Research On Comprehensive Evaluation Of The Performance Of University Internal Administrative Institutions

For China's higher education reform and development,it is certainly important to improve both the teaching & research level and the ability of social service of the universities.However,at the same time the internal management of the universities cannot be ignored either.In fact,Chinese universities need more first class management badly.For a long time,the main role that the universities play is the power and logic mainly in administrative rather than in academic way.Even in the United States,the function of the administration has become more important in promoting overall university optimization.The responsibilities of university administrative institutions cover the main functional management areas such as teaching,scientific research,assets,personnel,finance,and students management.They actually act as the agents for the leadership.It is rather regrettable that the internal management and service organizations of universities are quite alienated into administrative governmental trends,and the official rank standard culture is very common,which seriously hinders the development of the universities.The implementation of internal administrative institutions performance evaluation in universities is an inevitable requirement to overcome the generalization of administrative power and improve management efficiency and competitiveness.Many universities have carried out practical explorations on the evaluation of their administrative institutions,or subjective assessments based on departmental summaries or debriefing,or comprehensive assessments using corporate management tools such as balanced scorecards and target management,and even the use of the comments from department heads instead.These practices have indeed achieved certain results,but they are mainly based on output-oriented evaluation methods,which is used for evaluation purposes of rankings.They not only fail to fully reflect the requirements of school-based relations and the establishment of a modern university system,but also fail to fully consider the respective administrative institutions.The characteristics are of little significance for improving the work of all aspects of the administrative structure.Evaluation is a judgment of the overall state of the administrative institutions.The core purpose is to build a benign work system and identify key issues that affect the operation of the system to improve both departmental work and efficiency.To achieve this core purpose,it is required to evaluate the essential elements of the functional activities of the administrative institutions and the operational influencing factors before they can be realized.In view of this,this paper focuses on the source factors affecting the functional activities of university administrations,and explores the essential elements and key factors of operational impact.Based on Parsons' social action theory,it attempts to propose the objectives,concepts and main dimension framework of the comprehensive evaluation of university administrations.to improve the effectiveness of evaluation.On this basis,all the secondary dimensional factors,decomposed by the main dimensions of evaluation,are introduced.The introduction of DAMATEL method is to optimize the leading factors and to determine the key factors in the subset of all secondary dimension-influencing factors.This serves as the basis for establishing a basic indicator system for the comprehensive evaluation of administrative institutions.Through the special report of 124 universities across the country,we grasp the total overview of the comprehensive evaluation of the university administrative institutions in China,combing and analyzing the effectiveness of the evaluation and the key issues involved,which serves as the first-hand data of the research combined with the literature to determine the research topics.Although the research has a general understanding of the content of the short-term evaluation period,the comprehensive evaluation itself is a gradual process from implementation,result formation,feedback perfection,and improvement to re-implementation.Any evaluation design plan requires long-term practice observation and tracking analysis.Further understanding the core process of evaluation,the key details of the whole process,and the true reflection of each group,enhance the cognition of the operational mechanism and the essence of the evaluation,and D University,which is more typical of administrative evaluation,is selected to carry out the evaluation process for its four consecutive years.Through the in-depth case study of D University's four-year administrative organization comprehensive evaluation program,results,feedback,improvement,and effects were compared and analyzed,focusing on the evaluation of the essential elements,key nodes and operational impact.The main goal is to explore useful experiences,key problems and solutions.On this basis,we will enhance the understanding of the nature and regularity of the comprehensive evaluation of university administrative institutions and the substantive understanding of the problems,so as to provide referable experience and ideas for further promotion.By investigating universities and the case analysis of D University,we found that the root of the problem is that the evaluation concept and goal,and the framework of the evaluation deviates from the essence of the problem to be solved.It is especially critical that the key factors affecting the performance of administrative institutions from the perspective of evaluation lack a logical and accurate representation framework.Therefore,it is a key link to find an appropriate basis to construct a logically corresponding evaluation dimension framework that conforms to the principle of evaluation.The structural logic features formed by the action system and unit action in the social action theory are similar to the university administrative institutions and their functional activities.In the theory of social action,Talcott Parsons proposes that in the social system,unit actions composed of several actors and interrelated units constitute social system actions,and the basic components of social system actions are unit actions,which can be deconstructed into actors,goals,situations and norms.Four of the subsystems and their corresponding functions are the basic components and landmark features of social action.Through the comparative analysis of the subsystems(action organisms,personality,society,culture,etc.)and their corresponding functions and action systems,this paper finds that the functional activities of university administrative institutions show similar mechanisms to social actions.With the characteristics,this paper believes that the functional activities of the administrative institutions can be regarded as a kind of social action.By examining the functional activities of university administrative institutions from the perspective of social action,in other words,the university administrative organization is regarded as the action system,but the differentiated level and status subsystem are significantly different,and thus have different functional states,showing different Administrative effectiveness.Based on Parsons' social action theory,the evaluation of university administrative institutions must adhere to the functional orientation of active adaptation,goal achievement,collaborative integration and model maintenance.It should follow the people-oriented,culture-based,systematic review,and improvement-oriented evaluation concepts,and construct the first-level structural indicator framework of the evaluation system consisting of four main dimensions: actors,objectives,situations and norms.All the secondary dimension factors generated by the decomposition of the main dimensions constructed by social theory constitute a complex multi-factor system.In order to enhance the practicality and operability of comprehensive evaluation,the DAMATEL method is introduced to optimize the key factors.Through optimizing all the secondary dimension influence factors,this is,the key influencing factors are obtained.The effectiveness of the optimization scheme is verified by comparison test,which is used as the basis for establishing the basic index system for the comprehensive evaluationThis paper pays much attention to the comprehensive evaluation objectives,concepts and main dimensions of the internal administrative performance of the university,focusing on the relationship among the administrative organization structure,the functional activities of the administrative institutions and the structure and function of the action systems in the social action theory.At the same time,it explores the optimization methods for key factors of complex systems.This paper emphasizes two arguments,how social action theory applies to the comprehensive evaluation of the performance of university administrations,and how the DAMATEL analysis method can optimize and identify key factors.Based on the evaluation of the main dimensions and the basic indicator system,through the comparative analysis.This paper proposes the application models of the three categories of comprehensive evaluation of the internal administrative functions of the university.The first type is a one-dimensional evaluation.The second single-dimensional superposition model evaluation is to retain the single-dimension original feature values,and physically superimpose the results or values of each single-dimensional evaluation to form a discontinuous multi-evaluation model.The third type is multi-dimensional or full-dimensional composite evaluation.The reliability and validity of the one-dimensional evaluation are the highest compared with the multi-dimensional comprehensive evaluation.Along with the increase of the evaluation dimension,the reliability and validity of the comprehensive evaluation will gradually decrease.The social action theory and the DAMATEL method are the two core theories and methods in this paper.They are in two independent research stages and there is no logical correlation between the two.Even if a method has reliability problems,it will not have joint effect on the other method.In the paper,attention is paid to the compatibility among the applied theory and method,the unity between the research units,and as always,the paper has also paid attention to the overall logic,and adjusted and corrected the logical conflicts between the internal units.It should be addressed that the determination of the logical framework of the evaluation dimension is only the starting point of the evaluation.The follow-up also involves the classification of qualitative and quantitative factors,the weight distribution of quantitative factors,the choice of qualitative evaluation methods,and the mean of data acquisition,feedback and application and so on.This paper only discusses the core part of comprehensive evaluation.