent rate, while Nonprofit articles frequently cite PA research. We develop a taxonomy of fifteen broad categories using the subset of cross-citing PA and Nonprofit articles (n = 1954). Finally, we use the typology to examine knowledge integration at the nexus of the two fields and identify topical areas that would benefit from a more robust integration of PA and Nonprofit research.
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