Fred Thompson
Paul
Krugman calls 1913 the high-water mark of the First Global Economy.
He notes, that over the preceding century, the world economy had been
transformed by technology and the widespread acceptance of the belief
that free markets, with secure property rights, were the best way to
achieve economic progress.
After
1913 the market atrophied -- long-distance trade shrunk, private
international movements of capital virtually disappeared, and a third
of the world rejected private property.
How
does one explain this reversal? Perhaps, more importantly, how does
one explain the even more astonishing reversal of fortune that, at
the start of the 21st century, the world has returned to
more or less the same ideology of free markets, small governments,
and sound money that prevailed at the beginning of the
20th.
The
answer to the first question must be that bureaucracies replaced
alternative institutional arrangements, primarily markets in the
first half of the 20th century because they outperformed them. How?
Presumably, or so Alfred Chandler argues, because of technological
innovations that led to massive economies of scale and/or scope.
What
were the changes in technology that caused bureaucracies to
out-perform markets? Here the surprising answer is changes in
organizational arrangements themselves. That is: changes in
organizational design, personnel systems, operational engineering,
accounting systems, and control technologies. This answer reflects
the currently fashionable view among economists that the comparative
advantage of institutional arrangements boils down to a question of
information costs and that actual arrangements are solutions to
information problems &emdash; the costs associated with search,
bargaining, monitoring, and enforcement. Hence, transformations in
organizational arrangements must be largely driven by changes in
information costs.
Elsewhere,
Gil Reschenthaler and I (1994) have argued that changes in
organizational arrangements produced four major shifts in the
comparative advantage of alternative institutions in the late
19th century. These are:
1.
The efficacy of centralized allocation and ex-ante control increased
relative to decentralized allocation of resources and ex-post
control, which had the effect of increasing the payoff to scale.
2.
The efficacy of functional structures increased relative to
process-oriented structures, which had the effect of increasing the
payoff to scope.
3.
The efficacy of hierarchically coordinated systems increased relative
to self-organizing systems, which had the effect of increasing the
payoff to vertically integrated systems of command and control.
4.
The relative efficacy of government provision and control increased,
which had the effect of decreasing the payoffs to free markets,
secure property rights, and minimal government intervention.
Of
course, if these shifts explain the rise of bureaucracy might not
recent innovations in organizational design, operational engineering,
accounting systems, and control technologies, by reversing these
shifts, also suffice to explain its fall?
Prussians
perfected the bureaucratic model: Heinrich von Stein, Gerhard von
Scharnhorst, August von Gneisenau, and Helmuth von Moltke during the
19th century. Their administrative innovations included detailed
centralized materials requirements and logistical planning, control
by rules, standard operating procedures, and the merit principle,
functional administrative design, decomposition of tasks to their
simplest components and narrow job descriptions, and sequential
processing.
The
American contribution to this system lay primarily in activity and
cost measurement, in process engineering: standardization of
components, processes, and products, and in the use of electric
motors to reconfigure workflow. These innovations made possible the
moving, or continuous, assembly line, in which each assembler
performed a single, repetitive task. The moving assembly line was
first implemented at Henry Ford's Model-T Plant at Highland Park,
Michigan, in 1914, increasing labor productivity tenfold and
permitting stunning price cuts -- from $780 in 1910 to $360 in 1914.
Ford made everything he needed for his cars from the raw materials on
up. Of course, total vertical integration required the organization
of huge numbers of activities and employees. Workers, staff
specialists, and middle managers had to be recruited, sorted out, and
fitted into a merit-driven hierarchical scheme -- that is,
bureaucracy.
Not
only did bureaucracy make large, complex organizations efficient, it
also made them inevitable. Only very large organizations could take
full advantage of bureaucracy. Only they could afford to devote
substantial amounts of resources to gathering and processing
quantities of data for top management to use to coordinate activities
and allocate resources. Hence, it seemed that bigger organizations
were necessarily better. And, there seemed to be no natural limits to
this conclusion.
In
the US the progressive movement created modern public administration.
To a remarkable degree the progressive reforms -- an executive,
input-oriented budget, a professional civil service and merit-based
public personnel administration, control by rules, standardization of
procedures, task specialization, and a strict administrative
hierarchy, with clearly delineated staff and line functions -- were
based on the Prussian model. In a few instances -- the War Department
under Elihu Root and the USDA
Forest Service under Gifford Pinchot, the NYC Dept. of Sanitation
under Col. George E. Waring, for examples -- progressives proudly
acknowledged the source of inspiration for their administrative
reforms. Elsewhere, they expressed some discomfort at copying the
governance institutions of an undemocratic, militaristic regime. One
of the best-known apologies for this practice was Woodrow
Wilson’s argument that politics and administration are different
functions, making it possible to borrow administrative practices from
an authoritarian state without thereby threatening democratic
politics -- “If I see a murderous fellow cleverly
sharpening his knife....”
Regardless
of their source, progressive reforms led to dramatic improvements in
the delivery of government services and in the productivity of public
employees. Anecdotes to this effect abound: significant reductions in
disease following Col. Waring’s reforms, the forest
rangers’ erstwhile reputation for efficiency, widespread
replacement of government contracting out by in-house production, and, perhaps most telling, the
early 20th Century enthusiasm for postalization (i.e.,
running businesses like the US Post Office).
Not all of the evidence is anecdotal, however. Cross national
comparisons show, for example, that total factor productivity growth
in surface transport once tended to be higher in nationalized systems
than where government regulated price and entry and higher in
regulated systems than in competitive ones. Similar evidence exists
with respect to most so-called public utilities. Empirical evidence
also exists as to the consequences of the wave of reform that
transformed the governments of many U.S. cities in the last century.
Controlling for city and time effects, bureaucratic reform led to
significantly increased rates of infrastructure investment and
economic development (Rauch, 1995). Overall, by the middle of the
last century, despite far higher employment growth, value added per
worker remained 40 percent greater in the public sector than in the
private.
My point is that
bureaucratic arrangements once successfully provided security, jobs
and economic stability, ensured fairness and equity, and delivered
the “one size fits all” services needed during the era that
lasted from the turn of the last century to the mid-1960s. In the
meantime, however, the organizational arrangements invented at the
dawn of the industrial era have become increasingly anachronistic.
Centralization,
executive, input-oriented budgets, standardization, and direct
supervision of the flow of raw materials and components through the
production process were eventually rendered obsolete by innovations
in organization pioneered by General Motors under Alfred P. Sloan.
The best known of these is the multi-product, or M-form,
organizational structure, in which each major operating division
serves a distinct market segment, retains considerable autonomy, and
keeps its own books, and is evaluated using the DuPont system of
financial measurement. Short run coordination between GM's consumer
goods divisions and the divisions making components was achieved via
buyer-seller relationships -- quasi- arm's length transfer pricing
arrangements. Longer run coordination was achieved via the first
modern capital budgeting system used in the US. GM's organizational
innovations were widely emulated by American businesses during the
1950s and sixties.
Improvements
in educational levels and advances in automation have reduced the
relative efficacy of bureaucratic personnel systems: control by rules
and standard operating procedures, task specialization, and
sequential processing. Indeed, these have been superceded in many
industries by modern, people-based human resources management
practices: self-managed teams, control built into job design, and
decentralization of decision-making as basic principles of
organization, highly selective hiring of new personnel and employment
security, extensive training, comparatively high compensation based
on organizational performance, reduced status distinctions and
barriers across levels, and extensive sharing of financial and
performance information throughout the organization (Pfeffer, 1998).
The consequences of these high performance HR practices include
faster organizational learning and innovation, greater flexibility,
skill acquisition, and productivity, and ultimately improved customer
service.
More
recently American businesses have abandoned functional
compartmentalization along with vertical integration. Arguably, these
trends are being driven by reductions in communications, logistics,
and information processing costs -- reductions stimulated if not
caused by the introduction of computers and by our increasing ability
to use them. These reductions are breaking down economies of scale
and scope built upon functional specialization and vertical
integration. As a result, even large companies are mimicking their
smaller competitors: shrinking head offices, removing layers of
bureaucracy, and concentrating on core businesses.
This
has led to flatter as well as smaller organizations, organized around
a set of generic value-creating processes and specific competencies.
Some single-mission organizations are now organized as virtual
networks, some multi-mission organizations as alliances of networks.
Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster (1997) refer to both of these kinds
of organizational arrangements as hyperarchies, after the hyperlinks
of the World Wide Web. Evans and Wurster assert that these kinds of
organizations, like the Internet itself, the architectures of
object-oriented software programming, and packet switching in
telecommunications, have eliminated the need to channel information,
thereby eliminating the tradeoff between information bandwidth
(richness) and connectivity (reach). How far hyperarchy will go is an
open question. Evans and Wuster claim that it will destroy all
hierarchies, whether of logic or power, “with the possibility
(or the threat) of random access and information symmetry.”
These
changes have already influenced business to a greater or lesser
degree. They have had almost no effect on the production and delivery
of public services. As a result, productivity growth in the public
sector has lagged productivity growth in the private sector by a
remarkable degree. Indeed, low government
productivity almost wholly explains the gap between value added in
manufacturing and in services. Evidently, value-added per worker is
only 5 percent lower in private services than in manufacturing, but
government productivity lags manufacturing productivity by a third.
The 20 percent of the American workforce employed by government
generates less than 15 percent of total output. This means that, if
government workers were as productive as nongovernmental workers, GDP
would be five percent higher. More
dramatically, had value-added per government worker increased at the
same rate as in the goods sector from mid-century on, GDP would have
been thirteen percent higher than in 2003 ($1.4 trillion, about
three-fourths of total federal, state, and local expenditures).
Moreover,
we now live in an economy where
workers demand autonomy and citizens/customers demand superior
service and more choice. Old-fashioned business bureaucracies cannot
meet these demands; neither can old-fashioned government
bureaucracies.
What the new
public management calls for is the adoption of
the organizational designs and practices that are transforming
business: decentralized, flatter, perhaps smaller, organizations,
organized around sets of generic value-creating processes and
specific competencies, high performance HRM practices, modern
information technology, balanced responsibility budgeting and control
systems, and loose alliances of networks (Jones & Thompson,
1999). An example of what I am talking about is the New Zealand Post,
which under its CEO, Elmar Toime, transformed itself from a typical
bureaucracy to a profitable state-owned enterprise and the most
efficient postal service in the world. This entailed a 30 percent
reduction in workforce, but because of changes in organizational
design and HRM practices, “these reductions were accomplished
without leaving the organization weakened by a distrustful and
unmotivated workforce” (Pfeffer, 1998: 186).
Ultimately,
we favor these things not only because we want to make the public
sector more productive, but also because we want it to be more
democratic. Old style bureaucracy is authoritarian and hierarchical,
those attributes never comported well with democratic values.
Moreover, the requirements of directing giant, vertically integrated,
functional organizations has tended to overwhelm the capacity of the
public and its elected representatives to attend to the general
welfare. Limiting the scope of the public sector to the provision of
services that truly are infused with the common interest cannot but
enhance the efficacy of democratic governance mechanisms.
Hugh T. Miller
Thompson’s interpretation of
organizational history and the buildup of bureaucracy convey an
impressive amount of intelligence in a very short space. He is indeed
the master of efficiency. His descriptions are vivid and
illuminating, even though his announcement of the fall of bureaucracy
is premature. His prescriptions are well-intentioned, though overly
imbued with business sector zeal.
Thompson writes beautifully, but what is
he prescribing? Two things we already have enough of: Old
clichés about the superiority of business practices over
public administration practices, and gizmo-sounding slogans offered
as management reforms. He says we need “high performance HRM
practices,” along with “generic value-creating
processes” and “balanced responsibility budgeting.”
Thompson presents service sector
productivity data as if they were established facts rather than
controversial assertions. Economists openly acknowledge the trouble
with measuring service-sector productivity. Moreover, rapid
productivity increases may be more difficult to accomplish in
services than in goods. Ignoring these controversies, Thompson
implies that there is a public employee problem behind the
productivity data.
By drawing a circle around a bullet hole,
Thompson identifies the New Zealand postal service as a bulls-eye, an
exemplar of what the remaining hundreds of thousands of public sector
organizations could do if they would just transform themselves into
“decentralized, flatter, perhaps smaller, organizations,
organized around sets of generic value-creating processes and
specific competencies, high performance HRM practices, modern
information technology, balanced responsibility budgeting and control
systems, and loose alliances of networks.”
The predictable upshot of Thompson’s
essay is his claim that productivity growth in government is less
than productivity growth in the private sector, and, moreover, it is
up to the public sector to remake itself in the image of business.
Never mind that 4th quarter 2002 productivity improvement
(the most recent available at this writing) in the U.S. non-farm
business sector showed a productivity decline of .2 percent. (And yet no one views this as
an employee issue.)
Two things are ignored amidst the praise
for whiz-bang new organizational designs that have supposedly
displaced old-time bureaucracy in the private sector but not in the
public sector: a) The displacement of old-time bureaucracy with new
forms has not occurred in the private sector; b) There have been
tremendous changes in service delivery instruments that have taken
place in the public sector, including contracting out, policy
networks, interagency task forces, and special district governments.
While the term “bureaucracy”
always makes good cannon fodder, the reports of its demise are
premature. On one hand, bureaucracy is not as totalizing as Thompson
makes it out to be. Henry Ford’s company never did, in fact,
make “everything he needed for his cars from the raw materials
on up.” The “total vertical integration” that
bureaucracy supposedly achieved is a chimera. On the other hand, the
reforms that Thompson offers are an extension of the same
instrumental rationality that also sustains bureaucracy. Precision,
speed, clarity in communication, reduction of friction, reduction of
personnel costs -- these are the technical advantages of bureaucracy,
according to Max Weber. It is no coincidence that Thompson’s
management reforms are intended to achieve these same sorts of
effects.
Meanwhile, the characteristics that make
bureaucracy what it is remain intact: “The principles of office
hierarchy,” “levels of graded authority,” and “a
firmly ordered system of super- and subordination” (Weber 1946:
197). The suppositions of expert training remain. Duties of the job
continue to demand the full working capacity of the employee. General
office rules, to this day, must be learned and followed.
Moving beyond bureaucracy in a serious
way involves a critical assessment of the instrumental rationality
that informs modern organizations of all kinds. Max Weber (1946) said
that the decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization
“has always been its technical superiority over any other form
of organization” (p. 214). It is worth remembering the source of
such advance:
Today,
it is primarily the capitalist market economy which demands that the
official business of the administration be discharged precisely,
unambiguously, continuously, and with as much speed as possible.
Normally, the very large modern capitalist enterprises are themselves
unequalled models of strict bureaucratic organization. Business
management throughout rests on increasing precision, steadiness, and,
above all, the speed of operations (Weber 1946: 215).
The ethic of instrumental rationality
that capitalism and bureaucracy have brought about is now so
thorough-going that bureaucracy -- the primary vehicle for spreading
instrumental rationality into the culture -- is ridiculed for no
longer being efficient enough. Yet bureaucracy has set the terms, and
the game is still being played according to the rules of bureaucratic
rationality. Efficiency and rapid, unambiguous communication remain
the foremost criteria that are used to assess the “technical
superiority” of organizational form. Hence the “fall”
of bureaucracy in the corporate sector is surely an over-statement.
Instead, performance management, outcome measurement, and
results-oriented managerialism are tributes to the triumph of
bureaucracy’s core value, instrumental rationality.
Thompson wants public sector
bureaucracies to operate more like a business, and thinks that
democratic values run in precisely the same direction. We can agree
that democratic structural innovations that increase information flow
(bottom-up as well as top-down) should be developed in the public
sector -- and, indeed, this is happening in a vibrant way. However,
Thompson ignores the rapidly expanding body of research on policy
networks, decentered governance, and deliberative policy
implementation in Denmark, England, USA, and the Netherlands. Public
administration theorists concerned about democratic governance watch
these experiments and innovations closely.
Amidst increasing specialization (which
began as a bureaucratic phenomenon), it seems as though the
literature on organizational efficiency and the literature on
democratic policy implementation exist in separate spheres of
specialization.
Even when management reforms can be
justified on efficiency grounds, it would be claiming too much to
assert that one has, thereby, justified the reforms on democratic
grounds as well. Can efficiency and democracy be discussed on the
same page? Some say yes. As Thompson puts it “Ultimately, we
favor these things not only because we want to make the public sector
more productive, but also because we want it to be more
democratic.”
However, when the discussion shifts from
efficiency to democracy, the politics are exposed. Conservative
ideology equates democracy with limited government, rather than with
expanded participation in it. Thompson says, “Limiting the scope
of the public sector to the provision of services that truly are
infused with the common interest cannot but enhance the efficacy of
democratic governance mechanisms.” One begins to suspect that,
by the end of the essay, Thompson’s critique of public sector
productivity, on the supposedly politically neutral terrain of
efficiency, has transformed itself into an essay on limited
government. An economic definition of democracy, like the others, has
its upside and its downside.
Thompson ignores the downside of the
business ethic, dubbed “infectious greed” by Alan
Greenspan. Avarice would also be a good term to use. In the wake of
the scandals at Global Crossing, Adelphia, Enron, Arthur Anderson,
WorldCom, and so on, it takes chutzpah to hold the business model up
as one worth emulating in the public sector. Instead, the indulgent
and dangerously righteous business model generates a public sector
ethics that should give one pause.
Consider this example from my home area
in South Florida. The Pembroke Pines city manager Charles F. Dodge
and his assistant Martin J. Gayeski were paid $306,000 per year
between them, and they now will be entitled to pension benefits
because they are retiring. This story (from Miami
Herald reporter Scott
Andron) would be ho-hum news, except for one catch.
Now Dodge and his subordinate will be
paid $3,345,000 over five years -- as consultants for Charles F.
Dodge LLC the brand new consulting firm that just won a
non-competitive contract to manage the city. I wonder if this is the
sort of high-performance HRM practice that Thompson has in mind.
There are several features of the deal
worth considering:
According to city council members, Dodge
and Gayeski were doing an outstanding job managing the city. Dodge
justified his contract amount by touting several personnel inactions.
He saved the city money by not
hiring an education director to oversee the city’s charter
schools; by not hiring a project
manger to oversee development of a park; by not hiring an additional assistant city
manager. The city council was persuaded by this argument, and I would
not be surprised if advocates of “new public management”
would likewise be persuaded.
What is my objection? In a culture
dominated by corporate practices and business ethics, limited
government has slightly different connotations than it did for the
American founders when the business corporation had no legal status.
Unlike classic liberal political theory that extolled civil society
and the autonomous individual, Thompson extols corporate practices.
Thompson’s reforms are presented as
good for democracy. They might save taxpayers money and they might
make governmental organizations more effective. These would be good
things. But are they democratic in any robust sense of the term? I
doubt it. Something more profound is happening, instead. The
instrumentally rational predisposition, honed and improved though
corporate practices, stands ready to colonize culture and its
politics.
Fred Thompson
Government does not have an employee problem; it has a
public-management policy problem. According to the Volker
Commission:
•
The federal government is not performing nearly as well as it can or
should. The difficulties federal workers encounter in just getting
their jobs done has led to discouragement and low morale.
•
A clear sense of policy direction and clarity of mission is too often
lacking, under-cutting efficiency and public confidence. As a result,
there is real danger of healthy public skepticism giving way to
corrosive cynicism.
To me democracy means self-determination -- the power to
influence decisions that are central to one’s life. It’s
true: I like the idea of limited government. Government works best
where participation in public-policy making is widespread.
Unfortunately, because people treat participation in decision-making
as a cost and because they do not see government as central to their
lives, many opt out. One does not have to be a right winger to
believe that government performance might be improved or that the
citizenry's abilities to control its elected agents might be enhanced
if their attentions and responsibilities were suitably focused on
fundamental issues.
More importantly, work is central to our lives.
But, at work, we are often silenced. “The principles of office
hierarchy,” “levels of graded authority,” and “a
firmly ordered system of super- and subordination” are inimical
to democracy. They are
also increasingly inimical to high performance. Nowadays, high
performing entities are more likely to be designed around team-based
collaborations that successfully spread authority and responsibility
throughout the organization and thereby mobilize the collective
intelligences of their members.
IBM’s Dallas TX facility
is an example. It mimics a market. Everyone is either a customer or
provider, depending on the transaction, thereby transforming the
facility into a network of exchanges. Each exchange is a closed loop
involving four steps: request from a customer and offer from a
provider, negotiation of the task to be performed and definition of
success, performance, and customer acceptance. Until the last step is
completed, the task is unfinished. IBM uses powerful computers to
track these loops and monitor the progress of each transaction. The
result has been to empower workers, eliminate boundaries and
bottlenecks, and boost productivity through the ceiling.
As Hugh Miller notes, some
government organizations (e.g., Oregon’s housing authority under
the leadership of Rey Ramsey [Hecht & Ramsey, 2001]) have
copied well-managed businesses by organizing themselves into similar
alliances of networks, sharing their top management, core
competencies, and a common culture, and using computers to chart
activities and operational flows. Their control systems are like
those of centralized bureaucracies in that they collect a lot of
real-time information on operations. Unlike the control systems of
stove-piped centralized bureaucracies, however, which passed the
exercise of judgment up the managerial ranks, this information is
used to push it down into the organization, to wherever it is most
needed, at delivery, in production, or to the client.
Anyone committed to democratic governance should be truly excited by these innovations.
Beniger,
James R., The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic
Origins of the Information Society (1986).
Chandler, A.D. The Visible Hand: The Managerial
Revolution in American Business (1977).
Evans,
P.B., and T.S. Wurster “Strategy and the New Economics of
Information,” Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1997: 71-82.
Hecht,
Ben, and Rey Ramsey, ManagingNonprofits.org: Dynamic Management
for the Digital Age
(2001).
Jones,
L.R., Fred Thompson, Public Management: Institutional Renewal for
the 21st Century (1999).
Pfeffer,
Jeffrey, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People
First (1998).
Rauch, James E. “Bureaucracy,
Infrastructure, and Economic Growth: Evidence from U.S. Cities During
the Progressive Era,” American Economic Review. 85/4 (Sept. 1995), 968-979.
Reschenthaler, G.B., and Thompson, Fred “The Information
Revolution and the New Public Management.” Journal of Public
Administration Research and Theory. 6/1 (1996) 125-144.
Thompson. Fred. “Fordism
and PostFordism,” Encyclopedia of Political Economy.
Routledge: London, 1998: 404-407.
Weber, Max. 1946.
“Bureaucracy.” Chapter VIII in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills, eds. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, pp.
196-252.
Womack, James P.,
Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos, The Machine that Changed the
World (1990).
The
basic texts on information costs include Kenneth Arrow, The
Organization of Economic Activity
(1969); Yoram Barzel, Measurement Costs and the Organization of
Markets. Journal of Law and Economics. 25/1: 27-48 (1982); Paul Milgrom, John Roberts,
Economics, Organization, and Management (1992); and Oliver E
Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (1985) and Organization
Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and Beyond
(1990).
Comparative
analysis of the industrial and bureaucratic revolutions are found in
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
(1944, reprinted 1985) and Nathan
Rosenberg, L.E. Birdsall, How the West Grew Rich: The Economic
Transformation of the Industrial World
(1986). It is reasonable to conclude that the changes that led
to mass production also promoted mass politics and that product
standardization encouraged egalitarianism. Mass production required
the organization of vast numbers of unskilled laborers to work
assembly lines. Like circumstances imply like interests. Widespread
common interests led to powerful industrial unions and many instances
popular political mobilization as well. Mass marketing and product
standardization had a significant leveling effect with respect to
consumption, reducing the benefits of relative wealth and, as a
result perhaps, organized opposition to relatively egalitarian social
policies. Consequently, from the standpoint of the argument made here
and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the bureaucratic
(authoritarian) populism (socialism) of the first half of
20th century now appears to be an almost irresistible
consequence of industrialization.
The
Prussian military's role in the development of both the factory
system and bureaucratic organizations is described in Andre
Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1492-1789, translated by A.T. Siddall (1979); Martin van
Creveld, Command in War (1985) and Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein
to Patton
(1977); T.N. Dupuy, A Genius for War: The German Army and the
General Staff, 1807-1945
(1977); Archer Jones, Civil War Command & Strategy (1992); and Walter Millis,
Arms and Men: A Study of American Military History (1956). The adoption
of Prussian practices in the public sector in the US is explicitly
described in Ben W. Twight, Organizational Values and Political
Power
(1983); see also James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the
Liberal State: 1900-1918
(1968).
The
new paradigm in government is best described by Michael
Barzelay, Breaking through Bureaucracy
(1992).
______________
Hugh T. Miller is Professor and Director
of the School of Public Administration at Florida Atlantic
University. He is the author of Postmodern Public Policy (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2002).
Fred Thompson is Grace and
Elmer Goudy Professor of Public Management & Policy, Atkinson
Graduate School of Management, Willamette University. He edits the
International Public Management Journal and is a CARR fellow, London School of Economics, and
confesses to being a managerialist and an instrumental rationalist
(is there any other kind?).