270 10: Conclusion: A Bright Future for Th eory?
to all the theories successfully employed by public administration scholars. Th e
goal was to present what we believe to be the key contemporary theories and to
use them to demonstrate the importance of theory to scholarship and to the shap-
ing of applied practice. Whatever its failures, public administration theory can
count among its successes its numerous contributions to increasing our system-
atic understanding of the public sector and to repeatedly providing public service
professionals (albeit sometimes in a diluted, popularized form) useful guides for
action.