New Public Management Theory And The Comparison Of The Traditional Public Administration Theory Research

The traditional public administration theory (also called bureaucratic administration theory) which is acknowledged by the academic circles consists of "the dichotomy of Politics and Administration", "bureaucracy theory and scientific management theory". These three theories constitute the traditional public administration paradigm, namely the Wilson-Weber-Taylor paradigm. Afterwards, with the complement from Mayo in Human Relations School, Gulick in Management Process School and Simen in Organizational Behavior School, the traditional bureaucracy administration theory has formed a much better logical system. The emphasis of the traditional public administration theory is efficiency for pursuing tool rationality under the precondition of the separation between politics and administration, and then fulfills the political value rationality. The bureaucratic administration theory satisfied the needs of transformation from traditional agriculture society to modern industrial society in western countries. Along with the transition from liberal capitalism to monopoly capitalism, the centralization of production and capital as well as the expansion of organization, the function of government also grow and become more and more complicated. Under the guidance of bureaucratic theory, western countries adopted such administrative model and made great accomplishments. On the basis of legal authority, the bureaucratic theory which proposed by Weber actually expressed a kind of "idealism", which can not be realized and even has negative elements. Churchill criticized it as the worst organization theory. However, this theory is still not old-fashioned even now and it is the only one applicable theory. How to complement and perfect the theory is crucial to the development of public administration around the world.As the era of post-industrial which features informatization and globalization is coming, many countries overused the bureaucratic theory for standardization, stabilization and precision which revealed some deficiencies. After the WWⅡ, under the guidance of Keynes'interventionism, the financial-crisis-stricken western countries established the so-called omnipotent govemment which severely impaired the function of market. Thus, the size of government organization expanded wildly and the efficiency went further down, even leading to serious deficit. The phenomenon of government failure made the bureaucratic theory get into difficulties. The efficiency-oriented bureaucratic theory now becomes a synonym for inefficient, bloated organization structure and concentration of power but anti-democracy. Faced with this situation, western countries launched a campaign called new public management movement. Under the customer-oriented and result-oriented principle, this movement aimed at retrieving the function of market so as to help the government out of the dilemma. This movement produced a marked effect to some extent and attracted attention from some scholars. To discuss the relation between new public administration theory and traditional public administration theory from the perspective of paradigm is one of the researches of this kind. About this discussion, scholars hold different views. This paper will continue to discuss this question beginning from Kuhn's paradigm theory. Through the comparison between traditional public administration theory and new public administration theory, I concluded that new public administration theory cannot be viewed as a paradigm, also cannot replace the position of bureaucratic administration paradigm. It is just a complement to the bureaucratic administration paradigm under the paradigm of traditional public administration theory.China is now at a transitional period from traditional agricultural society to a modern industrial one. Compared with those western developed countries, China lags behind a little, and at the same time, she is confronted with the challenge from informationization and globalization. Through the investigation on western new public management movement combined with the reality of Chinese public management, some spirit of new public management movement has to some extend been reflected in the course of our Reform and Opening-up. Bureaucracy hereditary system has been long and deeply rooted in China. But, based on traditional administrative power, Chinese native bureaucracy is characterized by the feature of rule-by-man and irrationality. The only way to the realization of rule-by-law of Chinese public management is the trend from irrationality to rationality via the modification of Weber's theory of rational bureaucracy to Chinese traditional bureaucracy. However, in order to catch up with the development of informationization and globalization and overcome the abuse of Weber's bureaucracy, we need also to take into consideration our social, political and economical details, balance the govemment, society and market properly, borrow the beneficial achievements of new public management movement and improve and complement the bureaucratic administrative mode, so as to ensure a better development of Chinese administrative management.