Herbert Kaufman

Emerging Conflicts in the Doctrines of Public Administration.

As a self-conscious discipline among the cluster of specialties or “fields†encompassed by political science, public administration came late and grew fast. Its recent arrival and rapid growth sometimes obscure the fact that its origins are to be found in a process of experimentation with governmental structure that long preceded the appearance of public administration as a subject of systematic study and is likely to continue as long as the nation exists. This process of experimentation goes on vigorously today, and the development of new forms is generating discord more profound and far-reaching than any that has ever hitherto divided students of public administration. It is with the sources and significance of that discord that this paper is concerned. The central thesis of this paper is that an examination of the administrative institutions of this country suggests that they have been organized and operated in pursuit successively of three values, here designated representativeness, neutral competence, and executive leadership.

FEAR OF BUREAUCRACY: A RAGING PANDEMIC*

Bureaucracy is nothing new. Although the French term for it apparently did not gain currency until the nineteenth century, the phenomenon itself seems to have existed for a long time-in ancient China, in the Roman Empire, in the Church, in the Ottoman Empire, and in the kingdoms of Europe from the time they emerged from the Middle Ages, for example. It has been especially luxuriant, however, in modern industrial states, whatever their political complexions-not only in governments, but in the large-scale organizations of every kind that the industrial system seems to spawn. Although bureaucracy is not a product of industrialism exclusively, industrialism has been particularly hospitable to it. Chances are bureaucracy was never popular, wherever and whenever it occurred. But it seems to me to have come under exceptionally heavy fire recently, particularly in the United States. You find hardly any academic treatments of it in America before 1930, and not many between 1930 and 1940. They became much more common after World War II, however, and now scarcely a year goes by without publication of another treatise on the subject. And in the popular press, of course, reporters, columnists, and editors pour out a steady stream of complaints and exposes. Antibureaucratic sentiment has taken hold like an epidemic. More and more people are apparently convinced that bureaucracy is whirling out of control and are both infuriated and terrified by the prospect. Yet for all the hostility towards it, the character of its threat is hard to pin down.

Organization Theory and Political Theory

If two men of similar talents, identical training, shared values, and common interests were to study the same phenomena it would not be at all remarkable if they approached the phenomena in the same way, described them in the same terms, employed the same logic in analyzing them, drew the same conclusions from them, and formulated the same theories about their causes. If, however, two men of similar talents but of rather divergent training, professing differing objectives, and displaying varied (perhaps even conflicting) concerns were to pursue studies of phenomena each believed to be quite distinct from the others field of inquiry, it would be most astounding if their findings and inferences should turn out to be closely parallel in many important respects, particularly if there were little evidence of communication between them.

Continuity and disruption : essays in public administration

Through thoughtful essays linking historical concepts and practices, current issues, and modern research, Matthew Holden argues that administration is indispensable to politics. Essentially, public administration consists of making decisions about information, money, and force - the three crucial sources of power. Politics and administration cannot be separated, and no political system can be sustained when its administrative core collapses. In Holdens view of administration, a crucial problem is turbulence: the presence of simultaneous pressures toward continuity and toward disruption. Holden examines turbulence in the intellectual history of administration as reflected in traditional political theory and in specific contemporary theories of organization, bureaucracy, and management. He also analyzes political dogmas as a form of control over turbulence, considering such concepts as executive leadership and the emergence of administrative law. He turns an unblinking eye on the practice of public administration today, buffeted by changes in technology and ethnic diversity.

The Morphology of Organizations.

Organization structures are generally assumed to take on the shape of a pyramid. To see whether this assumption is valid, an index of organization shape was devised and applied to 25 agencies of the federal government and four county health departments. Line personnel and the chiefs of line units did indeed form the familiar pyramidal pattern, but staff personnel and the chiefs of staff units formed inverse pyramids, while total personnel fell into a wide variety of patterns, none of which could reasonably be called pyramids. Shape did not correlate with organization age, size, mission, expenditures, expenditures per employee, or any combination of these factors. A possible conclusion is that line structures are governed by commonly assumed imperatives of span of control and convenience of communication, but staff people are distributed to organizational levels on the basis of organizational politics. If this is so, the distribution of personnel among administrative levels may indicate the locus of power in organizations.

Ruminations on the Study of American Public Bureaucracies

Public bureaucracies warrant the attention of political scientists because bureaucrats help determine the contents and effectiveness of public policies. Although the relationships between them and the other participants in public policy making can theoretically range from bureaucratic dominance, or at least autonomy, to passive bureaucratic subservience, most political scientists tend to treat American bureaucrats as significant but not commanding partners in the interplay of checks and balances in the political process. Understanding their roles in this process, however, is beset by ambiguities about when and to what extent their behavior is controlled or controlling. These uncertainties, plus incessant changes in their roles, may mean that we cannot hope for universal, long-enduring generalizations about their place in the polity. Consequently, to fully understand our political system, we must continuously observe, analyze, and reassess the influence they exert and the influences on them.