Public Administration In The View Of Civilization: A Tendency Of Politics

The main task of the thesis is to establish a view of cultural hermeneutics about public administration, and, from this view, to explore the tendency of politics with regard to public administration as social governance. Public administration has been perplexed by the question of legitimacy for a long time. To trace to its source, it is about two meta-questions, i.e., what is it to be, what is it to do. In a sense, the major schools in administration history have directly or indirectly tried to answer these two questions. Thereby, the subject about identification- construction and meaning-pursuit is the elementary mission of theory study. This thesis is just impelled by the mission. In this subject, cultural hermeneutics is the methodology, and tendency of politics is the content. Hermeneutics is to reveal and to explain. Through cultural hermeneutics, we can re-consider public administration and its theories, and find some covered logic. As for tendency of politics, we will discover its political pursuit and potential tendency in future from public administration as social governance. In this subject, we realized that administration was politics in action, while theory of public administration could also be considered as political theory. Before our examination, we discovered from social reality that the theory construction of public administration was confronted with historical dilemma (the relationship between government and society) and intellectual dilemma (the relationship of politics and administration). As influenced by dualism and secessionism, the traditional model of administrative knowledge never got out of the dual dilemmas. Therefore, it was a useful attempt to explore public administration from a total vision of civilization. Then, used concept, action and social structure, we established three layers about cultural hermeneutics of public administration, and studied public administration from its happening but not from its origin or etymology. After the method was defined, we studied the theory archetype of Wilson and Weber as a beginning, and revealed their attempt of disenchantment in public administration. The former tried to make administration to be an independent realm without political interference through the distinction between politics and administration, while the latter made an effort to establish an ideal model of bureaucracy as a rational machine between government and society. Their theory suggested an attempt of dis-politicalization. In later century, public administration was first influenced by behaviorism and post-behaviorism, and then impacted by anti-statism and post-modernism. Owe to the influence of secessionism, the theory construction could not form any effective explanatory system or practical design, and controversy began from dis-politicalization to re-politicalization then to anti-politicalization. In this course, theories gradually adjusted themselves and the reform began to resort to a form of non-political assumption. The non-political tendency would bring a challenge to the development of public administration and politics. With the challenge, in order to accomplish the logical reconstruction of politics and administration, this thesis used cultural hermeneutics again to explore public sphere in cultural field. Finally, in two dimensions, of history and of space, we extend to discover the intellectual spectrum of public administration as a form of social governance, and reveal the possible tendency of public administration in future under the influence of non-political. Chapter one was about the definition of method. To avoid the traditional secessionism and the dilemmas of public administration, we chose cultural hermeneutics as our method, and considered civilization to be shaped by concept, action and social structure, public administration to be cultural compound. Chapter two explored Wilson's policy-administration dichotomy and Weber's theory of ideal bureaucracy. To avoid misunderstanding their theories, we firstly distinguished between the theorists' v...