Bureaucracy: a Love Story

2005

Public Integrity, 2015

Over the course of three decades and more, hundreds of college and university professors and tens of thousands of undergraduate and M.P.A. students have benefited from reading The Case for Bureaucracy (editions 1983, 1985, 1994 and 2004) as they either embarked upon their formal public administration education or came to this classic in search of greater understanding of their chosen profession in public service. In either case, the high regard in which Charles Goodsell, professor emeritus in the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech, is held is undeniable. I myself made use of each of the prior editions of this classic with good results by way of student reactions in my own teaching over the period from 1971 to 2011; I made use of the book at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and with college students and public service practitioners alike in universities in California, Colorado, Indiana, Idaho and Washington State. His publication of the highly praised Mission Mystique: Belief Systems in Public Agencies research monograph in 2011, featuring six rich and highly insightful case studies of service made public in the name of democracy, set a strong foundation for this book. The New Case for Bureaucracy represents a fifth-and in this reviewer's opinion more balanced-pass at making the positive case for properly appreciating the comparatively high quality of governmental agency performance present in the United States. Goodsell has long argued that the public sector agencies of American federal, state, and local governments are not the hapless, wasteful, demoralized, alienating, and nefarious bad actors so commonly portrayed in much of the academic literature (principally sociology, economics, and political science), and also in much of the popular literature and the mass media. In the prior editions of The Case for Bureaucracy, Goodsell presented his arguments in the form of an outright polemic-that is, a blatantly direct assault on what he perceived as patently false myths and seriously misdirected lines of argument, using admittedly selective forms of empirical and qualitative evidence to bolster his case that the virtues of governmental agency service in the United States tend to be vastly undervalued, and its limited failings tend to be greatly

Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2012

In this article AU :2 , we focus on the stabilizing functions of public bureaux and examine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make them less hierarchical and more 'flexible'. In so doing, we seek to evidence the ways in which what are represented as anachronistic practices in the machinery of government may actually provide political life with particular required 'constituting' qualities. While such practices have been negatively coded by reformers as 'conservative', we hope to show that their very conservatism may serve positive political purposes, not the least of which is in the constitution of what we call 'responsible' (as opposed to simply 'responsive') government. Through a critical interrogation of certain key tropes of contemporary programmes of modernization and reform, we indicate how these programmes are blind to the critical role of bureaucracy in setting the standards that enable governmental institutions to act in a flexible and responsible way.

Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2022

This essay introduces the special symposium issue Reappraising Bureaucracy in the 21st Century in Perspectives on Public Management and Governance. The symposium seeks to place Weberian bureaucracy in the context of contemporary public administration and evaluate its relevance to modern-day concerns.

Journal for the History of Knowledge, 2020

In this introduction we explain the overall approach taken in this special issue. It is the collective result of a working group of historians who focus on very different periods and regions, such as the medieval Latin West, Spanish America, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire. We show, firstly, how bureaucracy has worked as a term of critique and how, in fin-de-siècle Europe, it became an analytical concept used for world-historical comparison with a strong Western bias. Against this background, we then develop our group's new approach to analyzing bureaucratic procedures as knowledge processes, a method we term "bureaucracy as knowledge." This approach builds on the history of science and technology and aims to recover actors' ways of organizing social and material worlds rather than judge them by modernist, Western standards. Third, we discuss if there is such a thing as "bureaucratic knowledge" sui generis and, based on the experience of our authors, suggest ways of studying plural knowledges that cut across different domains. Finally, we argue that historical bureaucracies merit close investigation because they have demonstrated the power to both make and break social and material worlds. The approach proposed in this issue can therefore help make better sense of the dynamics by which bureaucracies exert such power in situations otherwise studied by political, cultural, and social historians. This introduction is part of a special issue entitled "Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge," edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.

1994

The first half of the paper defines the concept of bureaucracy, its evolution over the time and the current academic debates. A short review of the most debatable theories written by Lowi, Niskanen, Dunleavy and Choudhury is included. The second half focuses on the three concepts of power put forward by Russel and the non-paid goals bureaucratic offices pursue on a daily basis. The paper also analyses the issue of monitoring the output of bureaucratic offices.

To what can we ascribe the commercial dominance and organizational ubiquity of relational databases in the 1990s and early 2000s? By integrating perspectives from classical sociological theory, the history of administrative computing, and linguistic anthropology with papers and proceedings from the nascent database research community, this paper argues that the success of relational databases (and their corresponding tabular data models) can be ascribed to three distinctive components: 1) a semiotic distinctiveness from previously-existing (and now largely forgotten) hierarchical and network models; 2) a bureaucratic correspondence with practices of file organization and index-based retrieval; and 3) support for transaction processing, which facilitated adoption by a wide variety of organizations in commerce, banking, and finance. These three aspects are in turn used to suggest ways for understanding the potential significance (or lack thereof) of an emerging 21 st-century market for non-relational and/or " Big Data " database systems.