2011, Vol.22, No.1

Korean Society and Public Administration 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 2.38

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

Facing the changes in the macro environments, the Rho Tae-Woo administration had to do very difficult works at its onset. It had to retrench government organizations in some areas, but increase in others. However, the end results were no more than the bigger government than before and, curiously, the revamps came in 1989 and 1990 not 1988, the first year of the government. Specifically, only a few changes happened in 1989 and most revamps came in 1990. Even if these results can be explained from many viewpoints, this paper seeks the causes in macro-level environments, meso-level institutional contexts, and micro-level actors. It seems that the Rho administration intentionally didn't revamp the government organization in 1988 to avoid the dominant influences of the outgoing Chun administration. At the same time, it couldn’t find opportunities to revise the Government Organization Act because of the political situation in which the opposition parties tried to cleanse all the alleged problems of the former administration. In 1989, it had no choice but to revise the act by adding only a few trivial items to the bills that the opposition parties had proposed. They had to meet the strong demands of the opposition parties to a significant degree for its minority position in the national assembly and in order to pass other unsettled but crucial bills on political money, election, labor relations, and the public use of lands. In 1990, despite its super majority position in the national assembly, the Roh administration failed again to reform the government appropriately. The resistances of the interested forces and core actors’ weak will acted together to make the retrenchments of the government organizations impossible. Overall the reforms resulted in the increase of the government organizations.

Social conflicts have become increasingly pervasive in our daily lives and interactions, and have huge impacts on the socio-economic and political landscape. Lately, the level and magnitude of conflicts between government and the civil society has escalated as government policies are often associated with diverse interests. The Korean government is no exception. The Korean government’s conflict management capability is challenged for its inattention to social conflict issues, absence of effective conflict management, and lack of conflict management experts and educational programs. Above all, the significance of conflict management education and training for government officials has been by and large neglected by the government. Accordingly, little studies have examined the effectiveness of conflict management education and training for government officials. This lack of research may lead to a policy vacuum in this area. In this milieu, the Korea Institute of Public Administration has run a number of courses in the field of negotiation, mediation, and conflict management, commissioned by the prime minister’s office, in order to strengthen public officials’ conflict management capacity. This study is to probe what factors influence the effectiveness of the KIPA’s conflict management education programs and to draw policy implications for the future education for conflict management.

This study aims to find the best way to apply job analysis to performance evaluation, with focus on the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology(MEST) . The job ranking and weighting of each department is based on a degree of perception on job importance, difficulty, expertise and scale of MEST's officials. This study presents a practical methodology that can be utilized as a switching element for organizational performance management. The connotations of this study are as follows. First, the method of job analysis can be used in case of ministries where it is difficult to apply the AHP method in organizations such as MEST with numerous departments. Second, the job recognition and involvement of public officials can be changed positively if job analysis is connected with performance evaluation. Third, this study can contribute rationally to the development of organization or personnel of ministries as MEST. Finally, this study is limited by the specific weakness of the perception survey on public officials who are likely to be exposed to the tendency of leniency, secrecy, departmentalism, etc. Therefore, further research in this area is needed.