Title: A Study on the Perception of Local Public Officials on Expertise: Focused on the Public Officials of the Seoul Metropolitan Government
Abstract: Many scholars have been paid much attention to the expertise of the public working in the public sectors, but most of the attention was focussed on the normative and declaratory perspective of it. Whereas, the endeavors to analyze the concept of expertise has little interested in analyzing and understanding of it from the public officials perspective. This study has to aim to understand the concept of expertise from the public officials perspectives and then to improve the adaptability and acceptance of the concept of expertise in real world. This study also has purpose to provide some useful implication to prepare alternatives that increase the expertise of the public officials. The results of this research show that the public perceive the expertise as having the specialized knowledge on the specific fields and having the intuition as well as the ability of problem-solving. Based on these research results, the public acknowledge the concept of expertise from the broad concept including suchas specialized knowledge on specific fields and the ability of problem-solving, rather than perceiving the concept of expertise from the procedural, cognitive, and even the target of learning perspective. This research result, therefore, provide the direction of the expertise to which public sector has to aim. To increasing the expertise of the public officials, the expertise such as specialized knowledge and the ability of problem-solving should be considered as essential factors in the processes of recruitment, promotion and job positioning. I will expect that this study will be a momentum to do further researches on the expertise of the public officials.