National Art: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Administration: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Administration

Author: Hu De
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-02-01
Features: Based on the theory of group culture and combined with historical analysis, the author examines public administration from the perspective of cultural rhetoric. The author argues that as an analytical approach for creatively thinking about possible organizational forms, cultural theory analysis can offer valuable insights for the art of the state in exploring the diversity of concepts surrounding "what to do" in the public sector and government. In this book, the author uses grid/group culture theory to analyze the central themes of public administration, including exploring the basic types of control and regulation, decomposing persuasive arguments in management, and discussing the types of failures in public administration. Specifically, the author presents seven arguments in this book: (1) Grid/group culture theory summarizes most of the arguments in public administration, providing a broad analytical framework that integrates diverse knowledge about organizations; (2) Applying the cultural theory framework can clarify many core analytical issues in public administration; (3) Historically, the ideas about how to organize government and public services correspond one-to-one with the four types in cultural theory; (4) Each scheme has inherent weaknesses and can lead to negative outcomes or even counterproductive effects; (5) The author believes that global public administration has the potential to converge through a simple and stable path, but this claim has significant limitations; (6) The perspective established by cultural theory enables the analysis of organizational diversity to be conducted at multiple levels, exploring different manifestations and hybrids; (7) Understanding cultural and organizational diversity from a historical perspective places public administration research at the center, without this perspective, it is impossible to grasp the diversity of the concept of "good management," fully recognize the diversity of organizational types, or understand the typical patterns in which each model tends to collapse or self-destruct. The entire book is structured and argued around these seven points (premises), divided into three parts and ten chapters. The author is a renowned scholar from the UK and is currently a professor in the Department of International Relations and Politics at the University of Oxford, representing one of the key figures in the field of public administration in the English-speaking world.