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While he was still the director of the Institute of Public Administration at the University of Michigan, Ferrel Heady wrote a paper titled "Comparative Public Administration: Concerns and Priorities," which was published in a book he that coedited for Dwight Waldo, Papers in Comparative Public Administration (Heady and Stokes 1962, 1-18). This essay is remarkable because it clearly describes the wide-ranging series of intellectual movements in comparative politics, public administration, and theories of development that led to the creation of the Comparative Administration Group (CAG) within the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). Our shared intellectual concerns were reinforced by personal friendships in this vibrant context.
During the 1960s, comparative public administration became a stimulating and controversial field of study, and the CAG was its guiding force. That would not have been possible without the generous support of the Ford Foundation. However, its intellectual substance, comprising competing and quite different intellectual currents, stemmed from the diverse experiences and orientations of the CAG members. We convened annually (even biannually) and sponsored summer workshops that led to a series of books published by Duke University Press under the editorship of Ralph Braibanti. They reflect a wide assortment of orientations and interests with no unifying theory or doctrine. Indeed, in retrospect, it seems clear there was no need to worry: We were exploring a new field, and its lack of a coherent paradigm was not really a liability.
In his 1962 paper, Ferrel kindly made reference to my own contributions to this discourse, in which, of course, he also played a leading role, and we were close collaborators. The papers published in his 1962 volume had been drafted for presentation as part of the comparative politics program at the 1961 conference of the American Political Science Association in St. Louis. Other authors in this collection include Alfred Diamant, James Fesler, William Siffin, Edward Weidner, John Dorsey, and Amitai Etzioni. The extensive bibliographic notes attached to Ferrel's essay mirror the complex academic and policy concerns of that time and refer to meetings and groups whose convergent interests aided our understanding of subsequent developments.
Both Ferrel and I had participated in a graduate seminar on "The Comparative Study of Public Administration" that was held at Indiana University in 1956. The...