Download or read book Bureaucracy written by James Q. Wilson and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic book on the way American government agencies work and how they can be made to work better -- the "masterwork" of political scientist James Q. Wilson (The Economist) In Bureaucracy, the distinguished scholar James Q. Wilson examines a wide range of bureaucracies, including the US Army, the FBI, the CIA, the FCC, and the Social Security Administration, providing the first comprehensive, in-depth analysis of what government agencies do, why they operate the way they do, and how they might become more responsible and effective. It is the essential guide to understanding how American government works.

Download or read book What Motivates Bureaucrats written by Marissa Martino Golden and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-06 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -- Political Science Quarterly

Download or read book Street Level Bureaucracy written by Michael Lipsky and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1983-06-29 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.

Download or read book Barbarians to Bureaucrats Corporate Life Cycle Strategies written by Lawrence M. Miller and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 1990-01-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One day your sluggish company will taken to the sound of a beating drum and the sight of a competitor approaching at ramming speed. On deck will be a jut-jawed Barbarian....He will hardly blink as his target is ripped asunder, sending Aristocrats, Bureaucrats and their unfortunate shipmates to their corporate death....So goes Mr. Miller's tale, from which we can all profit." The Wall Street Journal Barbarians to Bureaucrats presents a brilliant new solution to a stubborn old business problem: how to halt a company's descent into wasteful, stifling bureaucracy. Lawrence M. Miller, a management consultant for such corporate giants as Xerox and 3M, argues that corporations, like civilizations, have a natural life cycle, and that by identifying the stage your company is in, and the leaders associated with it, you can avert decline and continue to thrive. Every company begins with the compelling new vision of a Prophet and the aggressive leadership of an iron-willed Barbarian, who implements the Prophet's ideas. New techniques and expansions are pushed through by the Builder and the Explorer, but the growth spawned by these managers can easily stagnate when the Administrator sacrifices innovation to order, and the Bureaucrat imposes tight control. And just as in civilizations, the rule of the Aristocrat, out of touch with those who do the real work, invites rebellion -- from employees, customers, and stockholders. It will take the Synergist, a business leader who balances creativity with order, to restore vitality and insure future growth. Executives from major corporations have already put the powerful insights of Barbarians to Bureaucrats into practice to regenerate their own companies. Now you can use this brilliant, lucid, and dazzlingly original book to put your company -- and your career -- back on track.

Download or read book Bring Back the Bureaucrats written by John DiIulio and published by Templeton Foundation Press. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John J. DiIulio Jr., one of America’s most respected political scientists and an adviser to presidents in both parties, summons the facts and statistics to show us how America’s big government works and why reforms that include adding a million more people to the federal workforce by 2035 might help to slow government’s growth while improving its performance. Starting from the underreported reality that the size of the federal workforce hasn’t increased since the early 1960s, even though the federal budget has skyrocketed. The number of federal programs has ballooned; Bring Back the Bureaucrats tells us what our elected leaders won’t: there are not enough federal workers to work for our democracy effectively. DiIulio reveals that the government in America is Leviathan by Proxy, a grotesque form of debt-financed big government that guarantees terrible government. Washington relies on state and local governments, for-profit firms, and nonprofit organizations to implement federal policies and programs. Big-city mayors, defense industry contractors, nonprofit executives, and other national proxies lobby incessantly for more federal spending. This proxy system chokes on chores such as cleaning up toxic waste sites, caring for hospitalized veterans, collecting taxes, handling plutonium, and policing more than $100 billion annually in “improper payments.” The lack of competent, well-trained federal civil servants resulted in the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the troubled launch of Obamacare’s “health exchanges.” Bring Back the Bureaucrats is further distinguished by the presence of E. J. Dionne Jr. and Charles Murray, two of the most astute voices from the political left and right, respectively, who offer their candid responses to DiIulio at the end of the book.

Download or read book Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies written by Joel D. ABERBACH and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In uneasy partnership at the helm of the modern state stand elected party politicians and professional bureaucrats. This book is the first comprehensive comparison of these two powerful elites. In seven countries--the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands--researchers questioned 700 bureaucrats and 6OO politicians in an effort to understand how their aims, attitudes, and ambitions differ within cultural settings. One of the authors' most significant findings is that the worlds of these two elites overlap much more in the United States than in Europe. But throughout the West bureaucrats and politicians each wear special blinders and each have special virtues. In a well-ordered polity, the authors conclude, politicians articulate society's dreams and bureaucrats bring them gingerly to earth.

Download or read book Bending the Rules written by Rachel Augustine Potter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who determines the fuel standards for our cars? What about whether Plan B, the morning-after pill, is sold at the local pharmacy? Many people assume such important and controversial policy decisions originate in the halls of Congress. But the choreographed actions of Congress and the president account for only a small portion of the laws created in the United States. By some estimates, more than ninety percent of law is created by administrative rules issued by federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, where unelected bureaucrats with particular policy goals and preferences respond to the incentives created by a complex, procedure-bound rulemaking process. With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be but rather an intensely political activity in its own right. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often at the bidding of affected interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate their proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Tracing the rulemaking process from when an agency first begins working on a rule to when it completes that regulatory action, Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process. This exercise reveals that unelected bureaucrats wield considerable influence over the direction of public policy in the United States.

Download or read book Bureaucrats Politics and the Environment written by Richard W. Waterman and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2004 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By examining what these personnel think about politics, the environment, their budgets, and the other institutions and agencies with which they interact, this work illuminates the actions of the bureaucracy and gives it a human face."--Jacket.

Download or read book Brokers and Bureaucrats written by Timothy Frye and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2000-04-20 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVOffers a new political explanation for the creation of market institutions as it investigates Russia's transition from a command economy /div

Download or read book Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy written by Morton H. Halperin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007-02-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy is one of the most successful Brookings titles of all time. This thoroughly revised version updates that classic analysis of the role played by the federal bureaucracy—civilian career officials, political appointees, and military officers—and Congress in formulating U.S. national security policy, illustrating how policy decisions are actually made. Government agencies, departments, and individuals all have certain interests to preserve and promote. Those priorities, and the conflicts they sometimes spark, heavily influence the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. A decision that looks like an orchestrated attempt to influence another country may in fact represent a shaky compromise between rival elements within the U.S. government. The authors provide numerous examples of bureaucratic maneuvering and reveal how they have influenced our international relations. The revised edition includes new examples of bureaucratic politics from the past three decades, from Jimmy Carter's view of the State Department to conflicts between George W. Bush and the bureaucracy regarding Iraq. The second edition also includes a new analysis of Congress's role in the politics of foreign policymaking.

Download or read book Bandits and Bureaucrats written by Karen Barkey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the main challenge to the Ottoman state come not in peasant or elite rebellions, but in endemic banditry? Karen Barkey shows how Turkish strategies of incorporating peasants and rotating elites kept both groups dependent on the state, unable and unwilling to rebel. Bandits, formerly mercenary soldiers, were not interested in rebellion but concentrated on trying to gain state resources, more as rogue clients than as primitive rebels. The state's ability to control and manipulate bandits—through deals, bargains and patronage—suggests imperial strength rather than weakness, she maintains. Bandits and Bureaucrats details, in a rich, archivally based analysis, state-society relations in the Ottoman empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Exploring current eurocentric theories of state building, the author illuminates a period often mischaracterized as one in which the state declined in power. Outlining the processes of imperial rule, Barkey relates the state political and military institutions to their socal foundations. She compares the Ottoman route with state centralization in the Chinese and Russian empires, and contrasts experiences of rebellion in France during the same period. Bandits and Bureaucrats thus develops a theoretical interpretation of imperial state centralization through incorporation and bargaining with social groups, and at the same time enriches our understanding of the dynamics of Ottoman history.

Download or read book Bureaucracy s Masters and Minions written by Eleanor L. Schiff and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions: The Politics of Controlling the U.S. Bureaucracy, the author argues that political control of the bureaucracy from the president and the Congress is largely contingent on an agency’s internal characteristics of workforce composition, workforce responsibilities, and workforce organization. Through a revised principal-agent framework, the author explores an agent-principal model to use the agent as the starting-point of analysis. The author tests the agent-principal model across 14 years and 132 bureaus and finds that both the president and the House of Representatives exert influence over the bureaucracy, but agency characteristics such as the degree of politization among the workforce, the type of work the agency is engaged in, and the hierarchical nature of the agency affects how agencies are controlled by their political masters. In a detailed case study of one agency, the U.S. Department of Education, the author finds that education policy over a 65-year period is elite-led, and that that hierarchical nature of the department conditions political principals’ influence. This book works to overcome three hurdles that have plagued bureaucratic studies: the difficulty of uniform sampling across the bureaucracy, the overuse of case studies, and the overreliance on the principal-agent theoretical approach.

Download or read book Breaking Through Bureaucracy written by Michael Barzelay and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-10-09 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book attacks the conventional wisdom that bureaucrats are bunglers and the system can't be changed. Michael Barzelay and Babak Armajani trace the source of much poor performance in government to the persistent influence of what they call the bureaucratic paradigm—a theory built on such notions as central control, economy and efficiency, and rigid adherence to rules. Rarely questioned, the bureaucratic paradigm leads competent and faithful public servants—as well as politicians—unwittingly to impair government's ability to serve citizens by weakening, misplacing, and misdirecting accountability. How can this system be changed? Drawing on research sponsored by the Ford Foundation/Harvard University program on Innovations in State and Local Government, this book tells the story of how public officials in one state, Minnesota, cast off the conceptual blinders of the bureaucratic paradigm and experimented with ideas such as customer service, empowering front-line employees to resolve problems, and selectively introducing market forces within government. The author highlights the arguments government executives made for the changes they proposed, traces the way these changes were implemented, and summarizes the impressive results. This approach provides would-be bureaucracy busters with a powerful method for dramatically improving the way government manages the public's business. Generalizing from the Minnesota experience and from similar efforts nationwide, the book proposes a new paradigm that will reframe the perennial debate on public management. With its carefully analyzed ideas, real-life examples, and closely reasoned practical advice, Breaking Through Bureaucracy is indispensable to public managers and students of public policy and administration.

Download or read book The Beautiful Bureaucrat written by Helen Phillips and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2015 NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by Time Out, Bustle, The Atlantic, Electric Literature, Kobo, Kirkus and more... "Riveting... thrillerlike...drolly surreal...Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions." The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice "A joyride..." -Karen Russell NAMED A MUST READ OF THE SUMMER by the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Bustle, The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, HelloGiggles and more... A young wife's new job pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe in a first novel Ursula K. Le Guin hails as "funny, sad, scary, beautiful. I love it." In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings-the office's scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread. As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond. Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder-luminous and new.

Download or read book The New Welfare Bureaucrats written by Celeste Watkins-Hayes and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the recession worsens, more and more Americans must turn to welfare to make ends meet. Once inside the agency, the newly jobless will face a bureaucracy that has undergone massive change since the advent of welfare reform in 1996. A behind-the-scenes look at bureaucracy’s human face, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is a compelling study of welfare officers and how they navigate the increasingly tangled political and emotional terrain of their jobs. Celeste Watkins-Hayes here reveals how welfare reform engendered a shift in focus for caseworkers from simply providing monetary aid to the much more complex process of helping recipients find work. Now both more intimately involved in their clients’ lives and wielding greater power over their well-being, welfare officers’ racial, class, and professional identities have become increasingly important factors in their work. Based on the author’s extensive fieldwork in two very different communities in the northeast, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is a boon to anyone looking to understand the impact of the institutional and policy changes wrought by welfare reform as well as the subtle social dynamics that shape the way welfare is meted out at the individual level.

Download or read book How Management Matters written by Norma Riccucci and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrats" have taken on a pejorative hue over the years, but does the problem lie with those on the "street-level" -- those organizations and people the public deals with directly -- or is it in how they are managed? Norma Riccucci knows that management matters, and she addresses a critical gap in the understanding of public policy by uniquely focusing on the effects of public management on street-level bureaucrats. How Management Matters examines not only how but where public management matters in government organizations. Looking at the 1996 welfare reform law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, or PRWORA), Riccucci examines the law's effectiveness in changing the work functions and behaviors of street-level welfare workers from the role of simply determining eligibility of clients to actually helping their clients find work. She investigates the significant role of these workers in the implementation of welfare reform, the role of public management in changing the system of welfare under the reform law, and management's impact on results -- in this case ensuring the delivery of welfare benefits and services to eligible clients. Over a period of two years, Riccucci traveled specifically to eleven different cities, and from interviews and a large national survey, she gathered quantitative results from cities in such states as New York, Texas, Michigan, and Georgia, that were selected because of their range of policies, administrative structures, and political cultures. General welfare data for all fifty states is included in this rigorous analysis, demonstrating to all with an interest in any field of public administration or public policy that management does indeed matter.

Download or read book The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy written by Mark Schwartz and published by It Revolution Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A playbook for mastering the art of bureaucracy from thought-leader Mark Schwartz.