Alan I. Marcus

`Would you like fries with that, Sir?' The evolution of management theories and the rise and fall of total quality management within the American federal government:

Abstract This article examines the introduction, domination, and diminution of Total Quality Management (TQM) and its allied managerial strategies in the United States federal bureaucracy over the past two decades. It makes a distinction between its use in the later 1980s and early 1990s to spur government productivity and its application by Bill Clinton through the National Performance Review to increase American appreciation for federal governance. It traces the creation of the intellectual threads that comprise TQM from the 1920s and shows how Statistical Quality Control, Hawthornism, Freudian psychology, and the Human Potential Movement fused around 1980 to yield what we have come to know as TQM. It argues that TQM was adopted by American business and ultimately the federal bureaucracy as Americans, concerned in the 1970s and early 1980s about what they saw as the Japanese economic boom, created and applied an Americanized version of those methods.

Sweets for the Sweet: Saccharin, Knowledge, and the Contemporary Regulatory Nexus

In 1977, the United States Congress forbade the Food and Drug Administration to outlaw use of the food additive saccharin as an artificial sweetener for a period of three years. Subsequent legislation extended the congressional ban. It remains in effect today. Congresss saccharin action neatly represented late twentieth-century federal regulatory policy. The process had become decidedly antibureaucratic and ultimately democratic. Forces both for saccharins prohibition and for its continued use outlined and debated their positions in public, letting their arguments contend in the marketplace of ideas. Following the conduct of this de facto national plebiscite, duly elected representatives weighed the respective cases and selected the course that their constituents seemed to favor.

Constituents and Constituencies: An Overview of the History of Public Agricultural Research Institutions in America

The nature of American agricultural research has been the subject of an intense debate during the past several decades. Land-grant colleges, agricultural experiment stations, and the United States Department of Agriculture have drawn public ire (Hightower, 1973; Berry, 1977; Friedland and Kappel, 1979; Vogeler, 1981). They also have generated a vigorous defense (McCalla, 1978; Ruttan, 1982; Busch and Lacy, 1983, pp. 167–204). Two questions rest at the heart of the matter. Is publicly funded agricultural research to assist small farmers, agribusiness, and/or consumers, and does it accomplish its mission(s) well? The first query raises a host of political and ethical issues — the fate of rural communities, the role of minorities in agriculture and agricultural research, justification for continued public funding, and the like. The second depends to a great degree on the answer to the first. But it also hinges on the measurement of effectiveness: is effectiveness measured by cost, immediate applications, long-range goals, or in some other way?

The strange career of municipal health initiatives: Cincinnati and city government in the early nineteenth century.

Most historians of medicine and public health agree that the first several decades of the nineteenth century were marked by a flurry of governmental activity that constituted the origins of &dquo;organized public health.&dquo; In particular, they concentrate on the creation of the position of health officer and the formation of local boards of health, asserting that the establishment of these institutions indicated the nascent assumption of responsibility by city governments for preventing disease and promoting health. And while medical and public health historians frequently complain about the inadequacy, ineptitude, or insufficiency of these institutions, or criticize the municipal fathers for not sponsoring more dynamic initiatives in the health field, they nonetheless suggest that the formation of these early nineteenthcentury institutions did lay the foundation for later develop-