Identifying and Cueing Network Membership

Innovations in service delivery require due attention to the accountable implementation of public policy in a manner compatible with the public interest. Network scholarship has emerged to describe and prescribe a variety of management mechanisms, political implications, and policy outcomes dealing with the multi-actor implementation models that have emerged with collaborative public, nonprofit and private sector efforts to address the public interest. The multiplicity of conceptualizations during the past three decades of what/who comprises a network makes it difficult to compare what scholars learn about networks between policy areas and different jurisdictions or levels of government and grow our understanding of networks. To bridge the substantial, multi-disciplinary body of scholarship dealing with networked implementation, the paper reports on an initial test review of twenty-five network-related articles published since 1980 in Public Administration Review . Findings from this initial review will hone a comprehensive analysis of network-related articles in terms of network and network membership definition from the top 15 U.S. policy, administration, or management journals related to public administration since 1980.