Beyond Bureaucracy

Managing Modernity: Beyond Bureaucracy? offers theoretical perspectives and substantive insights on the future of bureaucracy in different organizational contexts. It includes contributions from internationally renowned scholars working in the fields of organization theory, public administration, and information systems.

This book examines the role of bureaucracy in modern technologically advanced societies, the traditional models of governance, and the potential of information technology to fundamentally change and improve governance. In the area of public-domain governance, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have empowered public agencies to improve their activities and to strengthen the efficiency of their operations. Technology has enabled optimized transfer of knowledge and information between government agencies, more efficient supervision and control of relationships with citizens, and higher efficiency in law enforcement through better access to information. Throughout the last decades, technology has been used to strengthen the role of state bureaucracies and the relationship between the civil service and the citizens. We have witnessed the transformative powers of ICTs in private-sector enterprises in well-structured technological landscapes, which has produced new ecosystems comprised of software developers, providers, and consumers who provide and consume new products and services in ecosystems that are based on clear technological standards and shared modular generic artefacts, which allow for distributed peer production. ICTs will shape cultural and civic discourse and create products, services and tools, relying on the open toolsets, technologies and exchange of knowledge between peers. This book will be of particular interest to government CIOs, IT/IS managers, researchers, students, and practitioners in technical sciences, public administration, business management, public policy and IS management.

First published in 1998, this volume has been a significant contribution to current debates over the future of the public services. Professionalism has been and is a major feature of the British welfare state. Yet the political, social and economic context in which the profession emerged and flourished is changing rapidly. The professional ideal of disinterested expertise serving the public interest has lost much of its original gloss. Professional status and careers are threatened by major shifts in the structure of the welfare state which can be summed up as the decline of the big government bureaucratic model. Professions themselves face challenges to their special claims to expertise and public service from: politicians, senior managers, new social movements and pressure groups, technological change and not least from those citizens whom they aspire to serve. This volume asks how these new challenges are changing professions and how professionals themselves are adapting.

Traditional public policy and welfare economics have held that market failures are common, requiring the intervention of government in order to serve and protect the public good. In Beyond Politics, William C. Mitchell and Randy T. Simmons carefully scrutinize this traditional view through the modern theory of public choice. The authors enlighten the relationship of government and markets by emphasizing the actual rather than the ideal workings of governments and by reuniting the insights of economics with those of political science. Beyond Politics traces the anatomy of government failure and a pathology of contemporary political institutions as government has become a vehicle for private gain at public expense. In so doing, this brisk and vigorous book examines a host of public issues, including social welfare, consumer protection, and the environment. Offering a unified and powerful perspective on the market process, property rights, politics, contracts, and government bureaucracy, Beyond Politics is a lucid and comprehensive book on the foundations and institutions of a free and humane society.

For over two decades, Beyond Bureaucracy has helped both modern academic thought and current management practice with its far-reaching examination of the causes and consequences of change in organizations and leadership. From a powerful behavioral science perspective, this classic collection of essays examines the strategic, methodological, and conceptual issues central to changing organizations.