2009, Vol.20, No.3

Korean Society and Public Administration 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.89

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

The theory of meaning in public administration helps decide what we have to study, that is, what constitutes the boundary of public administration. The main-stream public adminstration from Wilson to Simon which was built upon the philosophical foundation of positivism, logical positivism in particular, has been established on the basis of a particular linguistic theory of meaning, that is, the meaning theory of scientific language. However, ever since New Public Administration challenged the main-stream public administration in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, until today, a new kind of public administration associated with subjectivistic philosophies such as phenomenology, critical philosophy and hermeneutics has failed to clearly define what its research object is and how it really differs from the main-stream public administration. The purpose of this essay is to clearly show the difference in the theory of meaning between the scientific language which the main-stream public administration adopts and the ordinary language with which the new kind of public administration takes side. In addition, this essay will try to suggest where we should look forwad for the reconstruction of public administration.

This paper explores the context of politics-administration relations in Korean political system. To identify key issues associated with the relationship between politics and administration, this study has examined the characteristics of diverse models of political-administrative relations. Five issues are identified. Those are the principle of political supremacy and the problem of control, the problems of partisan neutrality and policy neutrality, political interference in public personnel administration. job security of bureaucrats, and the problem of bureaucracy and democracy. Korean bureaucracy has changed from 'autonomous administrators model' to 'responsive administrators model' after democratization of 1990s. As the need for more responsiveness increases, the bases of policy neutrality and autonomy of bureaucrats have been withered. To improve the performance and accountability of bureaucracy in a democratic government, neutral competence of professional staff agencies should be recognized, immoderate political interference should be refrained, and the term of office must be observed. To sum up, Korean political system should seek new balance between politics and administration to resolve the bureaucracy problem in a democratic society.

This paper aims to analyse the validity and reliability of National Competitiveness Indices which are composite indicators ranking countries according to selected criteria and measures of national competitive powers. For this, it assesses the best-known indices, The Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum and The World Competitiveness Report of the IMD, and finds deficiencies at several levels. Its definitions are too broad, the approach biased and the methodology flawed. Many qualitative measures are vague, redundant or wrong. In particular, the extensive use of local executive responses, with many questions posed in an unclear manner, raises too many doubts to allow the data to be used to rank countries in the way the two organisations do. The impressive pyramids of rankings and policy conclusions reached by WEF and IMD rests ultimately on a small, inadequate and often suspect base. These weak theoretical and empirical foundations reduce the value of the indices for analytical or policy purposes. To be analytically acceptable, the two indices should be more limited in coverage, focusing on particular sectors rather than economies as a whole, and using a smaller number of critical variables rather than pulling in everything the economics, management, and other disciplines suggest.