抄録
There is a general agreement that a group of studies is not recognized as an established discipline until they share a particular purpose, a specific territory, an original method and a systematic theory. Unfortunately, the studies in which our Society members have been engaged do not fully satisfy all of those conditions. The definition of the study of educational administration should not be educational research by the method for the study of public administration, but academic research on educational administration. In other words, the term only specifies the scope of interests and does not mention the method to be taken. In this respect, the science of educational administration differs from some other educational sciences such as educational philosophy, history, psychology, or sociology. Thus a research is identified as a study of educational administration mainly by its topic. However, its territory does not have definite borders, partly because the nature of administration has been increasing complexity and overlapping with legislation and judiciary. That is also because educational administration, which used to refer only to running of public schools, has come to cover issues of private educational enterprises and people's out-of-school educational activities, and accordingly has closely been intertwining with other fields of administration, turning into comprehensive nature. In actual fact, research interests of the Society members expressed in their publications have extended over to educational finance, school management, policy-making or legislation relating to education and court cases concerning educational activities. These facts imply that the scope of educational administration should be interpreted as a broad coverage including these issues. In the meantime, there is no original method for the study of educational administration, and therefore the approach to be made may depend upon the aspect in which a researcher considers multitudinous interrelationship between education and administration. Accordingly, Society members have naturally applied a variety of approaches or Methods. As a result, some output can hardly distinguish educational administration studies from those in neighboring territories. An academic achievement stands good even if it cannot find out a branch of sciences to join. When a dispute arises over which discipline it should fall in, it would be better to leave the researcher's intention to categorize his/her work. While any approach should be acceptable only if the output is beneficial to educational administration, fears are entertained that too much diversity of approaches or methods among the members' individual studies might make them lose identity and consequently spoil the integration of Society. Then, the perception shared by the members on the purposes of their studies, which include effective training of educational administrators or improvement in the educational administration, will hopefully support the unity of Society. At the same time, the Society should promote frequent and fruitful intercommunication with neighboring academic societies.
