Bureaucratic Dynamics

Bureaucratic Dynamics PDF Author: B. Dan Wood
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Offering readable case studies and well-paired figures and tables (presented in both technical and nontechnical fashion), Bureaucratic Dynamics uses principal-agent theory to explain how the public policy system works.

Bureaucratic Dynamics

Bureaucratic Dynamics PDF Author: B. Dan Wood
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offering readable case studies and well-paired figures and tables (presented in both technical and nontechnical fashion), Bureaucratic Dynamics uses principal-agent theory to explain how the public policy system works.

Bureaucrats, Politics And the Environment

Bureaucrats, Politics And the Environment PDF Author: Richard W. Waterman
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822972514
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The bureaucracy in the United States has a hand in almost all aspects of our lives, from the water we drink to the parts in our cars. For a force so influential and pervasive, however, this body of all nonelective government officials remains an enigmatic, impersonal entity. The literature of bureaucratic theory is rife with contradictions and mysteries. Bureaucrats, Politics, and the Environment attempts to clarify some of these problems. The authors surveyed the workers at two agencies: enforcement personnel from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and employees of the New Mexico Environment Department. By examining what they think about politics, the environment, their budgets, and the other institutions and agencies with which they interact, this work puts a face on the bureaucracy and provides an explanation for its actions.

The Politics of Quasi-Government

The Politics of Quasi-Government PDF Author: Jonathan G. S. Koppell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139436643
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Hybrid organizations, governmental entities that mix characteristics of private and public sector organizations, are increasingly popular mechanisms for implementing public policy. Koppell assesses the performance of the growing quasi-government in terms of accountability and control. Comparing hybrids to traditional government agencies in three policy domains - export promotion, housing and international development - Koppell argues that hybrid organizations are more difficult to control largely due to the fact that hybrids behave like regulated organizations rather than extensions of administrative agencies. Providing a rich conception of the bureaucratic control problem, Koppell also argues that hybrid organizations are intrinsically less responsive to the political preferences of their political masters and suggests that as policy tools they are inappropriate for some tasks. This book provides a timely study of an important administrative and political phenomenon.

States at Work

States at Work PDF Author: Thomas Bierschenk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004264965
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focussing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants.

The Dynamics of Bureaucracy in the US Government

The Dynamics of Bureaucracy in the US Government PDF Author: Samuel Workman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107061105
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book assesses the influence of bureaucracy in American politics, asking how government agencies and Congress come to know about, and understand, important policy problems confronting citizens and government officials.

Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions

Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions PDF Author: Eleanor L. Schiff
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498597785
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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

Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization

Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization PDF Author: Rick Iedema
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027296480
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book considers the discourses that come into play in organizational change. The book outlines the tensions that arise for people having to enact change, and analyzes the ways in which they position themselves in changing organizational environments. The book takes a social semiotic perspective on discourse, organization and change. Here, discourse encompasses not only the multi-modal resources that people mobilize in organizational (inter)action, but also the practices and transformative dynamics afforded by those resources. The organizational changes highlighted in the book revolve around three dimensions of work that are increasingly coming to the fore: participation, boundary-spanning and knowledging. These dimensions are explored through case studies, including a health planning project, an initiative to standardize work practices, and the tension between paper-based and IT-based reporting. The book addresses the relevance of this discourse perspective to organizational research more broadly, by investigating organization as a dynamic of ‘resemiotizations’. Cover illustration by John Reid

The Government of Mistrust

The Government of Mistrust PDF Author: Ken MacLean
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299295931
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Focusing on the creation and misuse of government documents in Vietnam since the 1920s, The Government of Mistrust reveals how profoundly the dynamics of bureaucracy have affected Vietnamese efforts to build a socialist society. In examining the flurries of paperwork and directives that moved back and forth between high- and low-level officials, Ken MacLean underscores a paradox: in trying to gather accurate information about the realities of life in rural areas, and thus better govern from Hanoi, the Vietnamese central government employed strategies that actually made the state increasingly illegible to itself. MacLean exposes a falsified world existing largely on paper. As high-level officials attempted to execute centralized planning via decrees, procedures, questionnaires, and audits, low-level officials and peasants used their own strategies to solve local problems. To obtain hoped-for aid from the central government, locals overstated their needs and underreported the resources they actually possessed. Higher-ups attempted to re-establish centralized control and legibility by creating yet more bureaucratic procedures. Amidst the resulting mistrust and ambiguity, many low-level officials were able to engage in strategic action and tactical maneuvering that have shaped socialism in Vietnam in surprising ways.

The Dynamics of Bureaucracy in the US Government

The Dynamics of Bureaucracy in the US Government PDF Author: Samuel Workman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316299198
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book develops a new theoretical perspective on bureaucratic influence and congressional agenda setting based on limited attention and government information processing. Using a comprehensive new data set on regulatory policymaking across the entire federal bureaucracy, Samuel Workman develops the theory of the dual dynamics of congressional agenda setting and bureaucratic problem solving as a way to understand how the US government generates information about, and addresses, important policy problems. Key to the perspective is a communications framework for understanding the nature of information and signaling between the bureaucracy and Congress concerning the nature of policy problems. Workman finds that congressional influence is innate to the process of issue shuffling, issue bundling, and the fostering of bureaucratic competition. In turn, bureaucracy influences the congressional agenda through problem monitoring, problem definition, and providing information that serves as important feedback in the development of an agenda.

Patchwork Leviathan

Patchwork Leviathan PDF Author: Erin Metz McDonnell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691197369
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Corruption and ineffectiveness are often expected of public servants in developing countries. However, some groups within these states are distinctly more effective and public oriented than the rest. Why? Patchwork Leviathan explains how a few spectacularly effective state organizations manage to thrive amid general institutional weakness and succeed against impressive odds. Drawing on the Hobbesian image of the state as Leviathan, Erin Metz McDonnell argues that many seemingly weak states actually have a wide range of administrative capacities. Such states are in fact patchworks sewn loosely together from scarce resources into the semblance of unity. McDonnell demonstrates that when the human, cognitive, and material resources of bureaucracy are rare, it is critically important how they are distributed. Too often, scarce bureaucratic resources are scattered throughout the state, yielding little effect. McDonnell reveals how a sufficient concentration of resources clustered within particular pockets of a state can be transformative, enabling distinctively effective organizations to emerge from a sea of ineffectiveness. Patchwork Leviathan offers a comprehensive analysis of successful statecraft in institutionally challenging environments, drawing on cases from contemporary Ghana and Nigeria, mid-twentieth-century Kenya and Brazil, and China in the early twentieth century. Based on nearly two years of pioneering fieldwork in West Africa, this incisive book explains how these highly effective pockets differ from the Western bureaucracies on which so much state and organizational theory is based, providing a fresh answer to why well-funded global capacity-building reforms fail—and how they can do better.