Public Administration and Bureaucracy

Bendix and of Merton and his students (Selznick Gouldner , Blau . Since there never has been any question that this is basic sociological research , courses on formal organizations are standard fare in all top ten sociology departments , and many of them have organization theory as a field of concentration . More recently , the "new economics of organization " is finding a home in elite economics departments . In our intellectual histories we have focused so much on the relationship of public administration and political science that we have forgotten to look across the street . The patterns there

are consistent with our experience : Practical research on organizations and administration has not flourished in elite social science departments basic research has

Even though public administration and political science drifted apart this did not mean that political scientists forgot about bureaucracies The study of bureaucracy after World War II was very decentralized . That the study of bureaucracy was thus distributed across other specializations made it hard for political scientists and public administrationists alike to realize that there was a new field in political science oriented toward basic research on public agencies

As Fesler has pointed out (1975 , fairly a few distinguished political scientists worked in public agencies during World War II he listed thirty who would contribute to public administration after the war (p 104 , note 24 . A lot of returned to academia with a fresh appreciation of the importance of bureaucracy in both formulating and carrying out policy . The visions of many of them were expressed in an important volume , Elements of Public Administration (1946 . The contributors included V .O . Key , Avery Leiserson , Fritz Morstein Marx , Dwight Waldo and Fesler himself . In his perceptive article , Fesler suggests that this "new public administration " involved four changes of emphasis

Even though this was unavoidably institutional , it was nevertheless...