2006, Vol.16, No.4

Korean Society and Public Administration 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.89

pISSN : 1225-8652
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kspa

This paper analyses the relation between minister and senior civil servants in Korea, using a case study on the policy of Government Research Institute(GRI case) in the Ministry of Science and Technology of Kim Dae Jung's government. Based on the two assumptions that Parliamentary and Presidential systems have a different understanding on the relation between politics and administration, and also that the Korean system shows a mixed feature of the two systems, this study analyses the GRI case from the viewpoint of ministerial responsibility and bureaucratic autonomy, which are useful notions in comparing the two systems. The GRI case shows a dramatic, reverse change of policy in just one term of a government and a great part of the policy change can be explained by the change of ministers, implying minister's dominance on the civil servants. Regarding theoretical implications, two points are discussed: firstly, the need to assure ministerial responsibility in policy making and secondly, the importance of bureaucratic autonomy to defend rational decision making. The minister's task is to control bureaucratic resistance to reform measures in order to manage administration more efficiently. The civil servants need to develop policy network to win external advocates in terms of expertness and rationality.

This article aims to analyse empirically the criteria of administrative reorganization focusing on the reorganization of National Institute of Toxicological Research(NITR) in the perspective of the competing values approach. For the NITR' role, even though the increase of the hazardous materials in drugs and foods, it still remains the gap between administrative capacities. The increasing demands on the NITR are as follows. Besides toxicological research and assessment on the safety and efficacy of foods and drugs, the NITR needs to devote much effort on the biotechnology research on the safety of genetically-modified food, gene therapy, and on the development of transgenic animals, in step with the world's research and development in biotechnology. The NITR also has to contribute to the public health by assuring the safety of foods and drugs through the establishment of the nationally suitable toxicological management on the hazardous materials in foods and drugs. In conclusion, this article presents the priority of the administrative reorganization criteria. First, it analyzes the administrative environments of the NITR, and reviews organizational goals and strategies of it. Second, it reviews polity governance of the NITR. Third, it reviews organizational governance of the NITR and the related government agencies. Fourth, it looks at the benchmarking cases through comparative study. Fifth, it analyze questionnaires about the diagnoses and the development plans of the NITR from Toxicology-Professionals. Sixth, based on these analyses, it suggests the functional and organizational development plans of the NITR for the future.

In this study, the reception of administrative innovation policy and programs from local government officials is reconstructed based on qualitative analysis of grounded theory. From 131 responds on the open ended question on innovation policy, key concepts are collected and categorized into 15 attributes and 10 categories following paradigms of grounded theory. As a result, the common phenomena among the low ranking officials are found to be either insensitivity with innovation drive and/or frustration over inflexible hierarchical system. Consequently, one possible strategy for innovation in local government can be more flexibility to administrative process and hierarchical office culture, and provision of motivational factors.