The first edition of The Public Administration Theory Primer sought to address a problem faced sooner or later by all students, scholars, and practitioners of public administration. In order to make sense of what we study or practice we need some structure or framework to understand decisions, outcomes, causes, and the like; in other words, we need a theory. The big problem in the field of public administration is not that we lack theory; the problem is one of surfeit rather than deficit. The big challenge is ordering, synthesizing, and making sense of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives. The first edition of the primer was explicitly aimed at meeting that challenge.