A Prologue to a Survey of the Study of Public Administration in Korea

Abstract

Until a few years ago, it seemed that most of the Korean scholars and practitioners of public administration were busily consuming numerous brands of ready-made foreign ideas of public administration. These days, some scholars are engaged in building their own factory of ideas. In order to build a foundation for the factory of "indigenous" ideas and theories of public administration, several authors have contributed to an evaluation of the development of Korean public administration. Yet, these reviews and evaluations tend to lean heavily toward describing a history of social backgrounds and conditions of the development or dissemination of the ideas of public administration in Korea. Without unduly minimizing the relevance and importance of carefully reflecting upon the past, of describing the present, and of perspecting the future roles and status of the discipline in Korea, we suggest that the development of the discipline should also be reviewed from an analytical perspective. A survey of an academic discipline in its theoretical aspects is necessarily a philosophical analysis, because various frameworks themselves used in a discipline are subject to analysis. This is an essay aimed at drawing an outline for a philosophical analysis of the study of public administration in Korea. It is assumed that a theory or an approach used in a discipline cannot be a good tool for analyzing the discipline itself. In other words, a survey of the study of public administration in Korea must be attempted from a perspective that is different from those used in the study itself. Author intends to apply the perspective of history of scientific development. It should be stressed that this is only one of many possible perspectives.