公共行政学研究方法：问题与反思

公共行政学有三种研究取向:解释性、诠释性以及批判性研究,其中实证主义在公共行政学领域曾一度占据着主导地位。一些西方学者以实证主义的有效性标准来评估公共行政学的研究现状,另一些学者则对此展开了批判与质疑,他们认为不同的研究取向都有其自身的价值,不能用主流社会科学的衡量标准来评估诠释性研究与批判性研究,并由此引发了对西方公共行政学研究现状的反思。中国公共行政学研究在方法上也存在一些问题——理论脱离实际倾向严重;基本的公共行政学学术规范还没有建立起来,研究方法极不严谨,研究质量存在严重的问题;对定性研究存在认识上的误区;等等。在比较分析的基础上提出改善中国公共行政学研究状况的对策思考,尤其强调要注意区分公共行政学研究在不同国家所处的阶段不同。

The Research Method of Public Administration: Question and Reflection

There are three kinds of research orientations in Public Administration: the positivism research,the interpretation research as well as the criticism research,in which positivism once occupied the dominant position. Some western scholars appraised the present research situation of Public Administration by the positivism standards,and then some other scholars launched the critiques because they thought that all different research orientations had their own values and we could not use the mainstream standards of social science to appraise the interpretation research and criticism research, which had initiated to the present research situation of western Public Administration. The research methods of Chinese Public Administration have such problems as the serious tendency of theory divorcing from practice,the non-rigorous research method and the low research quality. The paper proposes some countermeasures to improve Chinese Public Administration research on the basic of comparative analysis, emphasizing that we must pay more attention to different developing stages of Chinese and Western Public Administration.