Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Hypothesis of Human Nature of Administrators

摘要

Public administration theories and administrative reform measures always involves the question of how to determine the human nature of administrators and this question is among the original ones when discussing the nature of administrators. Representative views of scholar domestic and abroad on this question concerns nothing more than two categories of hypotheses of human nature of administrators: one is economic person and the other public person, and these two hypotheses are contrary to each other. How should we treat this dichotomy? How should the human nature of administrators be selected or presumed? To answer these questions, this paper argues that five issues has to be resolved: first, the difference between economic person and economic person trend; second, the universality and finiteness of economic person; third, the design of human nature of the administrators as public man; fourth, the merits of economic person and public person; fifth, the certainty and uncertainty of the hypothesis of administrators. Actually, the boundary between the two hypotheses, i.e. economic person and public person is ambiguous and it is not necessary to tell which one is better. Due to the limitations of these two hypotheses when used in research or practice, deconstruction of them is needed. In the perspective of methodology, this dichotomy is to a large extent imputable to the anachronistic linear thinking pattern rather than the nonlinear thinking pattern and can hardly justifies itself when confronted with complicated issues. This paper contends that it may well be more complete and practical and more conducive to deepening the research in relevant areas and tackling practical problems effectively when the human nature of administrators is hypothesized as social person, and the introduction of the concept of social person into the area of administration also can avoid the quandary facing with the dichotomy through the way of linear thinking.