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This essay explores whether religion has a place in addressing public challenges, particularly in the context of Non-Western Public Administration paradigms such as Confucian, Buddhist, and Islamic. The authors focus on Islam as a case study and highlight the need for real-life cases to build a grounded theory. To this end, the essay documents the authors' ongoing research on Islamic Public Value. We argue that to understand Public Administration in a global context, it is essential to recognize the limitations of a Western perspective, from which the dichotomy of religious versus secular emerged, and in so doing, consider alternative departure points, i.e. paradigms incorporating religious or semi-religious elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the concept of Islamic Public Administration (IPA) requires consideration of its portability across spatial and temporal contexts as well as secular-religious divides. The content of IPA has shifted over time, and debate over its meanings and key attributes has been a consistent feature of the history of Muslim societies. This means a hard-edged IPA concept constituted by immutable structural features to enable valid and reliable observation over time is likely to be defeated. This article argues instead for a thematic IPA framework that is relatively underspecified to allow for context sensitivity and facilitates the analysis of enduring historical dilemmas of Islamic governance. Such a framework helps show how IPA differs from other public administration traditions; specifically, its self-conscious reinvention by appeals to Islamic theology, law and ethics; and its grounding in values that are not commensurable with secular, liberal "public" values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of theoretical principles and centuries-old, yet still functional, practices and institutions that together form the Islamic paradigm of public administration (PA) have customarily been absent from both academic literature and PA reform policies, not least in the NISPAcee region. With, e. g., the arrival of Peter's Administrative Traditions last year, however, Islamic PA has now been positioned within the mainstream, that is, recognized as a legitimate, contextually relevant alternative to the global-Western paradigm. Accordingly, this article aims to further delineate the Islamic PA tradition by discussing its positionality and significance within Non-Western PA, surveying its normative principles, exploring a set of contemporary case studies in Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Morocco, and concluding with a broader reflection on the importance of contextuality and heterogeneity for good PA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article maps the relevant public administration (PA) research related to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by systematically analyzing international studies about PA in MENA between 1945 and 2019, complemented with findings from a newly-developed survey that sheds light on the activities of academics working in the region. We found PA research in MENA to be fragmented and isolated from international debates, and research about MENA being scattered. Finally, a modest proposal for a conceptual framework based on "functional equivalents" for traditional concepts and paradigms of PA research that may nudge cross-fertilization in both directions is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that there are (at least) three paradigms of governance and especially public administration: Chinese, Western, and Islamic -- paradigms understood here as potentiality and theory rather than reality and practice as observed today. It then discusses classical Chinese, i.e. Confucian, and Islamic, specifically Ottoman, public administration, from this perspective. The guiding question is whether we arrive more easily at good public administration if we realize that there are different contexts and thus, potentially at least, different ways thither, as well as legitimately different goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to investigate the historical records and backgrounds of the Islamic public administration in the management literature of Iran and the world and within meta-theoretical and philosophical justification on the one hand and forming the basis of Islamic principles based on religious references and sources on the other hand. Accordingly, following methodology of the new public service movement, efforts have been made to formulate the fundamental principles of Islamic public administration. The first part of this research paper was to analyze and explore the evolution of knowledge of this movement. In the second part meta-theoretical and philosophical reasons for the current trend of management were provided. And the final part of the present paper presented the intellectual and practical foundations of the movement.