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Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It
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.
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.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
About the author
James Q. Wilson
207 books45 followersJames Q. Wilson was one of the leading contemporary criminologists in the United States. Wilson, who has taught at several major universities during his academic career, has also written on economics and politics during his lengthy career. During the 1960s and 1970s, Wilson voiced concerns about trying to address the social causes of crime. He argued instead that public policy is most effective when it focuses on objective matters like the costs and benefits of crime. Wilson views criminals as rational human beings who will not commit crimes when the costs associated with crime become impractical.
James Q. Wilson most recently taught at Boston College and Pepperdine University. He was Professor Emeritus of Management and Public Administration at UCLA and was previously Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University. He wrote more than a dozen books on the subjects of public policy, bureaucracy, and political philosophy. He was president of the American Political Science Association, and he is the only political scientist to win three of the four lifetime achievement awards presented by the APSA. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in 2003.
Professor Wilson passed away in March of 2012 after battling cancer. His work helped shape the field of political science in the United States. His many years of service to his American Government book remain evident on every page and will continue for many editions to come.
James Q. Wilson most recently taught at Boston College and Pepperdine University. He was Professor Emeritus of Management and Public Administration at UCLA and was previously Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University. He wrote more than a dozen books on the subjects of public policy, bureaucracy, and political philosophy. He was president of the American Political Science Association, and he is the only political scientist to win three of the four lifetime achievement awards presented by the APSA. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in 2003.
Professor Wilson passed away in March of 2012 after battling cancer. His work helped shape the field of political science in the United States. His many years of service to his American Government book remain evident on every page and will continue for many editions to come.
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October 14, 2012
Quote from wikisum:
Three Main Constraints
Bureaucracies are subject to three main constraints; these constraints are the independent variables explaining why bureaucracies are inefficient. In particular:
Government agencies cannot lawfully retain and devote to the private benefit of their members the earnings of the organizations (so unlike McDonald's, there is no profit-maximization incentive);
Government agencies cannot allocate the factors of production in accordance with the preferences of the organization's administrators (so unlike McDonald's, we cannot necessarily move people and equipment to where it is most needed);
Government agencies must serve goals not of the organization's own choosing.
Related to these constraints are a few other factors affecting bureaucratic behavior:
Bureaucrats do not (legally) profit from their positions. Normal businesses try to limit expenditures and raise revenues to generate profits, but bureaucrats have no such incentive.
Official routines are characterized by excessive complexity.
The specific, clear and unquestionable goals imposed on bureaucrats create an aversion to take risks. After all, the cost to a bureaucrat of ignoring these goals could be very high. But normal businesses thrive by taking risks.
Effects of these Constraints
Managers have a strong incentive to worry more about constraints than tasks, which means to worry more about processes than outcomes.
The multiplicity of constraints on an agency enhances the power of potential intervenors in the agency.
Equity is more important than efficiency in the management of many government agencies.
The existence of many contextual goals, like the existence of constraints on the use of resources, tends to make managers more risk averse.
Public agencies have more managers than private ones performing similar tasks.
The more contextual goals and constraints that must be served the more discretionary authority in an agency is pushed upward to the top.
Three Main Constraints
Bureaucracies are subject to three main constraints; these constraints are the independent variables explaining why bureaucracies are inefficient. In particular:
Government agencies cannot lawfully retain and devote to the private benefit of their members the earnings of the organizations (so unlike McDonald's, there is no profit-maximization incentive);
Government agencies cannot allocate the factors of production in accordance with the preferences of the organization's administrators (so unlike McDonald's, we cannot necessarily move people and equipment to where it is most needed);
Government agencies must serve goals not of the organization's own choosing.
Related to these constraints are a few other factors affecting bureaucratic behavior:
Bureaucrats do not (legally) profit from their positions. Normal businesses try to limit expenditures and raise revenues to generate profits, but bureaucrats have no such incentive.
Official routines are characterized by excessive complexity.
The specific, clear and unquestionable goals imposed on bureaucrats create an aversion to take risks. After all, the cost to a bureaucrat of ignoring these goals could be very high. But normal businesses thrive by taking risks.
Effects of these Constraints
Managers have a strong incentive to worry more about constraints than tasks, which means to worry more about processes than outcomes.
The multiplicity of constraints on an agency enhances the power of potential intervenors in the agency.
Equity is more important than efficiency in the management of many government agencies.
The existence of many contextual goals, like the existence of constraints on the use of resources, tends to make managers more risk averse.
Public agencies have more managers than private ones performing similar tasks.
The more contextual goals and constraints that must be served the more discretionary authority in an agency is pushed upward to the top.
July 14, 2009
The best book I have ever read about government.
It's a theory book, big-think style, but it's not grandiose and doesn't dwell on hypotheticals. James Q. Wilson, probably the most respected political scientist alive (and now I know why), merely decided to read every good study ever written about government agencies and then write a book on some of the generalizations that can be drawn from them. The generalizations are particular ones, insights about localized times and spaces, but they are worthwhile insights nonetheless.
For instance, Wilson convincingly shows that government agencies are not naturally "imperialistic" as is often claimed. Instead, government agencies and executives typically aim for "autonomy" and independence of action. Even famously power-hungry pols try to slough off missions they think could disrupt the focus of their agencies, like J. Edgar Hoover's refusal to take up drug-busting and organized crime, for fear that it could corrupt his men or undermine the focus of the FBI. The army in 1947 worked to create a separate air force, so as not to be swamped by its subordinate unit. The Social Security Agency even tried to avoid taking up disability payments in the seventies because it felt itself inappropriately organized to do so. These agencies wanted both clear missions and, more importantly, clear constituencies that favored or supported their programs before Congress (local police, airplane manufacturers, old people), so, paradoxically, they could be as free from Congress as possible.
He also shows that the reason for the putative inefficiency of government programs lies in the natural process-orientation of Congress. A legislative body cannot evaluate the effectiveness of a program, such as a military weapons system, but it can evaluate if steps A through E were followed in creating that program, and political groups cannot ensure equity for different races or genders, but they can evaluate if certain clear procedural steps that supposedly ensure equality (or affirmative action) were taken to carry out a particular program.
Furthermore, despite all the talk of "runaway agencies" or "rogue bureaucrats," Wilson shows that almost all agencies are completely and utterly controlled by congressional mandates and oversight, and that they almost always march to Congress's beat. I'll remember his examples whenever I see some Congressman berating some poor assistant secretary of whatever for letting down the American people.
In my mind, this book demonstrates that political science can be more rigorous and insightful than it's often given credit for. It demonstrates that good academic work and good common sense can really help explain the world we live in, and it explains the stories behind all the political stories we read.
September 4, 2013
A thoughtful take on Bureaucracy. Notes:
Notes on James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy
“public management is not an arena in which to find Big Answers; it is a world of settled institutions designed to allow imperfect people to use flawed procedures to cope with insoluble problems.” p. 375
Preface to the New Edition
Bureaucrats have a variety of preferences, not just salary, rank, and power
Personal experiences w/ bureaucracy tend to be good, but citizens dislike in abstract
Part 1: Organizations
Chapter 1: Armies, Prisons, Schools
German Army v. French Army, Texas Prisons v. Mexican Prisons, Carver High School Turnaroud
Chapter 2: Organization Matters
Explanation of why his 3 examples in Chapter 1 made a difference
“Only two groups of people deny that organization matters: economists and everybody else” p. 23
The bottom line is in Madison’s Federalist Paper #51, on the structure of checks and balances. http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?f...
Part 2: Operators
Chapter 3: Circumstances
Operators deal with hands on work. “the central fact of daily life was ...Your task was to manage these people so as to minimize the threats and inconveniences they posed for you.” p. 39
Regulation writers prefer the concrete to the abstract, OSHA example
“Regulation writers find it much easier to address safety than health hazards. The former are technically easier to find, describe, assess, and control than the latter…..But if a worker develops cancer fifteen years after starting work in a chemical plant, the cause of the cancer will be uncertain and controversial. The cost of the disease will be hard to calculate. The solution will be hard to specify.” p. 42
Peer expectations determine both how hard people work and what they think their job actually is.
Chapter 4: Beliefs
Attitudes compete with incentives, and incentives frequently win.
Attitudes are most likely to determine behavior in weakly defined roles.
The presumption of ‘goal displacement’ is not backed up by studies, many bureaucrats seem to focus on long-term goals and be willing to take risks.
Chapter 5: Interests
Engineering efficiency came to define the TVA, so environmentalists were shut out.
FMC (Federal Maritime Commission) instead was defined by the need to handle a large amount of paperwork, so they assumed rates were reasonable if not challenged by a shipper
There are 3 main restraints on capture
1. Lower costs of political organization
2. Redistribution of Political Access
3. Beliefs
Chapter 6: Culture
Org culture a vague concept, but no less real than individual personality
Ex: universities have a culture that rewards research more than teaching
The cost of a clear mission is that tasks that are not considered part of that mission are performed poorly.
Part III: Managers
Chapter 7: Constraints
3 key ones
1. Cannot retain earnings
2. Cannot allocate factors of production
3. Must serve goals not of own choosing
“whereas business management focuses on the bottom line (that is, profits), government focuses on the top line (that is, constraints)” p. 115
Goal of congress is to maximize benefits to citizens and minimize administrative costs, hence underpaid bureaucrats in poor offices handing out lavish checks. This refutes economist’s theory that bureaucrats use their superior knowledge to lie to congress and expand their budgets.
Rules are mainly imposed externally. Political rules, not bureaucratic ones.
Congress tends to value fairness over efficiency. Hence Bureaucrats can’t consider personal knowledge in contracting out work.
Emphasize on fairness is, “not because the American Government is committed heart and soul to fairness as an abstract social good but because if a procurement decision is questioned it is much easier to justify the decision if it can be shown that the decision was ‘fairly’ made on the basis of ‘objective’ critieria.”
USPS first proposed eliminating Saturday delivery in 1977
The more goals an agency has the riskier it is for managers to trust operators to prioritize those goals
Chapter 8: People
Government has changed to involve more professionals and (relatively) fewer clerks.
Merit pay is usually resisted by workers and sometimes costs more to implement.
The example of teaching, 2nd wave reform suggested heavy regulations on becoming a teacher but fewer regulations once one was a teacher.
Chapter 9: Compliance
Shirking can be a problem, but difficult if not impossible to incentivize with pay based on marginal productivity of labor.
“Bureaucrats have preferences. Among them is the desire to do the job.” p. 156
Mission can be formed from
1. Purpose
2. Status
3. Solidarity
4 types of agencies
Outputs observed Outputs not observed
Outcomes observed Production Craft
Outcomes not observed Procedural Coping
Production
“Work that produces measurable outcomes tends to drive out work that produces unmeasurable outcomes.” p. 161
Procedural
“putting the fig leaf of professionalism over the nakedness of unknown outcomes will not fool anybody” p. 164
Standard Operating Procedures become pervasive. “If it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t move, pick it up; if it is too big to pick up, paint it.” p. 164
Craft
“Public management – or at least good public management – is not so relentlessly utilitarian as to think that only results matter. One reason for this is that every public agency produces many kinds of outcomes – not just progress toward the primary goal of the agency, but also conformity to the contextual goals and constraints in which the agency is enmeshed.” p. 168
Coping
Conflict between management and operators, bias towards those few measurable outcomes.
Part IV Executives
Chapter 10: Turf
Autonomy is often more important than budget size
Agencies attempt to match mission and jurisdiction
Turf battles create coordination problems
Chapter 11: Strategies
In D.C. the appearance of success is (often) as important as success.
Finding an external constituency is key
Four general types of execs
1. Advocate
2. Decision maker
3. Budget cutter
4. Negotiator
Chapter 12: Innovation
Organizations by nature resist innovation, they are built around SOPs.
Bureaucracies only like new tech if it leaves existing tasks unchanged.
Executives are safe if they fail for the right reason, i.e. reasons that will be respected by their peers. (peer pressure never really stops)
Part V Context
Chapter 13: Congress
Congressional control means one of three things
1. Congress controls day to day, Congress is principal and agency is agent.
2. Congress has ability to intervene, but agency has other influences as well.
3. Congress creates and maintains structural conditions in which the agency operates
Chapter 14: Presidents
Competes w/ Congress for control
Four main weapons
1. Choosing people
2. Altering procedures
3. Reorganizing agencies
4. Coordinating activities
“Harold Seidman described the quest for coordination as the “twentieth-century equivalent of the medieval search for the philosopher’s stone. “ In words heavy with irony, he explained: “If only we can find the right formula for coordination, we can reconcile the irreconcilable, harmonize competing and wholly divergent interests, overcome irrationalities in our government structures, and make hard policy choices to which no one will dissent.” p. 269
“In fact, there is something to be said (and Martin Landau has said it) on behalf of duplication and overlap. In some governmental systems as in many mechanical ones, redundancy is useful. Overlapping agencies, like back-up computers on the space shuttle, can detect errors; duplicating functions is not always wasteful, it can lead to more flexible responses and generate alternatives.” p. 274
Chapter 15: Courts
Causes agencies like EPA to be dominated by lawyers
More activist than previously. Often set broad goals, but still lack understanding of how setting that goal sacrifices a different one. The problem is not that judges can’t learn the scientific/technical aspects of cases they decide, but that they aren’t part of organization and so can’t adjudicate competing goals, only see the goal they are presented with as worth.
Chapter 16: National Differences
U.S. very formal and rule-driven. Sweden very informal and helpful.
Sweden has better or equal results
European politics are like a prize-fight, U.S. politics like a bar-room brawl.
The increase authority of regulators in Europe may actually free them to be more informal
Culture
Deference v. self-assertive; Formal v. informal; group v. individual, impersonal v. personal
In U.S. bureaucracy, “serves a weak state (though one that is growing stronger); it copes with adversarial rather than a deferential culture; it has found its exercise of discretion falling under suspicion and so has tried to constrain that discretion by formal procedures and elaborate rules; it is staffed by individualistic rather than group-oriented workers; and it has taken steps to reduce personal and patrimonial rule in favor of impersonal and rationalistic standards.” p. 312
Part VI Change
Chapter 17: Problems
1. Accountability
2. Equity
3. Responsiveness
4. Efficiency
5. Public Integrity
“A government that is slow to build rinks but is honest and accountable in its actions and properly responsive to its constituencies may be a very efficient government, if we measure efficiency by taking into account all of the valued outputs.”
Waste is primarily congressional directed waste….where there is waste.
There is an optimal level of waste in any organization, the level where eliminating waste costs more (in the short and long-term) than simply tolerating it.
All actors have rational incentives to overstates benefits and understate costs of new weapons systems.
“Constitutional order is animated by the desire to make government ‘inefficient’” p. 326
We desire to be both just and benevolent, this creates red-tape by trying to have neutral (just) rules that nonetheless are tailored to individuals so that they are benevolent.
Agencies know that uncertainty is power.
Chapter 18: Rules
Come from Congress, sometimes conflict.
Chapter 19: Markets
Public v. Private managers.
1. Public less able to define efficient outcome
2. Public less incentive to achieve efficient outcome
3. Public less authority to impose efficient outcome
Two notable exceptions are hospitals and electric utilities
Private is often more efficient for three reasons
1. Lower labor costs
2. Better management
3. Competition
Transaction costs may determine when it is efficient to outsource v. keep services in-house, much as it does for private firms
Some tasks cannot be outsourced because they are sovereign tasks.
Chapter 20: Bureaucracy and the Public Interest
Charles Wolf “both markets and governments have their imperfections; many things we might want to do collectively require us to choose between unsatisfactory alternatives.”
Wilson suggests modestly deregulated government, although there are concerns about maintaining discipline in the absence of competition.
5 recommendations
1. Executives should understand their organizations culture
2. Negotiate to determine essential v. inessential constraints
3. Match authority and control to tasks of organization
4. Judge organizations by results
5. Keep the #, size, and power of organizations driven by SOPs as small as possible
Most problems of bureaucracy are actually governance problems
U.S. system does manage to have both rules and openness.
All things considered the accomplishments of organizations are quite impressive.
Notes on James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy
“public management is not an arena in which to find Big Answers; it is a world of settled institutions designed to allow imperfect people to use flawed procedures to cope with insoluble problems.” p. 375
Preface to the New Edition
Bureaucrats have a variety of preferences, not just salary, rank, and power
Personal experiences w/ bureaucracy tend to be good, but citizens dislike in abstract
Part 1: Organizations
Chapter 1: Armies, Prisons, Schools
German Army v. French Army, Texas Prisons v. Mexican Prisons, Carver High School Turnaroud
Chapter 2: Organization Matters
Explanation of why his 3 examples in Chapter 1 made a difference
“Only two groups of people deny that organization matters: economists and everybody else” p. 23
The bottom line is in Madison’s Federalist Paper #51, on the structure of checks and balances. http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?f...
Part 2: Operators
Chapter 3: Circumstances
Operators deal with hands on work. “the central fact of daily life was ...Your task was to manage these people so as to minimize the threats and inconveniences they posed for you.” p. 39
Regulation writers prefer the concrete to the abstract, OSHA example
“Regulation writers find it much easier to address safety than health hazards. The former are technically easier to find, describe, assess, and control than the latter…..But if a worker develops cancer fifteen years after starting work in a chemical plant, the cause of the cancer will be uncertain and controversial. The cost of the disease will be hard to calculate. The solution will be hard to specify.” p. 42
Peer expectations determine both how hard people work and what they think their job actually is.
Chapter 4: Beliefs
Attitudes compete with incentives, and incentives frequently win.
Attitudes are most likely to determine behavior in weakly defined roles.
The presumption of ‘goal displacement’ is not backed up by studies, many bureaucrats seem to focus on long-term goals and be willing to take risks.
Chapter 5: Interests
Engineering efficiency came to define the TVA, so environmentalists were shut out.
FMC (Federal Maritime Commission) instead was defined by the need to handle a large amount of paperwork, so they assumed rates were reasonable if not challenged by a shipper
There are 3 main restraints on capture
1. Lower costs of political organization
2. Redistribution of Political Access
3. Beliefs
Chapter 6: Culture
Org culture a vague concept, but no less real than individual personality
Ex: universities have a culture that rewards research more than teaching
The cost of a clear mission is that tasks that are not considered part of that mission are performed poorly.
Part III: Managers
Chapter 7: Constraints
3 key ones
1. Cannot retain earnings
2. Cannot allocate factors of production
3. Must serve goals not of own choosing
“whereas business management focuses on the bottom line (that is, profits), government focuses on the top line (that is, constraints)” p. 115
Goal of congress is to maximize benefits to citizens and minimize administrative costs, hence underpaid bureaucrats in poor offices handing out lavish checks. This refutes economist’s theory that bureaucrats use their superior knowledge to lie to congress and expand their budgets.
Rules are mainly imposed externally. Political rules, not bureaucratic ones.
Congress tends to value fairness over efficiency. Hence Bureaucrats can’t consider personal knowledge in contracting out work.
Emphasize on fairness is, “not because the American Government is committed heart and soul to fairness as an abstract social good but because if a procurement decision is questioned it is much easier to justify the decision if it can be shown that the decision was ‘fairly’ made on the basis of ‘objective’ critieria.”
USPS first proposed eliminating Saturday delivery in 1977
The more goals an agency has the riskier it is for managers to trust operators to prioritize those goals
Chapter 8: People
Government has changed to involve more professionals and (relatively) fewer clerks.
Merit pay is usually resisted by workers and sometimes costs more to implement.
The example of teaching, 2nd wave reform suggested heavy regulations on becoming a teacher but fewer regulations once one was a teacher.
Chapter 9: Compliance
Shirking can be a problem, but difficult if not impossible to incentivize with pay based on marginal productivity of labor.
“Bureaucrats have preferences. Among them is the desire to do the job.” p. 156
Mission can be formed from
1. Purpose
2. Status
3. Solidarity
4 types of agencies
Outputs observed Outputs not observed
Outcomes observed Production Craft
Outcomes not observed Procedural Coping
Production
“Work that produces measurable outcomes tends to drive out work that produces unmeasurable outcomes.” p. 161
Procedural
“putting the fig leaf of professionalism over the nakedness of unknown outcomes will not fool anybody” p. 164
Standard Operating Procedures become pervasive. “If it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t move, pick it up; if it is too big to pick up, paint it.” p. 164
Craft
“Public management – or at least good public management – is not so relentlessly utilitarian as to think that only results matter. One reason for this is that every public agency produces many kinds of outcomes – not just progress toward the primary goal of the agency, but also conformity to the contextual goals and constraints in which the agency is enmeshed.” p. 168
Coping
Conflict between management and operators, bias towards those few measurable outcomes.
Part IV Executives
Chapter 10: Turf
Autonomy is often more important than budget size
Agencies attempt to match mission and jurisdiction
Turf battles create coordination problems
Chapter 11: Strategies
In D.C. the appearance of success is (often) as important as success.
Finding an external constituency is key
Four general types of execs
1. Advocate
2. Decision maker
3. Budget cutter
4. Negotiator
Chapter 12: Innovation
Organizations by nature resist innovation, they are built around SOPs.
Bureaucracies only like new tech if it leaves existing tasks unchanged.
Executives are safe if they fail for the right reason, i.e. reasons that will be respected by their peers. (peer pressure never really stops)
Part V Context
Chapter 13: Congress
Congressional control means one of three things
1. Congress controls day to day, Congress is principal and agency is agent.
2. Congress has ability to intervene, but agency has other influences as well.
3. Congress creates and maintains structural conditions in which the agency operates
Chapter 14: Presidents
Competes w/ Congress for control
Four main weapons
1. Choosing people
2. Altering procedures
3. Reorganizing agencies
4. Coordinating activities
“Harold Seidman described the quest for coordination as the “twentieth-century equivalent of the medieval search for the philosopher’s stone. “ In words heavy with irony, he explained: “If only we can find the right formula for coordination, we can reconcile the irreconcilable, harmonize competing and wholly divergent interests, overcome irrationalities in our government structures, and make hard policy choices to which no one will dissent.” p. 269
“In fact, there is something to be said (and Martin Landau has said it) on behalf of duplication and overlap. In some governmental systems as in many mechanical ones, redundancy is useful. Overlapping agencies, like back-up computers on the space shuttle, can detect errors; duplicating functions is not always wasteful, it can lead to more flexible responses and generate alternatives.” p. 274
Chapter 15: Courts
Causes agencies like EPA to be dominated by lawyers
More activist than previously. Often set broad goals, but still lack understanding of how setting that goal sacrifices a different one. The problem is not that judges can’t learn the scientific/technical aspects of cases they decide, but that they aren’t part of organization and so can’t adjudicate competing goals, only see the goal they are presented with as worth.
Chapter 16: National Differences
U.S. very formal and rule-driven. Sweden very informal and helpful.
Sweden has better or equal results
European politics are like a prize-fight, U.S. politics like a bar-room brawl.
The increase authority of regulators in Europe may actually free them to be more informal
Culture
Deference v. self-assertive; Formal v. informal; group v. individual, impersonal v. personal
In U.S. bureaucracy, “serves a weak state (though one that is growing stronger); it copes with adversarial rather than a deferential culture; it has found its exercise of discretion falling under suspicion and so has tried to constrain that discretion by formal procedures and elaborate rules; it is staffed by individualistic rather than group-oriented workers; and it has taken steps to reduce personal and patrimonial rule in favor of impersonal and rationalistic standards.” p. 312
Part VI Change
Chapter 17: Problems
1. Accountability
2. Equity
3. Responsiveness
4. Efficiency
5. Public Integrity
“A government that is slow to build rinks but is honest and accountable in its actions and properly responsive to its constituencies may be a very efficient government, if we measure efficiency by taking into account all of the valued outputs.”
Waste is primarily congressional directed waste….where there is waste.
There is an optimal level of waste in any organization, the level where eliminating waste costs more (in the short and long-term) than simply tolerating it.
All actors have rational incentives to overstates benefits and understate costs of new weapons systems.
“Constitutional order is animated by the desire to make government ‘inefficient’” p. 326
We desire to be both just and benevolent, this creates red-tape by trying to have neutral (just) rules that nonetheless are tailored to individuals so that they are benevolent.
Agencies know that uncertainty is power.
Chapter 18: Rules
Come from Congress, sometimes conflict.
Chapter 19: Markets
Public v. Private managers.
1. Public less able to define efficient outcome
2. Public less incentive to achieve efficient outcome
3. Public less authority to impose efficient outcome
Two notable exceptions are hospitals and electric utilities
Private is often more efficient for three reasons
1. Lower labor costs
2. Better management
3. Competition
Transaction costs may determine when it is efficient to outsource v. keep services in-house, much as it does for private firms
Some tasks cannot be outsourced because they are sovereign tasks.
Chapter 20: Bureaucracy and the Public Interest
Charles Wolf “both markets and governments have their imperfections; many things we might want to do collectively require us to choose between unsatisfactory alternatives.”
Wilson suggests modestly deregulated government, although there are concerns about maintaining discipline in the absence of competition.
5 recommendations
1. Executives should understand their organizations culture
2. Negotiate to determine essential v. inessential constraints
3. Match authority and control to tasks of organization
4. Judge organizations by results
5. Keep the #, size, and power of organizations driven by SOPs as small as possible
Most problems of bureaucracy are actually governance problems
U.S. system does manage to have both rules and openness.
All things considered the accomplishments of organizations are quite impressive.
March 19, 2014
This is a very dense book, highly in need of a more recent revision. The narrative is difficult; I often felt like I was slogging through the text purely through determination rather than a sense of fulfillment or enjoyment.
Still, the book offers a very informative historical context of our government agencies and identifies several anecdotal instances of the best (and worst) practices of these agencies. Some of the examples were fascinating and I can see how strong leadership can play a large role in the effectiveness of an organization.
I attended a course to learn my role as an 'Action Officer' on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, and this book came highly recommended at this course. I know that I would never have picked this book otherwise, but it was still a worthwhile read and I certainly derived some insight into the reasons why our government operates the way it does.
I thought it was interesting that the author recommended reading the Federalist Paper No. 51 by James Madison in order to really get to the 'bottom line' about how and why bureaucracies are run they way they are.
I appreciate that even back then, the concept that "the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others," and "giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others."
Overall, I thought that the book was very enlightening and informative. A bit dry in places and in dire need of a revision, but a worthwhile read nonetheless.
interesting quotes:
"The inference one may draw is that creating a secure and fair environment is a necessary precondition to learning." (p. 22)
"Effective schools tend to have strong principals who provide leadership in instructional matters, to have teachers with high expectations of student achievement, to emphasize learning basic skills, to maintain good order and discipline, to evaluate students on a regular basis, and to devote large amounts of time to study." (pp. 22-23)
"Since no general, at least in modern times, can know with any certainty what the next war will be like, all he has to draw upon in making his preparations are experience and conjecture. Since conjecture is, after all, conjectural, experience inevitably will play a large and proper role in guiding his plans. Successful generals do not ignore the lessons of the past. No one knows in advance what the lessons will be, but some people guess better than others." (p. 43)
"What is clear is that for whatever reason tasks were defined more by available technology and prior experiences than by a clear understanding of what kinds of tasks were appropriate to the conditions of war in Vietnam." (p. 44)
"The army experience produces people who can accept, more easily than representatives of other services, the coordinating tasks that are the reason for existence of joint military commands and staffs." (p. 58)
"What is distinctive about members of a profession, at least for purposes of explaining organizational behavior, is not how much status, income, or deference they receive but the sources of these rewards. A professional is someone who receives important occupational rewards from a reference group whose membership is limited to people who have undergone specialized formal education and have accepted a group-defined code of proper conduct. The more the individual allows his or her behavior to be influenced by the desire to obtain rewards from this reference group, the more professional is his or her orientation." (p. 60)
"Professionals are expected to put the well-being of their clients or the search for the truth above their own interests. Society invests heavily in the training of professionals in part because the clients - medical patients, for example - are unable to evaluate the quality of the procedures to which they are subjected." (p. 149)
"In short, well-run public schools are possible when talented, dedicated people are at work in sympathetic communities. It is good to know that this occurs; it is too much to expect that it will occur everywhere." (p. 153)
"There is a kind of Gresham's Law at work in many government bureaus: Work that produces measurable outcomes tends to drive out work that produces unmeasurable outcomes." (p. 161)
"The principal challenge facing public managers is to understand the importance of carefully defining the core tasks of the organization and to find both pecuniary and nonpecuniary incentives that will induce operators to perform those tasks as defined. Shirking is minimized by making certain that the proper performance of core tasks both enhances the careers of operators and confers upon them the esteem of their co-workers. The latter requires building a supportive culture around those core tasks." (p. 174)
"The army's fear was well-grounded; whenever the defense budget is to be cut, it usually turns out to be easier to cut people than to cut equipment." (p. 185)
[Michael Blumenthal] "In Washington, 'you can be successful if you appear to be successful...appearance is as important as reality.'" (p. 197)
"The principal source of power is a constituency. This plain fact repeated by generations of students of public administration still seems lost on those people (business executives, in particular) who upon taking a high-level job in Washington complain about the amount of time they must spend attending to the demands and needs of outside groups. All this time spent currying favor and placating critics, they argue, is time taken away from the real work of the agency, which is to 'do the job.' No. The real work of the government executive is to curry favor and placate critics. Skilled executives can do this without currying or placating in any demeaning or dishonest way, but the currying and the placating must be done, one way or another." (pp. 204-205)
"Innovation is not inevitably good; there are at least as many bad changes as good. And government agencies are especially vulnerable to bad changes because, absent a market that would impose a fitness test on any organizational change, a changed public bureaucracy can persist in doing the wrong thing for years. The Ford Motor Company should not have made the Edsel, but if the government had owned Ford it would still be making Edsels." (p. 227)
"The advent of first the telegraph, then the telephone, the radio, computers, and finally the helicopter gave to military commanders an increasing ability to receive and transmit orders and in the case of the helicopter to look down directly onto the battlefield. But as Martin Creveld has shown in his penetrating look at the role of command in war, improvements in communication tend to be used by high-level commanders to reduce the initiative and discretion of lower-level commanders, often with disastrous results. Creveld is quite blunt about the matter: 'those armies have been most successful which did not turn their troops into automatons, did not attempt to control everything from the top, and allowed subordinate commanders considerable latitude.'" (p. 228) [Although this was written prior to the era of full motion video feeds from unmanned aerial vehicles, I submit the principle still holds.]
"More frequent authorizations meant more chances to devise and impose rules and policy guidance on agencies. That in turn has meant a more crowded legislative calendar and a reduction in administrative discretion. This is most evident in the case of the Defense Department. In Congress there are now 29 committees and 55 subcommittees that in one way or another oversee defense activities. In 1984 they held 441 hearings. Whereas in 1977 the House debated the defense authorization bill for three days and considered no amendments, in 1986 it debated it for thirteen days and considered 148 amendments. A comparable change occurred in the Senate. In 1970 the Congress requested of the Pentagon 36 reports; in 1985 it requested 1,172." (p. 244) [I would love to see the data for 2013.]
[Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, quoting the author as the source of the idea] "'Iron Law of Emulation': 'Whenever any branch of the government acquires a new technique which enhances its power in relation to the other branches, that technique will soon be adopted by the other branches as well.'" (p. 259)
"Culture is to a group what personality is to an individual, a disposition that leads people to respond differently to the same stimuli." (p. 302)
"Americans admire their form of government, but do not admire or accord high status to the officials who work for it. More precisely, they tend to revere the presidency but not the president; they dislike Congress and 'the bureaucracy' though usually they have a good opinion of their own representatives and report that their experience with a given bureaucrat was satisfactory." (p. 304)
"The checks and balances of the American constitutional system reflect our desire to reduce the arbitrariness of official rule. That desire is based squarely on the premise that inefficiency is a small price to pay for freedom and responsiveness. Congressional oversight, judicial review, interest-group participation, media investigations, and formalized procedures all are intended to check administrative discretion. It is not hyperbole to say that the constitutional order is animated by the desire to make the government 'inefficient.'" (p. 326)
"Things are not made better by our national tendency to engage in bureaucrat-bashing. One has to have some perspective on this. It is true that bureaucracies prefer the present to the future, the known to the unknown, and the dominant mission to rival missions; many agencies in fact are skeptical about things that were 'NIH' - Not
invented Here. Every social grouping, whether a neighborhood, a nation, or an organization, acquires a culture; changing that culture is like moving a cemetery: it is always difficult and some believe it is sacrilegious. It is also true, as many conservatives argue, that the government tries to do things that it is incapable of doing well, just as it is true, as many liberals allege, that the government in fact does many things well enough. As Charles Wolf Jr. has argued, both markets and governments have their imperfections; many things we might want to do collectively require us to choose between unsatisfactory alternatives." (p. 368)
"All complex organizations display bureaucratic problems of confusion, red tape, and the avoidance of responsibility. Those problems are much greater in government bureaucracies because government itself is the institutionalization of confusion (arising out of the need to moderate competing demands); of red tape (arising out of the need to satisfy demands that cannot be moderated); and of avoided responsibility (arising out of the desire to retain power by minimizing criticism)." (p. 375)
Still, the book offers a very informative historical context of our government agencies and identifies several anecdotal instances of the best (and worst) practices of these agencies. Some of the examples were fascinating and I can see how strong leadership can play a large role in the effectiveness of an organization.
I attended a course to learn my role as an 'Action Officer' on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, and this book came highly recommended at this course. I know that I would never have picked this book otherwise, but it was still a worthwhile read and I certainly derived some insight into the reasons why our government operates the way it does.
I thought it was interesting that the author recommended reading the Federalist Paper No. 51 by James Madison in order to really get to the 'bottom line' about how and why bureaucracies are run they way they are.
I appreciate that even back then, the concept that "the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others," and "giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others."
Overall, I thought that the book was very enlightening and informative. A bit dry in places and in dire need of a revision, but a worthwhile read nonetheless.
interesting quotes:
"The inference one may draw is that creating a secure and fair environment is a necessary precondition to learning." (p. 22)
"Effective schools tend to have strong principals who provide leadership in instructional matters, to have teachers with high expectations of student achievement, to emphasize learning basic skills, to maintain good order and discipline, to evaluate students on a regular basis, and to devote large amounts of time to study." (pp. 22-23)
"Since no general, at least in modern times, can know with any certainty what the next war will be like, all he has to draw upon in making his preparations are experience and conjecture. Since conjecture is, after all, conjectural, experience inevitably will play a large and proper role in guiding his plans. Successful generals do not ignore the lessons of the past. No one knows in advance what the lessons will be, but some people guess better than others." (p. 43)
"What is clear is that for whatever reason tasks were defined more by available technology and prior experiences than by a clear understanding of what kinds of tasks were appropriate to the conditions of war in Vietnam." (p. 44)
"The army experience produces people who can accept, more easily than representatives of other services, the coordinating tasks that are the reason for existence of joint military commands and staffs." (p. 58)
"What is distinctive about members of a profession, at least for purposes of explaining organizational behavior, is not how much status, income, or deference they receive but the sources of these rewards. A professional is someone who receives important occupational rewards from a reference group whose membership is limited to people who have undergone specialized formal education and have accepted a group-defined code of proper conduct. The more the individual allows his or her behavior to be influenced by the desire to obtain rewards from this reference group, the more professional is his or her orientation." (p. 60)
"Professionals are expected to put the well-being of their clients or the search for the truth above their own interests. Society invests heavily in the training of professionals in part because the clients - medical patients, for example - are unable to evaluate the quality of the procedures to which they are subjected." (p. 149)
"In short, well-run public schools are possible when talented, dedicated people are at work in sympathetic communities. It is good to know that this occurs; it is too much to expect that it will occur everywhere." (p. 153)
"There is a kind of Gresham's Law at work in many government bureaus: Work that produces measurable outcomes tends to drive out work that produces unmeasurable outcomes." (p. 161)
"The principal challenge facing public managers is to understand the importance of carefully defining the core tasks of the organization and to find both pecuniary and nonpecuniary incentives that will induce operators to perform those tasks as defined. Shirking is minimized by making certain that the proper performance of core tasks both enhances the careers of operators and confers upon them the esteem of their co-workers. The latter requires building a supportive culture around those core tasks." (p. 174)
"The army's fear was well-grounded; whenever the defense budget is to be cut, it usually turns out to be easier to cut people than to cut equipment." (p. 185)
[Michael Blumenthal] "In Washington, 'you can be successful if you appear to be successful...appearance is as important as reality.'" (p. 197)
"The principal source of power is a constituency. This plain fact repeated by generations of students of public administration still seems lost on those people (business executives, in particular) who upon taking a high-level job in Washington complain about the amount of time they must spend attending to the demands and needs of outside groups. All this time spent currying favor and placating critics, they argue, is time taken away from the real work of the agency, which is to 'do the job.' No. The real work of the government executive is to curry favor and placate critics. Skilled executives can do this without currying or placating in any demeaning or dishonest way, but the currying and the placating must be done, one way or another." (pp. 204-205)
"Innovation is not inevitably good; there are at least as many bad changes as good. And government agencies are especially vulnerable to bad changes because, absent a market that would impose a fitness test on any organizational change, a changed public bureaucracy can persist in doing the wrong thing for years. The Ford Motor Company should not have made the Edsel, but if the government had owned Ford it would still be making Edsels." (p. 227)
"The advent of first the telegraph, then the telephone, the radio, computers, and finally the helicopter gave to military commanders an increasing ability to receive and transmit orders and in the case of the helicopter to look down directly onto the battlefield. But as Martin Creveld has shown in his penetrating look at the role of command in war, improvements in communication tend to be used by high-level commanders to reduce the initiative and discretion of lower-level commanders, often with disastrous results. Creveld is quite blunt about the matter: 'those armies have been most successful which did not turn their troops into automatons, did not attempt to control everything from the top, and allowed subordinate commanders considerable latitude.'" (p. 228) [Although this was written prior to the era of full motion video feeds from unmanned aerial vehicles, I submit the principle still holds.]
"More frequent authorizations meant more chances to devise and impose rules and policy guidance on agencies. That in turn has meant a more crowded legislative calendar and a reduction in administrative discretion. This is most evident in the case of the Defense Department. In Congress there are now 29 committees and 55 subcommittees that in one way or another oversee defense activities. In 1984 they held 441 hearings. Whereas in 1977 the House debated the defense authorization bill for three days and considered no amendments, in 1986 it debated it for thirteen days and considered 148 amendments. A comparable change occurred in the Senate. In 1970 the Congress requested of the Pentagon 36 reports; in 1985 it requested 1,172." (p. 244) [I would love to see the data for 2013.]
[Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, quoting the author as the source of the idea] "'Iron Law of Emulation': 'Whenever any branch of the government acquires a new technique which enhances its power in relation to the other branches, that technique will soon be adopted by the other branches as well.'" (p. 259)
"Culture is to a group what personality is to an individual, a disposition that leads people to respond differently to the same stimuli." (p. 302)
"Americans admire their form of government, but do not admire or accord high status to the officials who work for it. More precisely, they tend to revere the presidency but not the president; they dislike Congress and 'the bureaucracy' though usually they have a good opinion of their own representatives and report that their experience with a given bureaucrat was satisfactory." (p. 304)
"The checks and balances of the American constitutional system reflect our desire to reduce the arbitrariness of official rule. That desire is based squarely on the premise that inefficiency is a small price to pay for freedom and responsiveness. Congressional oversight, judicial review, interest-group participation, media investigations, and formalized procedures all are intended to check administrative discretion. It is not hyperbole to say that the constitutional order is animated by the desire to make the government 'inefficient.'" (p. 326)
"Things are not made better by our national tendency to engage in bureaucrat-bashing. One has to have some perspective on this. It is true that bureaucracies prefer the present to the future, the known to the unknown, and the dominant mission to rival missions; many agencies in fact are skeptical about things that were 'NIH' - Not
invented Here. Every social grouping, whether a neighborhood, a nation, or an organization, acquires a culture; changing that culture is like moving a cemetery: it is always difficult and some believe it is sacrilegious. It is also true, as many conservatives argue, that the government tries to do things that it is incapable of doing well, just as it is true, as many liberals allege, that the government in fact does many things well enough. As Charles Wolf Jr. has argued, both markets and governments have their imperfections; many things we might want to do collectively require us to choose between unsatisfactory alternatives." (p. 368)
"All complex organizations display bureaucratic problems of confusion, red tape, and the avoidance of responsibility. Those problems are much greater in government bureaucracies because government itself is the institutionalization of confusion (arising out of the need to moderate competing demands); of red tape (arising out of the need to satisfy demands that cannot be moderated); and of avoided responsibility (arising out of the desire to retain power by minimizing criticism)." (p. 375)
October 12, 2020
Humans can increase their potential for productive work enormously by breaking a job down into tasks that individuals can perform, and cooperating so that everyone works toward a common goal. In this way, the production of a group is far greater than what would be accomplished by the same number of people working in parallel, but independently. Although to see the gains from cooperation, the work must be coordinated; the distribution of tasks and the timing of sequential processes must be carefully controlled. Effective coordination requires trust between the people engaging in the cooperative effort, however, humans are not able to know more than a few tens of other people well enough to justify that trust, whereas cooperative projects may require vastly more people than this small number. The most common solution to this problem is to organize people into a hierarchical pyramid of trust relationships where a single person coordinates the work of up to a few tens of people, then another individual will coordinate up to a few tens of coordinators, and so on to whatever size of organization is required. This hierarchy is the basis for the bureaucratic organizations that dominate governments, businesses, militaries, and most other institutions that depend on human cooperation. James Q. Wilson gives one of the most comprehensive and lucid accounts of how bureaucratic organizations work in his book, “Bureaucracy”. His focus is almost entirely on government bureaucracies, and in particular, the government of the United States, and his method is to use actual examples to illustrate his assertions; so much so that the book is often somewhat devoid of abstract generalizations but at least he never generalizes without illustration.
Wilson begins with several examples of publicly run organizations where changes in the bureaucratic structure lead to dramatic changes in the function of these organizations. In short, the manner in which bureaucratic organizations are structured and run matters. It matters a great deal, and yet people usually view a bureaucracy as a monolithic, unchanging leviathan that simply feeds its own persistence. At one end of the spectrum is the economists’ view of a bureaucratic organization as a firm, driven entirely by the will of a single entrepreneur; at the other end is the view that the people who work for the bureaucracy shape the organization. In fact, the mechanisms by which coordination occurs within a bureaucracy are varied, nuanced, and exist at every level within the organization. We need public organizations so we may as well learn how they work so that we can get the best out of them.
The people in a bureaucracy who actually do the work of the organization are the operators; if coordination happened by magic, then they would be the only people employed by the organization. But coordination is required, and the quality and efficiency with which the operators achieve the critical tasks of an organization depend entirely on how that coordination is managed. Government agencies are typically monopoly providers of a service and the goals assigned to the agency are often vague and hard to achieve. The circumstances in which operators work will often define the tasks more fully than generalized goals. In cases where tasks are weakly defined, the attitudes and beliefs of a worker will significantly define a worker’s conception of the task and the manner in which it should be carried out. Indeed, when new government agencies are created, they are initially staffed with people from other agencies, thus vague goals come to be defined by what people already know how to do rather than by shaping the tasks to fit the goal. Political ideology is rarely imposed by operators on their tasks, though politicians constantly fear their policies will be undermined by such efforts, however, professional codes of conduct, for those operators who answer to regulatory bodies, will shape how tasks are defined.
The interests that the agency serves will influence the goals of the agency, and thereby affect how the operators define their tasks. An agency can be the product of client politics, in which a dominant interest group favours the goals of the agency. It can be the product of entrepreneurial politics, in which a dominant interest group is hostile to its goals. It can be the product of interest-group politics, in which rival interest groups are in conflict over its goals, or it can be the product of majoritarian politics in which there are no important interest groups. In the first three cases, interest groups will attempt to change the ways operators’ tasks are defined to further their own interests, by providing selective information that is seemingly helpful to the operators, or by lobbying (or capturing) elected officials who can influence the agency. Thus the organizational culture, the patterns by which an organization thinks about its central tasks, is critical to prevent an organization from being unduly influenced by outside interest groups. When both operators and managers share and embrace a culture, then the agency develops a distinctive competence; a sense of organizational mission exists to help guide the operators in defining and carrying out their tasks. However, tasks that don’t fit within the organizational culture will tend to be neglected. If there is no opportunity for advancement within an organization by performing a particular task well, then that task will not be performed well. So just as important as developing an organizational culture, is to avoid adding new responsibilities to an agency that do not fit within its current mission.
Operators do the work of an organization but it is the managers that coordinate that work. Here Wilson takes us through an illuminating discussion of how public sector managers have a much different, and more difficult, job than managers in the private sector. First among the differences between the two sectors is the addition of constraints on public sector managers that are imposed by elected officials, ultimately coming from the will of the people to ensure that government agencies act fairly toward all citizens. Private firms acquire capital by retaining earnings, borrowing, or selling shares; a government agency is only allowed to persuade a legislature to appropriate capital. A firm hires, promotes, demotes, and fires people with considerable freedom; a government agency is told how many people it can hire, at what pay rate, what rules must be followed to select new hires as well as promote, demote, or fire employees, all of which can be reviewed by the courts. A firm buys goods and services with complete freedom, notably including the freedom to develop a relationship with a trusted vendor, while a government agency must formally advertise for bids and accept the lowest without any prejudice based on knowledge of the reliability of vendors. A firm can close or combine offices and factories that are not profitable; a government agency must seek the permission of the legislature (including the representative of the riding where said closures and subsequent job losses are to occur). A firm budgets with complete freedom while a government agency must submit their budget to a legislature for approval. We often hear of commissioned reports that show how inefficiencies in government spending leads to billions of dollars being spent that could be saved if the government was run like a private business. Left unreported, however, is that running government agencies in that manner would lead to accusations of collusion, favouritism, and sweetheart deals for friends and donors, and these accusations would be justified. In fact, it is the citizens themselves who insist on not running the government like a private business by imposing constraints upon it.
Managers of government agencies are principally concerned with recruiting, assigning, motivating, and rewarding the people who make up the operators within the bureaucracy, while complying with the imposed constraints and trying to achieve the agency’s goals. Managers will attempt to measure the operators’ outputs (what they do) and outcomes (the results of their work). Agencies can be broadly classified based on how well managers are able to measure and react to these two factors. A production agency is one in which both outputs and outcomes are observable. Managers will tend to focus on those outputs and outcomes that are most easily observable, thus giving operators an incentive to juke the stats to game the system. Procedural agencies have observable outputs but not outcomes and are best served by using professionals as operators. However, managers are loathe to allow operators to make independent decisions so the focus is placed on following procedures without looking too carefully at whether the goals are being met. Craft organizations have easily measured outcomes but the activity of the operators is difficult to observe. Corruption is a concern here so managers must instil a strong sense of duty and professionalism on the operators. Coping organizations are those in which neither the outputs nor outcomes are easily observable, leading to a high degree of conflict between managers and operators. Public education is a good example of a coping organization (here Wilson compares public and private education, noting the better outcome of private education without noticing the effect of being able to choose the student population—a notably amateurish error that is rare for Wilson). Although the types of agencies are easily classified, the effects of different management styles are not yet well understood (though popular writers give them catchy names). Wilson is particularly concerned that we should develop such an understanding so that the sense of mission and the achievement of goals in government agencies can be improved.
Sitting atop the agencies’ org charts are the executives, whose autonomy often depends upon the particular interests of politicians at any given time. In general, executives are extreme egomaniacs. They must choose between managing their departments (a well run department is nigh invisible) and managing their reputation (a bold policy implementation, when successful, can make a reputation): they almost always choose their reputation because they have no doubt that even if they fail, they will continue to command a comparable salary in their next appointment. What is not often appreciated with government agency executives is that their power comes almost entirely from their constituency. They must put in the time to manage those outside groups whose interest is served by the agency if they wish to have any impact at all. This is especially true if the executive wants to introduce innovation in the way that tasks are performed by the agency. Innovation in settled organizations requires the exercise of judgement, personal skill, and misdirection—qualities that are rare in executives thus successful innovation is also rare.
Executives of public organizations must also answer to politicians who, unlike members of a board of directors of a private firm, can never get enough of blaming the bureaucracy for various problems. This despite the fact that politicians are the people who create agencies, give them their mission, and appoint executives to achieve the stated goals of the organization. Chief among political concerns is the coordination of multiple agencies to bring about policy implementation that is harmonized with the political philosophy of the party in power. In private business, coordination between firms occurs through competition in the marketplace, a solution that is not available to public agencies. Rarely noted, however, is that private competition depends upon redundancy; multiple firms doing the same thing with those who do it best becoming the winners in the marketplace (and those who fail being conspicuously ignored lest the waste and inefficiencies of multiple bankruptcies impose itself on the rhetoric of free market supremacy). Wilson notes that it is precisely when a government bureaucracy develops redundancy within its agencies that coordination between agencies is actually effective; a small committee that selects the best approach from several overlapping options. The usual tactic of forming a joint steering committee to impose directives on separate agencies has never succeeded, nor is it likely to in the future. This is an important observation by Wilson but it requires the waste and redundancy of “free” markets to be put on display in order to demonstrate why coordination works in this case, and there is simply no audience in America that wants to hear that message.
Up to this point, Wilson focuses entirely on the bureaucracy of the U.S. government. In order to better understand some of the peculiar aspects of American government agencies, he compares bureaucratic regulation of private business in the U.S. with other countries. He finds that the adversarial culture of American regulators is a reflection of the political culture in the U.S. created by the separation of powers (countries with parliaments in which executive and legislative powers are combined tend to be much more cooperative in their approach to regulation).
To close the book, Wilson looks at the problems of bureaucratic organization with a particular emphasis on the perception of problems that comes from comparing government and private organizations. These perceived problems almost always center around isolating comparable tasks and showing how much more efficient private business can be at accomplishing these tasks. However, if the constraints imposed by the demands of accountability, equality, and fiscal responsibility are considered, the highlighted efficiencies evaporate into very small differences. Since it is the people themselves who make these demands, it is a dishonest characterization to seek private sector efficiency in government agencies without also specifying which constraints one is willing to sacrifice to achieve these efficiencies. Being somewhat beholden to the times in which he was writing, Wilson does make a plea for increased deregulation of the bureaucracy (a tragic rhetorical decision given how deregulation has played out since the book was written) and privatization of government agencies where market forces can operate. Of course in recent years we have seen how the redundancies and waste in the private sector become socialized through government bailouts, thereby negating the supposed benefits of privatization (where these losses should be borne by the owners and shareholders). This was not so apparent when Wilson was writing, but it takes away much of the impact of the book, coming right at the end. Nevertheless, if one concentrates on the analysis of bureaucratic organization then the book represents a remarkable look into the workings of government bureaucracy.
Wilson begins with several examples of publicly run organizations where changes in the bureaucratic structure lead to dramatic changes in the function of these organizations. In short, the manner in which bureaucratic organizations are structured and run matters. It matters a great deal, and yet people usually view a bureaucracy as a monolithic, unchanging leviathan that simply feeds its own persistence. At one end of the spectrum is the economists’ view of a bureaucratic organization as a firm, driven entirely by the will of a single entrepreneur; at the other end is the view that the people who work for the bureaucracy shape the organization. In fact, the mechanisms by which coordination occurs within a bureaucracy are varied, nuanced, and exist at every level within the organization. We need public organizations so we may as well learn how they work so that we can get the best out of them.
The people in a bureaucracy who actually do the work of the organization are the operators; if coordination happened by magic, then they would be the only people employed by the organization. But coordination is required, and the quality and efficiency with which the operators achieve the critical tasks of an organization depend entirely on how that coordination is managed. Government agencies are typically monopoly providers of a service and the goals assigned to the agency are often vague and hard to achieve. The circumstances in which operators work will often define the tasks more fully than generalized goals. In cases where tasks are weakly defined, the attitudes and beliefs of a worker will significantly define a worker’s conception of the task and the manner in which it should be carried out. Indeed, when new government agencies are created, they are initially staffed with people from other agencies, thus vague goals come to be defined by what people already know how to do rather than by shaping the tasks to fit the goal. Political ideology is rarely imposed by operators on their tasks, though politicians constantly fear their policies will be undermined by such efforts, however, professional codes of conduct, for those operators who answer to regulatory bodies, will shape how tasks are defined.
The interests that the agency serves will influence the goals of the agency, and thereby affect how the operators define their tasks. An agency can be the product of client politics, in which a dominant interest group favours the goals of the agency. It can be the product of entrepreneurial politics, in which a dominant interest group is hostile to its goals. It can be the product of interest-group politics, in which rival interest groups are in conflict over its goals, or it can be the product of majoritarian politics in which there are no important interest groups. In the first three cases, interest groups will attempt to change the ways operators’ tasks are defined to further their own interests, by providing selective information that is seemingly helpful to the operators, or by lobbying (or capturing) elected officials who can influence the agency. Thus the organizational culture, the patterns by which an organization thinks about its central tasks, is critical to prevent an organization from being unduly influenced by outside interest groups. When both operators and managers share and embrace a culture, then the agency develops a distinctive competence; a sense of organizational mission exists to help guide the operators in defining and carrying out their tasks. However, tasks that don’t fit within the organizational culture will tend to be neglected. If there is no opportunity for advancement within an organization by performing a particular task well, then that task will not be performed well. So just as important as developing an organizational culture, is to avoid adding new responsibilities to an agency that do not fit within its current mission.
Operators do the work of an organization but it is the managers that coordinate that work. Here Wilson takes us through an illuminating discussion of how public sector managers have a much different, and more difficult, job than managers in the private sector. First among the differences between the two sectors is the addition of constraints on public sector managers that are imposed by elected officials, ultimately coming from the will of the people to ensure that government agencies act fairly toward all citizens. Private firms acquire capital by retaining earnings, borrowing, or selling shares; a government agency is only allowed to persuade a legislature to appropriate capital. A firm hires, promotes, demotes, and fires people with considerable freedom; a government agency is told how many people it can hire, at what pay rate, what rules must be followed to select new hires as well as promote, demote, or fire employees, all of which can be reviewed by the courts. A firm buys goods and services with complete freedom, notably including the freedom to develop a relationship with a trusted vendor, while a government agency must formally advertise for bids and accept the lowest without any prejudice based on knowledge of the reliability of vendors. A firm can close or combine offices and factories that are not profitable; a government agency must seek the permission of the legislature (including the representative of the riding where said closures and subsequent job losses are to occur). A firm budgets with complete freedom while a government agency must submit their budget to a legislature for approval. We often hear of commissioned reports that show how inefficiencies in government spending leads to billions of dollars being spent that could be saved if the government was run like a private business. Left unreported, however, is that running government agencies in that manner would lead to accusations of collusion, favouritism, and sweetheart deals for friends and donors, and these accusations would be justified. In fact, it is the citizens themselves who insist on not running the government like a private business by imposing constraints upon it.
Managers of government agencies are principally concerned with recruiting, assigning, motivating, and rewarding the people who make up the operators within the bureaucracy, while complying with the imposed constraints and trying to achieve the agency’s goals. Managers will attempt to measure the operators’ outputs (what they do) and outcomes (the results of their work). Agencies can be broadly classified based on how well managers are able to measure and react to these two factors. A production agency is one in which both outputs and outcomes are observable. Managers will tend to focus on those outputs and outcomes that are most easily observable, thus giving operators an incentive to juke the stats to game the system. Procedural agencies have observable outputs but not outcomes and are best served by using professionals as operators. However, managers are loathe to allow operators to make independent decisions so the focus is placed on following procedures without looking too carefully at whether the goals are being met. Craft organizations have easily measured outcomes but the activity of the operators is difficult to observe. Corruption is a concern here so managers must instil a strong sense of duty and professionalism on the operators. Coping organizations are those in which neither the outputs nor outcomes are easily observable, leading to a high degree of conflict between managers and operators. Public education is a good example of a coping organization (here Wilson compares public and private education, noting the better outcome of private education without noticing the effect of being able to choose the student population—a notably amateurish error that is rare for Wilson). Although the types of agencies are easily classified, the effects of different management styles are not yet well understood (though popular writers give them catchy names). Wilson is particularly concerned that we should develop such an understanding so that the sense of mission and the achievement of goals in government agencies can be improved.
Sitting atop the agencies’ org charts are the executives, whose autonomy often depends upon the particular interests of politicians at any given time. In general, executives are extreme egomaniacs. They must choose between managing their departments (a well run department is nigh invisible) and managing their reputation (a bold policy implementation, when successful, can make a reputation): they almost always choose their reputation because they have no doubt that even if they fail, they will continue to command a comparable salary in their next appointment. What is not often appreciated with government agency executives is that their power comes almost entirely from their constituency. They must put in the time to manage those outside groups whose interest is served by the agency if they wish to have any impact at all. This is especially true if the executive wants to introduce innovation in the way that tasks are performed by the agency. Innovation in settled organizations requires the exercise of judgement, personal skill, and misdirection—qualities that are rare in executives thus successful innovation is also rare.
Executives of public organizations must also answer to politicians who, unlike members of a board of directors of a private firm, can never get enough of blaming the bureaucracy for various problems. This despite the fact that politicians are the people who create agencies, give them their mission, and appoint executives to achieve the stated goals of the organization. Chief among political concerns is the coordination of multiple agencies to bring about policy implementation that is harmonized with the political philosophy of the party in power. In private business, coordination between firms occurs through competition in the marketplace, a solution that is not available to public agencies. Rarely noted, however, is that private competition depends upon redundancy; multiple firms doing the same thing with those who do it best becoming the winners in the marketplace (and those who fail being conspicuously ignored lest the waste and inefficiencies of multiple bankruptcies impose itself on the rhetoric of free market supremacy). Wilson notes that it is precisely when a government bureaucracy develops redundancy within its agencies that coordination between agencies is actually effective; a small committee that selects the best approach from several overlapping options. The usual tactic of forming a joint steering committee to impose directives on separate agencies has never succeeded, nor is it likely to in the future. This is an important observation by Wilson but it requires the waste and redundancy of “free” markets to be put on display in order to demonstrate why coordination works in this case, and there is simply no audience in America that wants to hear that message.
Up to this point, Wilson focuses entirely on the bureaucracy of the U.S. government. In order to better understand some of the peculiar aspects of American government agencies, he compares bureaucratic regulation of private business in the U.S. with other countries. He finds that the adversarial culture of American regulators is a reflection of the political culture in the U.S. created by the separation of powers (countries with parliaments in which executive and legislative powers are combined tend to be much more cooperative in their approach to regulation).
To close the book, Wilson looks at the problems of bureaucratic organization with a particular emphasis on the perception of problems that comes from comparing government and private organizations. These perceived problems almost always center around isolating comparable tasks and showing how much more efficient private business can be at accomplishing these tasks. However, if the constraints imposed by the demands of accountability, equality, and fiscal responsibility are considered, the highlighted efficiencies evaporate into very small differences. Since it is the people themselves who make these demands, it is a dishonest characterization to seek private sector efficiency in government agencies without also specifying which constraints one is willing to sacrifice to achieve these efficiencies. Being somewhat beholden to the times in which he was writing, Wilson does make a plea for increased deregulation of the bureaucracy (a tragic rhetorical decision given how deregulation has played out since the book was written) and privatization of government agencies where market forces can operate. Of course in recent years we have seen how the redundancies and waste in the private sector become socialized through government bailouts, thereby negating the supposed benefits of privatization (where these losses should be borne by the owners and shareholders). This was not so apparent when Wilson was writing, but it takes away much of the impact of the book, coming right at the end. Nevertheless, if one concentrates on the analysis of bureaucratic organization then the book represents a remarkable look into the workings of government bureaucracy.
April 22, 2022
3.5 - lots of good information! Shocking amount of examples and info was still relevant and true despite the fact the book was written in 1989. Reads like a textbook so it’s not the most fun book I’ve ever read, but it gave good insight and ended on some nice thought questions
July 18, 2012
This presents a really perceptive analysis of how government agencies work. The author, who recently passed away, was a very influential scholar on public organizations -- especially police organizations (Varieties of Police Behavior). The perspective in this book combines a rational action perspective (managers make choices to pursue their interests, etc) using a perspective of traditional organizational sociology - what might be called contingency theory. The basic idea is that there are different types of organizations, depending on how understandable and visible their outputs and outcomes are. Different types of organizations are best suited for different environments. In working out the details of such a theory, the choices of managers become associated with identifying what type of organization you are running and how to direct it appropriately to its particular environmental demands.
Theoretically, this sort of approach has not proved as effective as some of the more economic approaches, such as transaction cost analysis. When done well, this sort of approach can be useful for researchers and provide some interesting results, as it does in this book.
Wilson's own political/ideological leanings are sometimes difficult to take (he is fairly conservative) but he is not dogmatic and his style helps to frame questions in ways that foster useful discussion and research. It is also fairly easy to follow.
Theoretically, this sort of approach has not proved as effective as some of the more economic approaches, such as transaction cost analysis. When done well, this sort of approach can be useful for researchers and provide some interesting results, as it does in this book.
Wilson's own political/ideological leanings are sometimes difficult to take (he is fairly conservative) but he is not dogmatic and his style helps to frame questions in ways that foster useful discussion and research. It is also fairly easy to follow.
June 4, 2016
Who would ever have thought that a book about bureaucracy would be fascinating as well as enlightening? But it is. Wilson eschews easy answers and points out that the bureaucracy can not be described by a single model, but that there are four types of agencies each with their own missions. One problem is that those missions get multiplied by politicians trying to respond to constituents demands. Another is that they are constrained by paperwork that results from fears of corruption, cronyism, and conventions. If you actually want to know why bureaucracy functions the way it does instead of simply complaining about it, this is an excellent place to start.
May 30, 2021
While over 30 years old now, it's still probably the single best book on public policy. If you work in the public or private sector, it's a must read. It illuminates the unique nature of the American bureaucracy, from regulations to culture to leadership. Filled with real world examples, it's both analytic and prescriptive. Even after a decade in the government, I was amazed to learn about how and why the government acts like it does.
December 26, 2023
In this book, Wilson grapples with the contemporary landscape of the 21st century, which witnessed the burgeoning presence of private entities in realms conventionally under public administration. The current spheres of education are dominated by public and private schools alike, along with the growing prevalence of magnet schools and home schools.
One of my favorite sections grappled with the key agents in both public and private schools. A key stakeholder who wields incredible power, evidenced by the narrative of George Washington Carver High School, is the principal. In the 1970s, Carver High School had almost 900 students, most of whom came from public housing projects, and was located in a low-income neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. Carver grappled with a multitude of challenges such as dirty hallways and broken equipment (Wilson, 9). However, just a decade after, by the 1980s, Carver High outperformed its competitors. What sparked this profound shift?
Here is what did not happen. Carver High did not erect any new buildings nor transform the teaching staff. They didn’t enroll a new set of students or shrink the school size. The only fundamental change was the new principal, Norris Hogans, who became the catalyst to turn the school around.
Norris Hogans was a paternalistic and authoritative leader who focused on instilling order and discipline at school. He made uniforms the norm, got rid of radios from playgrounds, wiped away all the graffiti, and maintained clean hallways. Furthermore, Hogans created work-study programs and an “Explorers’ Program” where the students, dressed in white uniform jackets, engaged with prominent executives and C-suite members from Atlanta's corporate sphere. These strategic endeavors not only fostered a disciplined environment but also created meaningful connections between students and influential business figures. His administrative agenda proved to be a success.
Under Hogans' leadership, Carver High School underwent a substantial bureaucratic transformation, becoming a more effective and reputable school. Despite resource limitations and minimal parental support, Carver High turned itself around. This had monumental effects, even attracting students from neighboring school districts to transfer. By the 1980s, Carver boasted of functioning equipment, clean corridors, neatly dressed students, and rising achievement levels. The principal did not singlehandedly transform the school, but Hogans' leadership is undeniable. This case study underscores the power of the principal, whose drive for educational excellence positioned Carver High as a beacon of academic distinction.
Stories like this remind us of the importance of effective public administration and bureaucracy. Wilson's book may not be at the forefront of your reading list, and may not be the most entertaining read, but it sure is rewarding.
One of my favorite sections grappled with the key agents in both public and private schools. A key stakeholder who wields incredible power, evidenced by the narrative of George Washington Carver High School, is the principal. In the 1970s, Carver High School had almost 900 students, most of whom came from public housing projects, and was located in a low-income neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. Carver grappled with a multitude of challenges such as dirty hallways and broken equipment (Wilson, 9). However, just a decade after, by the 1980s, Carver High outperformed its competitors. What sparked this profound shift?
Here is what did not happen. Carver High did not erect any new buildings nor transform the teaching staff. They didn’t enroll a new set of students or shrink the school size. The only fundamental change was the new principal, Norris Hogans, who became the catalyst to turn the school around.
Norris Hogans was a paternalistic and authoritative leader who focused on instilling order and discipline at school. He made uniforms the norm, got rid of radios from playgrounds, wiped away all the graffiti, and maintained clean hallways. Furthermore, Hogans created work-study programs and an “Explorers’ Program” where the students, dressed in white uniform jackets, engaged with prominent executives and C-suite members from Atlanta's corporate sphere. These strategic endeavors not only fostered a disciplined environment but also created meaningful connections between students and influential business figures. His administrative agenda proved to be a success.
Under Hogans' leadership, Carver High School underwent a substantial bureaucratic transformation, becoming a more effective and reputable school. Despite resource limitations and minimal parental support, Carver High turned itself around. This had monumental effects, even attracting students from neighboring school districts to transfer. By the 1980s, Carver boasted of functioning equipment, clean corridors, neatly dressed students, and rising achievement levels. The principal did not singlehandedly transform the school, but Hogans' leadership is undeniable. This case study underscores the power of the principal, whose drive for educational excellence positioned Carver High as a beacon of academic distinction.
Stories like this remind us of the importance of effective public administration and bureaucracy. Wilson's book may not be at the forefront of your reading list, and may not be the most entertaining read, but it sure is rewarding.
March 22, 2019
Obviously, this review is only valid if the subject matter interests you. It is dense, replete with examples and case studies, and can take a while to get through. The core ideas, when they all come together (which started happening about 2/3rds of the way through for me), are useful and important. The tension between tasks and mission, between goals, incentives and rewards, and constraints. These are useful ways to frame the issues. If you are interested in how a bureaucracy works and where it fails, this book is worth the read.
It is dated. Some of what the author assumes to be immutable reality has proven to be...less so, in the last decade. Some of the language and phrasing and assumptions are also dated. You'll know it when you see it, but it's from 1989, so there that is.
One more note: prepare for the consistent use of "insure" instead of "ensure". I know language and word use changes over time, but I'm pretty sure that, even in the long-long-ago of 1989, this was wrong. But maybe not. I still found it irritating.
It is dated. Some of what the author assumes to be immutable reality has proven to be...less so, in the last decade. Some of the language and phrasing and assumptions are also dated. You'll know it when you see it, but it's from 1989, so there that is.
One more note: prepare for the consistent use of "insure" instead of "ensure". I know language and word use changes over time, but I'm pretty sure that, even in the long-long-ago of 1989, this was wrong. But maybe not. I still found it irritating.
Read
June 16, 2020This was a good book on how bureaucracies work, particularly federal agencies. Wilson examines schools, the social security administration, the WWII German military machine, and other organizations to examine why they function as they do. We all work within bureaucracies to some extent, AmeriCorps certainly is a part of a large bureaucracy, so its an interesting read just to analyze this organization.
Why should other corps members read/not read this book?
If you are interested in organizational theory, then I highly recommend this book. It's something of a classic in the field and presents some interesting examples on how bureaucracies function. Of course, if organizations aren't your thing, then I wouldn't recommend it.
Why should other corps members read/not read this book?
If you are interested in organizational theory, then I highly recommend this book. It's something of a classic in the field and presents some interesting examples on how bureaucracies function. Of course, if organizations aren't your thing, then I wouldn't recommend it.
June 21, 2020
I see why this book is considered a "classic" analysis of government organizations. Truly worth teaching in any intro course on the subject, it covers a very wide range of issues and clearly explains the "bottom-up" perspective of why government works the way it does. The thesis is clear and expressed in numerous examples: people take actions because of incentives and constraints on their behavior, and the number of constraints in government are more substantial and play a larger role in the working lives of employees, managers, and executives. Strongly recommend for anyone considering working in government and those civil servants who are wondering why their agencies act the way they do.
December 28, 2021
Many of my professors and other students found this an uninspiring way to look at government function, but even at the time I felt like it provided a valuable lens for understanding some of the limitations on change in policy. It's not perfect, but it really helped me ground my understanding of policy in terms of how and not just what.
November 15, 2017
Excellent and thought-provoking. Makes one wonder if bureaucracies have a natural trend towards decay and inefficiency, as rules and procedure (initially addressing some real or perceived issue) multiply without end.
January 25, 2018
Wilson has some really interesting ideas and fills the book with great details of government bureaucracies to illustrate these ideas...however, could be at least 150 pages shorter.
October 11, 2019
If you want to understand how the government works, this is the book to read.
February 14, 2020
Best look at bureaucracy I have seen laid out in a book. Very simple yet very detailed and exploratory. Great pick up for professionals or students alike.
March 24, 2022
Classic. Most original, and *useful*, thing I've ever read about government.
April 3, 2024
A must-read for anyone who wishes to understand administrative behavior in general, and in the United States in particular.
January 23, 2023
Despite being 40 years old and about the US, it coherently explains bureaucray in a way that matches my experiences in the British Civil Service
June 8, 2014
This is an excellent book, but it does get tedious.
One of its main theses is that American governmental bureaucracies could not be different than they are without fundamentally changing the entire political process or governmental structure. A free society based on the separation of powers results in a system in which people are empowered to organize and lean on the legislative branch, who then respond appropriately as they dictate the rules surrounding the executive branch's execution. The result is that agencies end up being defined by vague goals and constrained by carefully defined rules.
Wilson's point is far more nuanced than this quick summary. He goes into often excruciating detail for organizations that both support and seem to contradict the thesis. He supplements this view with classifications of organizations based on such traits as whether it is easy to monitor its output, whether it is easy to monitor the process by which it operates, whether it has a strong sense of culture that dictates process and values, whether its members tend to be recruited by a profession that will infuse its own culture, the effect of leadership, and so on.
There is a strong pragmatic streak through the book, and it a very refreshing point of view. Rather than railing about fickle politicians or inept bureaucrats, Wilson goes to great pains to explore and explain the motivations for each. He acknowledges that we might think we want a system that yields different results, but then argues that that desire is unrealistic. He is quick to defend the American system; like many Western democracies, it strives to protect the freedoms of its populace; unlike, he argues, all other Western democracies, it also allows its populace to have a relatively direct stake in how to accomplish that goal. (He argues that the European systems are strongly influenced by their monarchical histories; I do not know how convincing this part of the argument is.)
Wilson explicitly argues against the conventional view of bureaucracies loving red tape for its own sake, instead seeing red tape as a result of their constraint-bound organization. He explicitly calls into question whether they are inefficient, arguing that such an assessment requires that all of their outputs be measured, as opposed to just those that can be measured via comparison to the marketplace. For example, he argues that governmental organizations are very bound by legal constraints and self-imposed (and selfish) requirements to consider every bid when contracting work, as opposed to giving greater weight to what is convenient or to companies that have done good work in the past. The result is that an unspoken output of the organization is fairness, but no accusation of inefficiency ever seeks to remove or take into account this goal.
There is a brief passage in Chapter 8 devoted to education. It describes a history in the US of repeatedly trying to dictate the process of teaching, since the real goal of measuring successful teaching appears to be impossible. This was a very interesting comment in a 25-year-old book. This passage also mentions numerous attempts to turn education into a profession more in line with that of a doctor or a lawyer, with professional organizations and a unified culture operating under relatively strict goals, and the repeated failures due to, he argues, the perception that educational theory and education is not rigorous. Another interesting comment about education comes later, when he points out that most arguments against school vouchers boil down to a fear that kids will not be taught in an incorrect manner (where "incorrect" tends to mean "different from what the speaker wishes"); fears about religious schools top the list of potentially "incorrect" approaches.
my favorite quote: "Congress--whatever it may claim--values 'fairness' over effectiveness."
One of its main theses is that American governmental bureaucracies could not be different than they are without fundamentally changing the entire political process or governmental structure. A free society based on the separation of powers results in a system in which people are empowered to organize and lean on the legislative branch, who then respond appropriately as they dictate the rules surrounding the executive branch's execution. The result is that agencies end up being defined by vague goals and constrained by carefully defined rules.
Wilson's point is far more nuanced than this quick summary. He goes into often excruciating detail for organizations that both support and seem to contradict the thesis. He supplements this view with classifications of organizations based on such traits as whether it is easy to monitor its output, whether it is easy to monitor the process by which it operates, whether it has a strong sense of culture that dictates process and values, whether its members tend to be recruited by a profession that will infuse its own culture, the effect of leadership, and so on.
There is a strong pragmatic streak through the book, and it a very refreshing point of view. Rather than railing about fickle politicians or inept bureaucrats, Wilson goes to great pains to explore and explain the motivations for each. He acknowledges that we might think we want a system that yields different results, but then argues that that desire is unrealistic. He is quick to defend the American system; like many Western democracies, it strives to protect the freedoms of its populace; unlike, he argues, all other Western democracies, it also allows its populace to have a relatively direct stake in how to accomplish that goal. (He argues that the European systems are strongly influenced by their monarchical histories; I do not know how convincing this part of the argument is.)
Wilson explicitly argues against the conventional view of bureaucracies loving red tape for its own sake, instead seeing red tape as a result of their constraint-bound organization. He explicitly calls into question whether they are inefficient, arguing that such an assessment requires that all of their outputs be measured, as opposed to just those that can be measured via comparison to the marketplace. For example, he argues that governmental organizations are very bound by legal constraints and self-imposed (and selfish) requirements to consider every bid when contracting work, as opposed to giving greater weight to what is convenient or to companies that have done good work in the past. The result is that an unspoken output of the organization is fairness, but no accusation of inefficiency ever seeks to remove or take into account this goal.
There is a brief passage in Chapter 8 devoted to education. It describes a history in the US of repeatedly trying to dictate the process of teaching, since the real goal of measuring successful teaching appears to be impossible. This was a very interesting comment in a 25-year-old book. This passage also mentions numerous attempts to turn education into a profession more in line with that of a doctor or a lawyer, with professional organizations and a unified culture operating under relatively strict goals, and the repeated failures due to, he argues, the perception that educational theory and education is not rigorous. Another interesting comment about education comes later, when he points out that most arguments against school vouchers boil down to a fear that kids will not be taught in an incorrect manner (where "incorrect" tends to mean "different from what the speaker wishes"); fears about religious schools top the list of potentially "incorrect" approaches.
my favorite quote: "Congress--whatever it may claim--values 'fairness' over effectiveness."
November 7, 2019
Can you imagine a book with a more engaging title? Ha.
April 21, 2013
I found this book very interesting, though it's about a subject that would strike most as quite dry: administering government bureaucracies. Wilson has a firm grasp of the issues, writes clearly, and explains why things work the way they do, often producing undesirable results.
The book includes many examples and case studies, looking at the DMV, the army, public schools, prisons, the State Department, the Forest Service, the CIA, and many others. The examples are always apt and demonstrate the points being made. The book includes approximately 800 end notes pointing to studies cited and further resources. I was surprised to learn how much research and scholarship has been devoted to learning about public administration.
Wilson explains that the issue isn't bureaucracy per se; after all, McDonald's is also a massive bureaucracy with a 600-page operations manual weighing four pounds that controls the order in which beef patties are put on the skillet and flipped. The key point is that these are government bureaucracies that have far more constraints placed on them than companies, particularly in how difficult it is for them to hire and fire workers and to purchase goods and equipment. For the sake of fairness, to limit manager capriciousness, to promote buying American, and a host of other things we want, we've put a lot of constraints how how these agencies operate.
The book is well organized. Wilson focuses on bureaucracy at each level--the operators (the front-line folks: park rangers, DMV clerks, prison guards), the managers, and the executives, and discusses the incentives and issues facing each. He also looks at the influence of Congress, the President, and the courts on bureaucracy and has chapters comparing agencies in the United States with their counterparts in other countries.
If you're interested in government or just in institutions this is a very worthwhile book to check out. Wilson is a conservative scholar, but he never strays far from the facts and is very measured in his recommendations and comments. 5/5 stars.
The book includes many examples and case studies, looking at the DMV, the army, public schools, prisons, the State Department, the Forest Service, the CIA, and many others. The examples are always apt and demonstrate the points being made. The book includes approximately 800 end notes pointing to studies cited and further resources. I was surprised to learn how much research and scholarship has been devoted to learning about public administration.
Wilson explains that the issue isn't bureaucracy per se; after all, McDonald's is also a massive bureaucracy with a 600-page operations manual weighing four pounds that controls the order in which beef patties are put on the skillet and flipped. The key point is that these are government bureaucracies that have far more constraints placed on them than companies, particularly in how difficult it is for them to hire and fire workers and to purchase goods and equipment. For the sake of fairness, to limit manager capriciousness, to promote buying American, and a host of other things we want, we've put a lot of constraints how how these agencies operate.
Managers have a strong incentive to worry more about constraints than tasks, which means to worry more about the processes than outcomes. .;.. It is hard to hold managers accountable for attaining a goal, easy to hold them accountable for conforming to the rules. (p. 131)Almost all of the examples used are from U.S. federal agencies, but many of these lessons are applicable to the smaller bureaucracies at which many of us work. Thinking of my own work, I probably define the key tasks of my job differently than my manager would. Additionally,
There is a kind of Gresham's Law at work in many government bureaus: Work that produces measurable outcomes tends to drive out work that produces unmeasurable outcomes. (p. 161)I've found that's the case; things that can't be measured, quantified, and compared tend not to get much attention or emphasis. (That's why functionaries, including clerks at McDonalds, are often unfriendly--it's difficult to measure friendliness or its impact on the bottom line.)
The book is well organized. Wilson focuses on bureaucracy at each level--the operators (the front-line folks: park rangers, DMV clerks, prison guards), the managers, and the executives, and discusses the incentives and issues facing each. He also looks at the influence of Congress, the President, and the courts on bureaucracy and has chapters comparing agencies in the United States with their counterparts in other countries.
If you're interested in government or just in institutions this is a very worthwhile book to check out. Wilson is a conservative scholar, but he never strays far from the facts and is very measured in his recommendations and comments. 5/5 stars.
October 4, 2019
There are many conservative writers who wrote important classics but much fewer actual academics who write are conservative. James Q Wilson is one and a very important voice in the social sciences.
September 24, 2013
I found the book wonderfully engaging and thought-provoking.
Despite the title, its focus is narrower than "bureaucracy in general." It's primarily about what US governmental bureaucracies, particularly Federal ones, do and do not do well, and why. Comparisons to foreign and private bureaucracies are primarily used to illuminate the core topic, not explored at length.
One insight that I haven't seen elsewhere but that I now think matters a lot is that the US is very unusual in having a separate legislative branch that works as an effective check on the executive -- the Congress has a multi-billion-dollar budget that's mostly used for supervising the bureaucracy, and has very effective control, via the budgeting process. This means that, unlike agencies elsewhere, American bureaucracies have two masters, which means they sometimes have no master -- with the President and Congress pulling in separate directions, the agency is free to do what it likes. Perhaps relatedly, the US is unusual in how much judicial review we allow of administrative decisions. Like legislatures, this at first seems to constrain agencies, but often doesn't, since the agency can arrange to be forced, judicially, into doing something the agency's own political leadership would rather not do. (The EPA is particularly fond of this tactic.) In consequence, we have a much less docile administration than, say, Western Europe.
I should disclose I have a bias here -- Jim Wilson was my father's PhD advisor.
Despite the title, its focus is narrower than "bureaucracy in general." It's primarily about what US governmental bureaucracies, particularly Federal ones, do and do not do well, and why. Comparisons to foreign and private bureaucracies are primarily used to illuminate the core topic, not explored at length.
One insight that I haven't seen elsewhere but that I now think matters a lot is that the US is very unusual in having a separate legislative branch that works as an effective check on the executive -- the Congress has a multi-billion-dollar budget that's mostly used for supervising the bureaucracy, and has very effective control, via the budgeting process. This means that, unlike agencies elsewhere, American bureaucracies have two masters, which means they sometimes have no master -- with the President and Congress pulling in separate directions, the agency is free to do what it likes. Perhaps relatedly, the US is unusual in how much judicial review we allow of administrative decisions. Like legislatures, this at first seems to constrain agencies, but often doesn't, since the agency can arrange to be forced, judicially, into doing something the agency's own political leadership would rather not do. (The EPA is particularly fond of this tactic.) In consequence, we have a much less docile administration than, say, Western Europe.
I should disclose I have a bias here -- Jim Wilson was my father's PhD advisor.
April 18, 2012
This being a chestnut in administrative studies, there are plenty good, quick summaries that describe Wilson's main points (like this summary and this from a professor here in Richmond. The full book is still worth a read primarily because his overarching point--that government agencies have a series of unique characteristics--is best experienced
through the many stories Wilson recounts.
Most of the book is description - Wilson creates categories to describe and differentiate agencies. With those categories defined, he then describes the context in which they work with constraints inherent to their nature and imposed by law and society.
Really quite a good read.
through the many stories Wilson recounts.
Most of the book is description - Wilson creates categories to describe and differentiate agencies. With those categories defined, he then describes the context in which they work with constraints inherent to their nature and imposed by law and society.
Really quite a good read.
September 5, 2012
This book was full of examples as to why the government and its bureaucracy is (seemingly) inefficient. Wilson's argument is certainly still relevant today, but the material is quite dated (most examples from the 60s and 70s, as the book was originally published in 1989). My favorite example is that the Army Corp of Engineers is an elite agency. Maybe it still is, but after Katrina, at the least, it got a lot of bad press. I had to read this for school and there must be a more recent book out there that makes the same argument with more recent examples.
October 24, 2007
A functioning bureaucracy is key to a democratic society. This was not part of my courseload but it's such a classic I wanted to read it.
Plus I felt so innteljent afterwards.
Plus I felt so innteljent afterwards.
March 10, 2009
Had to read it for my public admin class. It was okay...not exactly thrilling stuff, but I like the fact that he relies heavily on examples.
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