시민사회론과 행정학: 행정학적 시민사회론의 모색 = Civil Society: Implications for Public Administration

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Compared with other social science disciplines such as political science and sociology, public administration is relatively a late-comer in the growing literature on civil society. This paper probes theoretical and methodological implications of civil society for public administration with a view to developing an effective research strategy and a distinct research agenda that public administration scholars can utilize in their study of civil society. The paper first assesses the existing works on civil society in political science and sociology according to a binary classificatory scheme, i.e., civil society as a dependent variable vs. civil society as an independent variable. Then, it turns to public administration and summarizes the existing research on civil society as 1) conceptual and theoretical reviews ; 2) investigations that place civil society as either a dependent or an independent variable, which therefore are in essence similar to the existing political science and sociological works on civil society ; and 3) various “new governance” studies that place government-civil society relations as a dependent variable and focus on public-private partnership and collaboration. The central argument of this paper is that public administration experts should strategically focus on conceptualizing, theorizing, and analyzing diverse types of government-civil society relations and various forms of governance arrangements involving multisectoral actors, processes, and institutions. This paper also briefly discusses how the study of civil society can stimulate, transform, redefine, and reinvigorate various subfields of public administration, such as comparative administration and policy, historical institutionalism, international administration, and organizational studies. The paper concludes with some reflections on how and why public administration specialists, relative to other social scientists, can make more distinct and significant conceptual and theoretical contributions to the rapidly-expanding literature of civil society.