Exploring Of Holistic Government Theory

With the deepening of administrative reform, a new round of government restructuring was launched in 2008 and has been promoted swiftly both by central and local government since then. While the practice of government reshuffle is being in progress, people are focusing on the government reshuffle from the theoretical perspective, discussing its definition, framework and mechanism. Some new concepts emerged from the western practice and theory of government restructuring, such as "joint-up government", "holistic government", "holistic governance", "governing by network", have been introduced to China and become the focal point of the academic circles. By and large, the current introduction of these concepts and theories is dispersive. Some people maintain that "holistic government" will be the new paradigm of public administration while some people argue that whether such a kind of dispersive concept can be a new theory is still uncertain. In addition, some people even ask "what on earth is it?"Based on the existing literature, this thesis sets up an analytical framework of competition-cooperation in order to analyze the theory of "holistic government". This thesis maintains that from the perspective of value proposition, basic hypotheses and means of functioning of the competition-cooperation in the paradigm of public administration, the characteristics of "traditional bureaucracy","new public management" and "holistic government" are as follows respectively:(1)Traditional bureaucracy:It prefers mechanical cooperation and facilitates the cooperation among different governments, different government agencies and different staffs by means of hierarchical control and control regulations. It argues that it is the single and most efficient way to achieve cooperation.(2)New public management:It aims to construct the competitive market within public sectors, construct competitive relations between public sectors and private sectors and make the best of competition among private sectors for the sake of boosting the efficiency of public administration. (3)Holistic government:It argues that it is due to the overemphasis of competition of "new public management" that gives rise to the balkanization of sectors and fragmentation of governments and proposes the orderly and reasonable competition, multiform integration and coordination and the working mechanism of trans-sectors cooperation. As we can see from the analytical framework of competition-cooperation, the theory of "holistic government" has the value of paradigm innovation.The theory of "holistic government" has different characteristics with traditional paradigm of public administration in the aspect of practical needs and theory content. In terms of practical needs, it asserts that it is helpless to deal with knotty problems for the balkanization and competition; In terms of contents, the theory of "holistic government" has gained innovation and development on the basis of organization sociology. Either on the definition of type of organizations,on the research of relations of organizations, or on the innovation of mechanism of coordination and integration, the theory of "holistic government" has its own system. It considers the holistic value as the most basic value, transfers the traditional division by means of integrated organizations, encourages and advocates a kind of new way which is trans-sectors cooperation.With regard to the practical value, the current reform of Super-Ministry System is carried out mainly in the forms of structural amalgamation and boundary demarcation. As a result, it confronts the clash between "integration" and "disjunction". It only depends on the means of internalization to resolve problems. Besides, the coordination among organizations demonstrates the characteristics of high complexity and high costs. So the Super-Ministry System needs to be further perfected both on its content and its means. Either "one dragon manages the flood",or "nine dragons manage the flood", it unavoidably confronts the potential risks of inefficiency. No matter how the boundary to be divided, it is indispensable to promote the trans-sectors coordination and integration.