
Travis A. WhetsellGeorgia Institute of Technology | GT · School of Public Policy
Travis A. Whetsell
Doctor of Philosophy
About
52
Publications
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Introduction
My research falls into three broad categories: networks in public policy and management, science and technology policy, and philosophy of public administration.
Additional affiliations
August 2017 - May 2022
Education
August 2012 - August 2017
Publications
Publications (52)
Descriptive and inferential social network analysis has become common in public administration studies of network governance and management. A large literature has developed in two broad categories: antecedents of network structure, and network effects and outcomes. A new topic is emerging on network interventions that applies knowledge of network...
The topic of academic freedom has come to the fore as nations around the world experience a wave of democratic backsliding. Institutions of higher education are often targets of autocrats who seek to suppress intellectual sources of social and political resistance. At the same time, international collaboration in scientific research continues unaba...
We test the feasibility of incorporating broad social, political, and governance indicators with standard metrics as a way to enrich assessment of national research capacity. We factor analyze two sets of variables for 174 countries from 2012 to 2021, one being traditional measures associated with national science and technology capacity such spend...
With the growing number of opioid-related deaths, many local governments are assembling collaborations with the goal of providing timely and tangible responses to the overdose epidemic. Although the purpose of such collaborations is to bring multi-sector stakeholders together to provide policy recommendations, the inclusion of organizations with di...
The discipline of public administration has grappled with concepts regarding the public for well over a century. Scholars from public opinion, public choice, and public value(s) have analyzed myriad elements of administration related to the public. Scholars also have applied numerous concepts from philosophical pragmatism to public administration....
Public management and policy scholars have engaged in extensive development of theory and empirical study of networks and collaborative systems of governance. This scholarship has focused on understanding the mechanisms of network formation and the implications of network properties on individual and collective outcomes. Despite rich descriptive wo...
The democracy-science relationship has traditionally been examined through philosophical conjecture and country case studies. There remains limited global-scale empirical research on the topic. This study explores country-level factors related to the dynamics of the global research collaboration network, focusing on structural associations between...
Public managers lack feedback on the effectiveness of public investments, policies, and programs instituted to build and use research capacity. Numerous reports rank countries on global performance on innovation and competitiveness, but the highly globalized data does not distinguish country contributions from global ones. We suggest improving upon...
The discipline of public administration has grappled with concepts regarding the public for well over a century. Scholars from public choice, public value(s), and publicness have analyzed myriad elements of administration related to the public. However, detailed explorations of this fundamental term remain relatively sparse, disparate, and under-th...
We explore the influence of gender and formal organizational status on the formation of discussion ties. Network data, gathered through surveying employees from a municipal organization in the United States, garnered a 92% response rate ( n = 143). Results of exponential random graph modeling indicate women supervisors are more likely to send discu...
Housing resilience planning is a challenging process that requires active participation of multisector stakeholders, including public agencies, private industries, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academia, and community residents. Despite the importance of multisector stakeholder collaboration and engagement, there is limited understanding of...
Housing resilience planning is a dynamic process that involves multisector stakeholders, including public agencies, private industries, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), academia, and community residents. Despite the importance of multisector stakeholder collaboration, there is limited understanding of stakeholder collaboration in housing resilie...
The connection between democracy and science has traditionally been examined through philosophical conjecture and single country case studies. As such, there remains limited global scale empirical research on the topic. However, there is a large body of evidence suggesting that research collaboration is associated with scientific productivity and p...
We explore the influence of gender and formal organizational status on the formation of discussion ties. Network data, gathered through surveying employees from a municipal organization in the United States, garnered a 92% response rate (n=143). Results of exponential random graph modeling indicate women supervisors are more likely to send discussi...
Public administration has yet to examine networks in terms of intervention, where network mechanisms are manipulated to promote behavioral change and improve social, organizational, and community outcomes. We argue that to fulfill the potential of network scholarship in public administration, the field requires a framework for intervention approach...
Scholars have long hypothesized that democratic forms of government are more compatible with scientific advancement. However, empirical analysis testing the democracy-science compatibility hypothesis remains underdeveloped. This article explores the effect of democratic governance on scientific performance using panel data on 124 countries between...
Attention to informal communication networks within public organizations has grown in recent decades. While research has documented the role of individual cognition and social structure in understanding information search in organizations, this article emphasizes the importance of formal hierarchy. We argue that the structural attributes of bureauc...
Accepted for publication in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.
Abstract: Attention to informal communication networks within public organizations has grown in recent decades. While research has documented the role of individual cognition and social structure in understanding information search in organizations, this article emp...
A salient characteristic of China’s public–pgrivate partnerships (PPPs) is the deep involvement of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), particularly those administered by the central/national government (CSOEs). In this research social network analysis (SNA) was used to examine the role of different actors in transport and environmental protection PPPs...
A salient characteristic of China's public-private partnerships (PPPs) is the deep involvement of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), particularly those administered by the central/national government (CSOEs). This paper integrates the approaches of resource-based view and resource-dependency theory to explain CSOEs' involvement in PPP networks. Built...
Scholars have long hypothesized that democratic forms of government are more compatible with scientific advancement. However, empirical analysis testing the democracy-science compatibility hypothesis remains underdeveloped. This article explores the effect of democratic governance on scientific performance using panel data on 124 countries between...
Governments have long-standing interests in preventing market failures and enhancing innovation in strategic industries. Public policy regarding domestic technology is critical to both national security and economic prosperity. Governments often seek to enhance their global competitiveness by promoting private sector cooperative activity at the int...
This research analyzes the effects of US science and technology policy on the technological performance of organizations in a global strategic alliance network. During the mid-1980s, the US semiconductor industry appeared to be collapsing. Industry leaders and policymakers moved to support and protect US firms by creating a program called Sematech....
Governments have long standing interests in preventing market failures and enhancing innovation in strategic industries. Public policy regarding domestic technology is critical to both national security and economic prosperity. Governments often seek to enhance their global competitiveness by promoting private sector cooperative activity at the int...
This research analyzes the effects of U.S. science and technology policy on a global strategic alliance network for research and development. During the mid-1980s the U.S. high-technology sector appeared to be collapsing. Industry leaders and policymakers moved to support and protect U.S. firms by creating a program called Sematech. While many scho...
Research articles produced through international collaboration are more highly cited than other work, but are they also more novel? Using measures developed by Uzzi et al. (2013), and replicated by Boyack and Klavans (2014), this article tests for novelty and conventionality in international research collaboration. Scholars have found that coauthor...
This is a comment for Nature Index on the findings of our recent article published in Research Policy. https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/novel-findings-rare-from-international-collaborations
Upon the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE), this article examines its development from 1995 to 2018. Many scholars in public affairs and administration have published in its pages, and the journal offers a large variety of articles on curriculum, pedagogy, and educational philosophy. This article pre...
Research articles produced through international collaboration are more highly cited than other work, but are they also more novel? Using measures developed by Uzzi et al. (2013), and replicated by Boyack and Klavans (2014), this article tests for novelty and conventionality in international research collaboration. Scholars have found that coauthor...
The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier...
In the decades since science and technology measures were crafted and adopted by governments, R&D has increasingly taken place across national boundaries. This leaves a gap for policy makers in how to account for the benefits to national governments of supporting international collaboration in science. This article seeks to address this gap by sugg...
Research produced through international collaboration is often more highly cited than other work, but is it also more novel? Using measures of conventionality and novelty developed by Uzzi et al. (2013) and replicated by Boyack and Klavans (2013), we test for novelty and conventionality in international research collaboration. Many studies have sho...
The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier...
The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier...
Complex problem resolution often involves the need for a pragmatic integration of knowledge from stakeholders with competing epistemic claims. The decision-making process regarding complex problem resolution is characterized by four basic sources of knowledge: disciplines, societies, organizations, and individuals. From the perspective of the publi...
This chapter makes the case that classical pragmatism provides a robust basis for research methodology in public administration and many applied fields. We base this on the logic of inquiry laid out by Charles Sanders Pierce, John Dewey and Jane Addams. We trace the history of dissertation research in public administration. We show how a pragmatic...
International collaboration in science continues to grow at a remarkable rate, but little agreement exists about dynamics of growth and organization at the discipline level. Some suggest that disciplines differ in their collaborative tendencies, reflecting their epistemic culture. This study examines collaborative patterns in six previously studied...
International collaboration in science continues to grow at a remarkable rate, but little agreement exists about dynamics of growth and organization at the discipline level. Some suggest that disciplines differ in their collaborative tendencies, reflecting their epistemic culture. This study examines collaborative patterns in six previously studied...
Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine who received the Prize between 1969 and 2011 are compared to a matched group of scientists to examine productivity, impact, coauthor-ship and international collaboration patterns embedded within research networks. After matching for research domain, h-index, and year of first of publication, we compare bibl...
[This] section focuses on the top journal outlets for military studies research. There are many outlets to publish empirical research in military studies…there was no easy, straightforward way to locate the top military studies journals. Recently this has changed with the advent of Google Scholar’s ranking of military studies journals. We have used...
Neopragmatists in public administration (PA) consistently argue that neopragmatism upgrades regular pragmatism. This claim rests on the contention that pragmatism is host to epistemic foundationalism, which undercuts legitimacy in PA. This article provides a new refutation of the upgrade claim, dissolving the hard-link constructed between epistemol...
This article explores the development of three features of positivism from the 1800s to the present: the unity of science, the verification criterion of meaning, and the empiricist observation language. The development of these features is demonstrated in the mid-20th century public administration (PA) literature and in the self-reflective literatu...
Pragmatism has become a topic of growing discussion in public administration, as demonstrated by ongoing debate within the pages of Administration & Society. Karen Evans recently argued that the pervasive influence of logical positivism has produced a public administration, dominated by an ethically vacuous overemphasis on efficiency. Keith Snider...