The State Of Public Bureaucracy

The authors explore the many ways that gender and communication intersect and affect each other. Every chapter encourages a consideration of how gender attitudes and practices, past and current, influence personal notions of what it means not only to be female and male, but feminine and masculine. The second edition of this student friendly and accessible text is filled with contemporary examples, activities, and exercises to help students put theoretical concepts into practice.

Based mainly on State Department materials, but addressing generic problems of organizational politics as well, this book provides a fresh, intelligent, and lively account of bureaucratic behavior.

Publisher description

Public administration is under increasing pressure to become more efficient, better geared to the demands and opinions of citizens, more open to contacts with transnational bureaucracies, and more responsive to the ideas of elected policy makers

How to better coordinate policies and public services across public sector organizations has been a major topic of public administration research for decades. However, few attempts have been made to connect these concerns with the growing body of research on biases and blind spots in decision-making. This book attempts to make that connection. It explores how day-to-day decision-making in public sector organizations is subject to different types of organizational attention biases that may lead to a variety of coordination problems in and between organizations, and sometimes also to major blunders and disasters. The contributions address those biases and their effects for various types of public organizations in different policy sectors and national contexts. In particular, it elaborates on blind spots, or ‘not seeing the not seeing’, and different forms of bureaucratic politics as theoretical explanations for seemingly irrational organizational behaviour. The book’s theoretical tools and empirical insights address conditions for effective coordination and problem-solving by public bureaucracies using an organizational perspective.

This book applies established analytical concepts such as influence, authority, administrative styles, autonomy, budgeting and multilevel administration to the study of international bureaucracies and their political environment. It reflects on the commonalities and differences between national and international administrations and carefully constructs the impact of international administrative tools on policy making. The book shows how the study of international bureaucracies can fertilize interdisciplinary discourse, in particular between International Relations, Comparative Government and Public Administration. The book makes a forceful argument for Public Administration to take on the challenge of internationalization.

Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.

Street level discretion -- Three pathologies: the indifferent, the enforcer, and the caregiver -- A gymnastics of the self: coping with the everyday pressures of street-level work -- When the rules run out: informal taxonomies and peer-level accountability -- Impossible situations: on the breakdown of moral integrity at the frontlines of public service