The Inspiration Of Postmodern Management For Higher Education Management

At present, Higher Education Management is still a subject which has a large space to explore further. Nowadays, the market economy develops rapidly and the cultural value becomes gradually diversified. Under such a background, due to the failure of satisfying the theories concerned Higher Education Management to the guidance for the practice, numerous problems in reality has aroused.The introduction of the thesis includes a discussion on the reasons for these problems and the statue quos of recent researches, as well as a brief illustration for this writing. The study about educational management based on logical positivism, exploring what it is and how to do, pursuing scientific and rationalization, paying attention to the research of issue, following positivism researching line, emphasizing the importance of scientific method, aimed at building scientific theory. According to the principle of Occam's Razor, on the one hand, modern educational management theory improves efficiency, on the other hand, it brings crisis. The thesis aims at putting forward thinking mode which is different from modernism.The first chapter is an outline for the postmodern management view. Postmodern management view is a reformative theory on management based on the postmodern philosophy. While bringing great material achievement, modernization also takes a great number of disadvantages—since the 20th century particularly, the driving force of the productivity to the society has produced great cultural shock. Irrationality, negativity, non-centrality, anti-legitimacy, uncertainty and pluralism are the key words of postmodernism, which aims to break people's belief on science through the reflections and criticisms on modernism. Although western management theory has been grouped into the category of science passed through a series of stages, such as scientific management, behavior science and modern management, its overemphasis on rationality has aroused questioning on modern management theory from numbers of administration scholars. Under such a background, postmodern management view gradually attracts more and more attentions, with irrationality, pluralism, marginalization, suspicion and criticism as typical characteristics.The second chapter talks about the problems existing in the current higher education management and makes an analysis on the reasons of their appearance. It analyze the status quo of current higher education management and its problems, such as the emphasis on bureaucratic administration and ignorance on humanization in the management structure, the emphasis on objects and ignorance on subjects in management objects, the emphasis on scientific rational and ignorance on human values in management goals, as well as the emphasis on uniformization and ignorance on diversification in management mode. The reasons lie in three aspects. Firstly, most of the organizations on higher education, which are established in modern era, take on a strong political and ethnic sense. Secondly, the mode of higher education management in China is an imitation of that in Soviet Union to some extent. Thus, the culture of official rank standard has lead to the administrative tendency in the higher education management. Thirdly, with the development of market economy, the adjustment of higher education management organization and the matching-up failure of legal construction lead to the hysteretic nature of the higher education management.The third chapter discusses the measures on improving the higher education management from the perspective of postmodern theory. At first, changing the concept of educational organization. A structural transition in education organization from plane to multilayer should be realized to seek for a multi-culture. Secondly, surveying the purpose of higher educational management. we should pay great attention on the subjectivity of the education organization, i.e. we should focus on the person in the organization and take the arousing of their enthusiasm as a priority. Thirdly, the quality of fact and value should be put equal importance in the education management which requires a progress from close to opening. The last but not the least, a diversified mode of education management should be pay attention to school-based management and group decision.As a mode of thinking different from modernism, postmodernism is able to help us to probe into the problems existing in the current higher education management and provide referential measures and means. Furthermore, since postmodernism is not completely opposite to the modernism, we should apply it according to the actual circumstance in the course of higher education management.