The Study of Public Administration in Korea: The Executive-Centered Approach to Public Administration and Its Legacy

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine if, and how, the executive-centered approach to public administration, which emphasized public administrators' unwavering loyalty to the president, intellectually shaped the founding and growth of Korean mainstream public administration in the 1962-1987 period. Specifically, this dissertation identifies the four normative tenets underlying the executive-centered approach and conducts comprehensive qualitative content analysis of mainstream scholars' journal articles and book chapters to investigate if, and how, such normative tenets framed the intellectual trajectory of Korean mainstream public administration in the 1962-1987 period.

The major findings of this dissertation indicate that: 1) Korean public administration was intellectually founded upon the four tenets of the executive-centered approach and such tenets became fully entrenched as unassailable normative beliefs in Korean mainstream public administration scholarship in the 1962-1987 period and 2) Korean mainstream public administration scholars' strong commitment to the executive-centered approach led them to uphold executive-centered governing order, in which the president exercised exclusive control of public administrators, and to champion the authoritarian developmental state, in which the authoritarian president pushed administrators into controlling civil society and market in line with his political and policy agenda, in the 1962-1987 period.

This dissertation also contends that in the post-1987 period, the advent of the new governing order of separation of powers created an intellectual dilemma for Korean public administration scholars because their blind adherence to the executive-centered approach, which stressed administrators' exclusive responsiveness to the president, came into essential tension with the new governing order of separation of powers, in which administrators were required to be simultaneously responsive to not only the president, but also the legislative and judicial branches.