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Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It

James Q. Wilson

Start date: March 6, 2014

Finish date: March 17, 2014

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Feb 24, 2014 Dolly rated it liked it

Shelves: germany-german, vietnam, military, washington-dc, france-french, education-school, nonfiction, england-english, other-usa, russia

This is a very dense book, highly in need of a more recent revision. The narrative is difficult; I often felt like I was slogging through the text purely through determination rather than a sense of fulfillment or enjoyment.

Still, the book offers a very informative historical context of our government agencies and identifies several anecdotal instances of the best (and worst) practices of these agencies. Some of the examples were fascinating and I can see how strong leadership can play a large This is a very dense book, highly in need of a more recent revision. The narrative is difficult; I often felt like I was slogging through the text purely through determination rather than a sense of fulfillment or enjoyment.

Still, the book offers a very informative historical context of our government agencies and identifies several anecdotal instances of the best (and worst) practices of these agencies. Some of the examples were fascinating and I can see how strong leadership can play a large role in the effectiveness of an organization.

I attended a course to learn my role as an 'Action Officer' on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, and this book came highly recommended at this course. I know that I would never have picked this book otherwise, but it was still a worthwhile read and I certainly derived some insight into the reasons why our government operates the way it does.

I thought it was interesting that the author recommended reading the Federalist Paper No. 51 by James Madison in order to really get to the 'bottom line' about how and why bureaucracies are run they way they are.

I appreciate that even back then, the concept that "the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others," and "giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others."

Overall, I thought that the book was very enlightening and informative. A bit dry in places and in dire need of a revision, but a worthwhile read nonetheless.

interesting quotes:

"The inference one may draw is that creating a secure and fair environment is a necessary precondition to learning." (p. 22)

"Effective schools tend to have strong principals who provide leadership in instructional matters, to have teachers with high expectations of student achievement, to emphasize learning basic skills, to maintain good order and discipline, to evaluate students on a regular basis, and to devote large amounts of time to study." (pp. 22-23)

"Since no general, at least in modern times, can know with any certainty what the next war will be like, all he has to draw upon in making his preparations are experience and conjecture. Since conjecture is, after all, conjectural, experience inevitably will play a large and proper role in guiding his plans. Successful generals do not ignore the lessons of the past. No one knows in advance what the lessons will be, but some people guess better than others." (p. 43)

"What is clear is that for whatever reason tasks were defined more by available technology and prior experiences than by a clear understanding of what kinds of tasks were appropriate to the conditions of war in Vietnam." (p. 44)

"The army experience produces people who can accept, more easily than representatives of other services, the coordinating tasks that are the reason for existence of joint military commands and staffs." (p. 58)

"What is distinctive about members of a profession, at least for purposes of explaining organizational behavior, is not how much status, income, or deference they receive but the sources of these rewards. A professional is someone who receives important occupational rewards from a reference group whose membership is limited to people who have undergone specialized formal education and have accepted a group-defined code of proper conduct. The more the individual allows his or her behavior to be influenced by the desire to obtain rewards from this reference group, the more professional is his or her orientation." (p. 60)

"Professionals are expected to put the well-being of their clients or the search for the truth above their own interests. Society invests heavily in the training of professionals in part because the clients - medical patients, for example - are unable to evaluate the quality of the procedures to which they are subjected." (p. 149)

"In short, well-run public schools are possible when talented, dedicated people are at work in sympathetic communities. It is good to know that this occurs; it is too much to expect that it will occur everywhere." (p. 153)

"There is a kind of Gresham's Law at work in many government bureaus: Work that produces measurable outcomes tends to drive out work that produces unmeasurable outcomes." (p. 161)

"The principal challenge facing public managers is to understand the importance of carefully defining the core tasks of the organization and to find both pecuniary and nonpecuniary incentives that will induce operators to perform those tasks as defined. Shirking is minimized by making certain that the proper performance of core tasks both enhances the careers of operators and confers upon them the esteem of their co-workers. The latter requires building a supportive culture around those core tasks." (p. 174)

"The army's fear was well-grounded; whenever the defense budget is to be cut, it usually turns out to be easier to cut people than to cut equipment." (p. 185)

[Michael Blumenthal] "In Washington, 'you can be successful if you appear to be successful...appearance is as important as reality.'" (p. 197)

"The principal source of power is a constituency. This plain fact repeated by generations of students of public administration still seems lost on those people (business executives, in particular) who upon taking a high-level job in Washington complain about the amount of time they must spend attending to the demands and needs of outside groups. All this time spent currying favor and placating critics, they argue, is time taken away from the real work of the agency, which is to 'do the job.' No. The real work of the government executive is to curry favor and placate critics. Skilled executives can do this without currying or placating in any demeaning or dishonest way, but the currying and the placating must be done, one way or another." (pp. 204-205)

"Innovation is not inevitably good; there are at least as many bad changes as good. And government agencies are especially vulnerable to bad changes because, absent a market that would impose a fitness test on any organizational change, a changed public bureaucracy can persist in doing the wrong thing for years. The Ford Motor Company should not have made the Edsel, but if the government had owned Ford it would still be making Edsels." (p. 227)

"The advent of first the telegraph, then the telephone, the radio, computers, and finally the helicopter gave to military commanders an increasing ability to receive and transmit orders and in the case of the helicopter to look down directly onto the battlefield. But as Martin Creveld has shown in his penetrating look at the role of command in war, improvements in communication tend to be used by high-level commanders to reduce the initiative and discretion of lower-level commanders, often with disastrous results. Creveld is quite blunt about the matter: 'those armies have been most successful which did not turn their troops into automatons, did not attempt to control everything from the top, and allowed subordinate commanders considerable latitude.'" (p. 228) [Although this was written prior to the era of full motion video feeds from unmanned aerial vehicles, I submit the principle still holds.]

"More frequent authorizations meant more chances to devise and impose rules and policy guidance on agencies. That in turn has meant a more crowded legislative calendar and a reduction in administrative discretion. This is most evident in the case of the Defense Department. In Congress there are now 29 committees and 55 subcommittees that in one way or another oversee defense activities. In 1984 they held 441 hearings. Whereas in 1977 the House debated the defense authorization bill for three days and considered no amendments, in 1986 it debated it for thirteen days and considered 148 amendments. A comparable change occurred in the Senate. In 1970 the Congress requested of the Pentagon 36 reports; in 1985 it requested 1,172." (p. 244) [I would love to see the data for 2013.]

[Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, quoting the author as the source of the idea] "'Iron Law of Emulation': 'Whenever any branch of the government acquires a new technique which enhances its power in relation to the other branches, that technique will soon be adopted by the other branches as well.'" (p. 259)

"Culture is to a group what personality is to an individual, a disposition that leads people to respond differently to the same stimuli." (p. 302)

"Americans admire their form of government, but do not admire or accord high status to the officials who work for it. More precisely, they tend to revere the presidency but not the president; they dislike Congress and 'the bureaucracy' though usually they have a good opinion of their own representatives and report that their experience with a given bureaucrat was satisfactory." (p. 304)

"The checks and balances of the American constitutional system reflect our desire to reduce the arbitrariness of official rule. That desire is based squarely on the premise that inefficiency is a small price to pay for freedom and responsiveness. Congressional oversight, judicial review, interest-group participation, media investigations, and formalized procedures all are intended to check administrative discretion. It is not hyperbole to say that the constitutional order is animated by the desire to make the government 'inefficient.'" (p. 326)

"Things are not made better by our national tendency to engage in bureaucrat-bashing. One has to have some perspective on this. It is true that bureaucracies prefer the present to the future, the known to the unknown, and the dominant mission to rival missions; many agencies in fact are skeptical about things that were 'NIH' - Not
invented Here. Every social grouping, whether a neighborhood, a nation, or an organization, acquires a culture; changing that culture is like moving a cemetery: it is always difficult and some believe it is sacrilegious. It is also true, as many conservatives argue, that the government tries to do things that it is incapable of doing well, just as it is true, as many liberals allege, that the government in fact does many things well enough. As Charles Wolf Jr. has argued, both markets and governments have their imperfections; many things we might want to do collectively require us to choose between unsatisfactory alternatives." (p. 368)

"All complex organizations display bureaucratic problems of confusion, red tape, and the avoidance of responsibility. Those problems are much greater in government bureaucracies because government itself is the institutionalization of confusion (arising out of the need to moderate competing demands); of red tape (arising out of the need to satisfy demands that cannot be moderated); and of avoided responsibility (arising out of the desire to retain power by minimizing criticism)." (p. 375)
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