Building Bridges? An Assessment of Academic and Practitioner ...

R. P. Battaglio, Jr. & M. J. Scicchitanoalter their behaviors to become more accessible to practitioners. More currentresearch appears to be moving away from this argument toward the realizationthat the gap cannot be closed. Thus, it is more instructive for future research toaddress how pracademics can bridge the gap between theory and practice. Giventhe increasing popularity of executive education programs that encourage academicpractitionerinteractions, researchers should look at how these interactions canimprove policy making and business in a domestic and international context.To be sure, academic-practitioner interaction is a part of many Master of PublicAdministration programs. Although the research presented here does not explicitlyaddress this issue, such collaboration between academics and practitioners in theclassroom merits further investigation (Posner, 2009). Indeed, public administrationprograms that offer consulting services through public service outreachfor political and government officials might be useful to consider in future researchefforts (see Battaglio, 2008).Finally, the consistency of results for age, education, and to some extentgender suggests that demographics might be a stronger indication of differences.Importantly, female members were less likely than their male counterparts toperceive PAR as an important medium offered by ASPA. Perhaps the knowledgegained from PAR may not “ring true” to the interests of women in the academyor field (Ospina & Dodge, 2005b). Although the influence of the academicvariable controls for the others, perhaps age and education might overlay andexacerbate the academic practitioner divide, at least for ASPA. The differencesdemonstrated in the results begin to tell a richer story that suggests the dividebetween younger and older members may be important for the future of ASPA.Bolton and Stolcis (2003) suggest that with age and increasing sophistication,we learn to safeguard our rewards by creating rationales for privileging ourperspectives. The findings with regard to age suggest that younger membersindicate they find less utility in the services and/or priorities espoused by ASPA.ASPA services and priorities may be strained to accommodate “connectedness”among members intergenerationally (Newland, 2000). Ultimately, the surveyand our findings have more direct bearing on the future of ASPA as a vehicle forcommunicating best practices than on the academic-practitioner divide. However,ASPA is arguably the primary means for providing the necessary brokering andneutral ground to convene academics and practitioners in common forums forpublic administration. So as ASPA goes, so goes our profession’s achievementof professional synergies between theory and practice—a hallmark of publicadministration as a professional discipline. In addition, the consistent resultswith respect to age across the models suggest that stages in a person’s career orlife may be important considerations for the imparting of relevant topics andmediums for doing so. These results point to an attitudinal divide that mustbe bridged if concerns over academic-practitioner differences are finally tobe overcome.766 Journal of Public Affairs Education