Book Review

Book Review

All bureaucracies are not created equal. If nothing else, James Q. Wilson's massive book teaches that the ways of constructing and running a bureaucracy are almost as numerous as bureaucrats themselves. To that end, Wilson goes into a great amount of detail about how such agencies work or, more often, fail to work, and the wealth of concrete examples he has gleaned from other sources make up the most interesting portions of the book.

To show how various bureaucracies function, Wilson divides the book into six large sections (Organizations, Operators, Managers, Executives, Context, and Change) that are subdivided into chapters (“Culture,” “Turf,” etc.). Thus arranged, Wilson starts at the bottom of the structure (the people working in a bureaucracy, their beliefs, whose interests the agency serves, the circumstances they work under, and so on) and works his way to the top (Congress, the courts, and the President). At each level he deals with the problems such agencies face in pursuing their goals.

One thing Wilson stresses is that, unlike private enterprises, government agencies are not driven by goals but by constraints. Bemuse bureaucracies aren't rewarded with profits when they do something right, avoiding doing something wrong (by “following the rules”) becomes far more important than achieving results.

The history of the idea of bureaucracy is also marked by changes in the public perception of the term. Prior to Weber's defining the idea of bureaucracy, the practice of rational organization of government services according to neutral merit-based qualifications was viewed as a positive antidote to the nepotism and hereditary domination of traditional monarchical or ethnocentric forms of government. However, across most of the globe, the recent history of the term suggests that it has had a largely negative influence upon society. Indeed, the term bureaucracy now evokes epithetical connotations that refer exclusively to perceived inadequacies in government policy implementation.

One final characteristic of the history of the idea of bureaucracy is the multitude of synonyms that have evolved to describe the practice or the idea of bureaucracy in more neutral or passive terms, particularly within the past century. These synonyms include public administration, public management, public service, and governance or policy implementation. In fact, within much of the contemporary literature on bureaucracy, or public administration in particular, the two concepts are used coterminously. This tendency to conflate the idea of bureaucracy with the idea of public service, management, or administration demonstrates that the term has expanded from its original sociological implications. However, this is not to suggest that the idea of bureaucracy as the social organization of complex tasks according to rational-legal authority has lost any of its original appeal. It merely suggests that changing public preferences have altered the disciplinary significance of historical ideas and distorted them to reflect current social contexts, even if it leads to the incorrect hijacking of what once was a neutral academic term.

Thus, government agencies often work inefficiently at moving toward what we perceive to be their objective because the constraints of public policy almost ...