Guerrillas In The Bureaucracy

Guerrillas in government are all around us. They can be as high profile as “Deep Throat,” or as low profile as the bureaucrat who belligerently slows the processing of an application for a driver’s license. Their dissent stems from dissatisfaction with the actions of public organizations they work for, but they strategically choose not to go public with their concerns. Instead, they work against the wishes—either implicitly or explicitly communicated—of their superiors and run the spectrum from anti-establishment liberals to fundamentalist conservatives, from constructive contributors to deviant destroyers. Typically guerrilla government is undetected as it is woven into the fabric of the everyday, often mundane, world of bureaucracy. Rosemary O’Leary shows that the majority of guerrilla government cases are the manifestation of inevitable tensions between bureaucracy and democracy, which yield immense ethical and organizational challenges that all public managers must learn to navigate. To illustrate these tensions and challenges, O’Leary presents three in-depth case studies and 21 mini case studies that showcase the range of guerrillas from an official at a regional EPA office to a doctor at a medical school to the director of planning in a county office. O’Leary’s fresh analysis, combined with great story-telling, underscores the importance of dissent and presents strategies for ways public servants can decide ethically to engage in guerrilla activity, while offering ways public managers can learn to tap into the potentially insightful, creative ideas and energy of dissenters in order to make constructive changes in the system.

An attempt to highlight the bureaucracy existing in the Indian government.

Winner of the 2021 “Best Book Award” from the Academy of Management Division of Public and Nonprofit Management! “Rosemary O’Leary’s The Ethics of Dissent offers a novel take on rule breakers and whistle-blowers in the federal government. Finding a book that elegantly interweaves theory, case detail, and practice in a way useful to students and researching proves challenging. O’Leary achieves those aims.” —Randall Davis, Southern Illinois University From “constructive contributors”" to “deviant destroyers,” government guerrillas work clandestinely against the best wishes of their superiors. These public servants are dissatisfied with the actions of the organizations for which they work, but often choose not to go public with their concerns. In her Third Edition of The Ethics of Dissent, Rosemary O’Leary shows that the majority of guerrilla government cases are the manifestation of inevitable tensions between bureaucracy and democracy, which yield immense ethical and organizational challenges that all public managers must learn to navigate. New to the Third Edition: New examples of guerrilla government showcase the power of public servants as well as their ethical obligations. Key concepts are connected to real examples, such as Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to sign the marriage certificates of gay couples, and Kevin Chmielewski, the deputy chief of staff for operations at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who led environmental groups to the wrong doings of EPA Administrator Scott Prewitt. A new section on the creation of “alt” Twitter accounts designed to counter and even sabotage the policies of President Donald Trump highlights the power of social media in guerrilla government activities. A new section on the U.S. Department of State “dissent channel” provides readers with a positive example of the right way to dissent as a public servant. A new chapter on Edward Snowden demonstrates the practical relevance and contemporary importance of the world’s largest security breach. A new profile of U.S. Department of State diplomat Mary A. Wright illustrates how she used her resignation to dissent about U.S. policies in Iraq.

An ethnography exploring disagreements among Paraguayan peasants, government bureaucrats, and development experts about how state bureaucracy should function, what archival documents are for, and who gets to narrate the past.

The most complete history to date of the Nazi partisan resistance movement known as the Werwolf at the end of WWII. A fascinating history of great interest to general readers as well as to military historians.