The Demacratic Dilemma Of Bureaucracy And The Difficulty Of Its Postmodern Solution

In the field of contemporary Western public administration theory, criticizing and disputing bureaucracy has merged into a stream of thought. This trend of thought began to take shape from the 1950s and 1960s in 20th century and is becoming more intense. At the end of last century, postmodern public administration has developed quickly and has made the thought more in-depth. Postmodern public administration theory deconstructed bureaucracy from both the way of thinking and behavior framework and declared the "death" of traditional governance form. Bureaucracy is in ugly state under the post-modern consideration, and has the brand of modernity under the nurturance of modernity. Therefore, it naturally has a variety of modern limitations: particularism, scientific thought, technical thought, and enterprise logic and hermeneutics. These limitations make bureaucracy, which should have been the protection of democracy, expose the dead hand of "anti-democratic". Postmodern public administration adheres to the "democratic" stand, uses public energy field instead of the traditional public administration field, language games instead of a single bureaucratic text, many-talk instead of bureaucratic monologues, and strives to realize the ideals of democracy. But its potential is limited. Even so, it is of great importance to public administration especially to the development of the theory of public administration.