Bureaucracy And Society In Transition

Despite criticism of inefficiencies and unlimited growth, bureaucracies still fill crucial positions in modern societies. This volume examines ‘varieties in bureaucracies’ across Europe, with a specific focus on the Nordic region.

Despite criticism of inefficiencies and unlimited growth, bureaucracies still fill crucial positions in modern societies. This volume examines ‘varieties in bureaucracies’ across Europe, with a specific focus on the Nordic region.

Complementarities between political and economic institutions have kept Brazil in a low-level economic equilibrium since 1985.

Highly original and based on unique empirical research in the fields of organization theory and organization behaviour, this work makes an invaluable contribution to the literature on bureaucracy and innovation. Focusing on a study of two major companies working with innovation and new product development Styhre's critical analysis pushes the bound

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.

When the objectives of public policy programmes have been formulated and decided upon, implementation seems just a matter of following instructions. However, it is underway to the realization of those objectives that public policies get their final substance and form. Crucial is what happens in and around the encounter between public officials and individual citizens at the street level of government bureaucracy. This Research Handbook addresses the state of the art while providing a systematic exploration of the theoretical and methodological issues apparent in the study of street-level bureaucracy and how to deal with them.

Opening the Government of Canada presents a compelling case for a more open model of governance in the digital age – but a model that also continues to uphold democratic principles at the heart of the Westminster system. Amanda Clarke details the untold story of the federal bureaucracy’s efforts to adapt to digital-age pressures from the mid-2000s onward. This book reveals the mismatch between the bureaucracy’s closed government traditions and evolving citizen expectations and digital tools. Striking a balance between reform and tradition, lays out a roadmap for building a democratically robust, digital-era federal government.

Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society rediscovers Max Weber for the twenty-first century. Tony and Dagmar Waters' translation of Weber's works highlights his contributions to the social sciences and politics, credited with highlighting concepts such as "iron cage," "bureaucracy," "bureaucratization," "rationalization," "charisma," and the role of the "work ethic" in ordering modern labor markets. Outlining the relationship between community (Gemeinschaft), and market society (Gesellschaft), the issues of social stratification, power, politics, and modernity resonate just as loudly today as they did for Weber during the early twentieth century.