Public administration boundary crossing imperatives: A practitioner’s reflections on pathways toward improved relevance for public service contexts

Abstract

As a practitioner with boundary spanning interests and roles, I take a reflexive posture to ponder the nature and significance of boundary crossing in public administration. Specifically, I consider how boundary crossing could provide pathways toward greater relevance for public service contexts in South Africa. By bricolage, I derive theoretical and methodological associations across social constructionist perspectives that include relational theory, critical theory and reflexivity. Building on how the boundary crossing imperative is expressed in programme purposes and on brief reviews of public administration interdisciplinarity, I reflect on my experiences in practitioner-academic interactions and inter-institutional projects. From this exploration, I draw provisional conclusions about constraints to and opportunities for beneficial boundary crossing. I incorporate examples of critical considerations to guide the furtherance of education outcomes through boundary interactions between academics and practitioners. The limitations of self-reflexivity in qualitative inquiry are mediated through different data sources and the transparency with which subjective experiences are interpreted. The paper’s contribution is in making explicit a critical inside-out perspective and placing this side by side other empirical endeavours. Amid calls for more relevant and reflexive practices in public administration, the paper provides an example of cross boundary reflections that are still underrepresented and are yet to gain sophistication in practitioner-academic engagement and scholarship.