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AbstractHerbert Simon, in his 1946 essay "The Proverbs of Administration," indicted public administration as having conflicting and contradictory theories and an absence of a knowledge base that could provide a guide to practice. Simon proposed that public administration define concepts, adopt efficiency as its objective, focus on the study of decision making, and construct models that could predict efficient results. This 75th‐anniversary article revisits Simon's essay in light of contemporary public administration. It examines the progress that has been made and what still needs to be accomplished, and it ends with a list of barriers to further progress.

Luther Gulick was both an academic and a reformer. In the latter role, he thought seriously about what the future of public administration might look like. This essay examines his work as a lens through which to view the future of public administration in 2020. Gulick suggests that public administration needs a governance orientation to link scholarship with the realities of practice, a recognition of the bias of structures, a stress on the informal elements of organization, additional research on almost every question, a recognition of the importance of ethics, a stress on the importance of context, and a fundamental appreciation of the role that public management plays in fostering democracy.

The field of policy theory abounds with numerous theories, with each theory having a set of practitioners that are working independently of the others. Resolving conflicts among policy theories as a result is difficult. This essay has a more modest goal of posing some questions and suggesting some avenues for future research. Key points include defining the purpose of policy theory, incorporating management into our theories, making strategic choices about areas of study, addressing the parsimony‐comprehensiveness tradeoff, and providing a more nuanced role for institutions.

The purpose of the John Gaus Award and Lectureship is to recognize "scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration." That tradition has a long and honorable history. Many of the presidents of the American Political Science Association were scholars of public administration (Frank J. Goodnow, Woodrow Wilson, W. W. Willoughby, Leonard White, Luther Gulick, Pendleton Herring, Emmette S. Redford, Carl J. Friedrich, James Q. Wilson, and Matthew Holden, Jr.) and several others made contributions to the literature (V. O. Key, Jr., Charles S. Hyneman, Robert A. Dahl, Aaron Wildavsky, and Elinor Ostrom). Yet a visitor from another planet studying political science and public administration might conclude that these tribes have evolved into two distinct species. Prepared for presentation as the John Gaus Distinguished Lecture, American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, September 1, 2006, Philadelphia. I would like to thank Paul Brace, George Krause, Alisa Hicklin, Larry O'Toole, Jim Rogers, and Michael Thies for their assistance.