Max Weber

The author of the classic essay, "On Bureaucracy," Max Weber was a German sociologist who described bureaucracy as an "ideal type," representing a goal of industrial society as it shook off the particularism (treatment on the basis of status, not functional role and ability) of pre-industrial society.

Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson's 1887 "The Study of Administration" defined good public administration in the "good government" tradition of rigid separation of "administration" from "politics." This was to be accomplished, as the civil service reform movement of the day advocated, by mandating the technical training of civil servants for a hierarchical, specially trained, efficiency-centered bureaucracy not unlike Weber's ideal type.

Luther Gulick

Gulick sought to differentiate public administration from the then-dominant "scientific management" theories of Frederick Taylor, which had provided the basis for the assembly-line modernization of industry. Where public sector scientific management saw political elements as problems to be minimized, if not eliminated, Gulick emphasized the inevitable and desirable integration of the politics and administration. Gulick was a strong influence on the later thought of Herbert Simon, discussed below. He also figured in the founding of the Brookings Institution, the International Management Association, the American Society for Public Administration, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the National Planning Association.

POSDCORB. Gulick's theory of administration was a variant of structural-functionalism, analyzing organizations in terms of seven essential functions (forming the acronym PODSCORB): planning, organizing, directing, staffing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. The best organizational structure followed function, hence organizations should have functional divisions around these seven functions (though not necessarily seven divisions as some might be combined structurally; however these seven functions describe the executive role worldwide).

Span of control. An executive's span of control rested on diversity, stability, and space. The more diverse the functions being supervised, the more unstable the staffing, and the less the face-to-face contact, the fewer subordinates the executive could control effectively.

Chester Barnard

A telephone company executive, Barnard's writings on the administration of bureaucracy were popularized by Simon (see below) and others due to Barnard's emphasis on authority as a relationship involving exchange, and on organizations as systems of exchange, not a simple command structures as in Wilsonian theory. His Functions of the Executive 1938) described organizations as systems of cooperation centered on efficiency (defined as satisfying the motives of the organization's members) and effectiveness (defined as achieving explicit organizational goals). Cooperation depends on efficiency in this sense and efficiency determines the longevity of the organization.

Communication and authority. Barnard's emphasis on cooperation led to a great emphasis on organizational communication. Organization members should be aware of channels of communication, have access to them, and be able to communicate directly. Barnard viewed authority as depending on communication also. Employees must receive and understand communications from authorities, they must feel the communication is compatible their own goals/motives (effectiveness), they must feel the communication is compatible with organizational goals (efficiency), and compliance must be feasible. This view of authority emphasized the role of the employee, not the superior, in making a communication "authoritative." The role of the superior is to use incentives, mainly persuasion, to encourage receptivity to communications the superior may issue.

Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon, a student of political science, public administration, and economics. He was born in 1916, was heavily influenced by the behavioral revolution in political science under Charles Merriam at the University of Chicago in the 1930s (Simon, 1996), and went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978. His major works include Administrative Behavior (1946), Models of Man (1957), Organizations (coauthored with James March, 1958), and The Sciences of the Artificial (1969). Because he worked at Carnegie-Mellon University, his work and those of colleagues and disciples sometimes goes under the label of "the Carnegie school." Among the major thrusts of his analysis were these:
1. Public administration as normative science. Simon believed that public administrators were not should not be and could not be policy-neutral (a direct challenge to Wilsonian thinking), though their commitments to policy should be tempered by strong professional standards.
2. Administrative man, not economic man. Simon rejected the classic economic assumptions of managers as economic maximizers making optimal decisions based on acquiring full information. Instead, he believed "administrative man" was more descriptive: managers are "satisficers" who seek the first satisfactory solution, based on limited information ("bounded rationality"). Although Simon's work was a challenge to purely rational models of decision-making, ultimately his view was rationalistic, believing administrative decisions could be interpreted in terms of nested hierarchical structures in which decision-makers decomposed large problems into a series of smaller ones and routinized their solution through limited search strategies. Simon's neo-rational theory was later challenged by other theorists who believed public-sector decisions had to be described with more emphasis on political and non-rational processes.
3. Information costs. Where classical economics assumed unlimited free information available for decision-making, Simon understood all information has costs. "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. "
4. Bounded rationality: pattern matching to develop solutions in problem space. Another corollary of the rejection of "economic man" and decision-making by optimization based on total search of all possible information, was Simon's understanding that in reality decision-makers define "problem spaces" onto which limited information may be "mapped." Mapping, in turn, centers on matching patterns, not indiscriminantly adding atomic fragments of data. As patterns are matched, information is mapped in "chunks" to the problem space until satisficing can occur. People remember and process data in chunks, averaging five pieces of data per chunk, not in sequential threads involving a large number of pieces. Satisficing is a form of chunk-based, non-structured search, which may be contrasted with systematic optimization/maximization (as Jones, 2003, does). Simon's 1955 paper on bounded rationality was a basis for his receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978. Simon's later writings on artificial intelligence build on this theme.
5. Mathematical models may be constructed to describe human behavior. This was the theme of Models of Man (1957). Decision-making centers on efficiency as a norm for evaluating alternatives. This requires measurement of results. Measurement requires clear conceptual definition of desired outputs. Simon's earlier 1938 work with Clarence Ridley was a milestone in the measurement of municipal indicators.
6. Organizations as value systems. Simon emphasized the role of the manager in articulating organizational goals, in part through encouragement of cooperative behavior (cf. Barnard).
7. Cognitive psychology was the focus of Simon's later work, focusing on the use of the computer to simulate human thinking. In philosophy of science, Simon was especially interested in how theoretical (non-observable) terms arise in scientific theories and how they can be handled in axiomatization.

Dwight Waldo

Dwight Waldo, whose writing extends from the 1960s to the 1990s, has played a central role in the development of public administration theory, both in his writings and through several conferences he organized over the years. Carroll (1997) summarizes Waldonian thought under several categories:
1. Antinomic, in the sense of focusing on the tensions among concepts which are considered valid in their own spheres.
2. Pluralistic or multidimensional, in the sense of emphasizing a broad array of factors at work in any given administrative process.
3. Historical, in the sense of stressing the evolution of administrative processes, often calling attention to cycles.
4. Comparative, in the sense of focusing on comparisons among agencies, states, and nations.
5. Normative, in the sense of being concerned with the fundamental relationships among bureacracy, civilization, and the values of "the good life," including democratic values.
6. Functional, in the sense of focusing on processes of change within bureacratic functions.
7. Anti-reductionist, in the sense of emphasizing the complexity of forces at work in bureaucracy and cautionary about formalistic solutions to public discontents.

Bibliography

• Barnard, Chester I. (1938). Functions of the executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
• Carroll, James D. (1997). The warfare on and over American government in Waldonian perspective. Public Administration Review, Vol. 57, No. 3 (May/June): 200-204.
• Gulick, Luther (1937). Notes on the theory of organization. In Gulick, L. & Urwick, L. (1937). Papers on the science of administration. New York. Institute of Public Administration, Columbia University.
• Jones, B. D. (2003). Bounded rationality and political science: Lessons from public administration and public policy. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 13(4), 395-412.
• Simon, Herbert (1947) Administrative behavior: A study of decision-making processes in administrative organizations, 4th Ed. The Free Press (1997) ISBN 0-684-83582-7.
• Simon, Herbert (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. Quarterly Journal of Economics 6, 99-118.
• Simon, Herbert (1957.) Models of man. NY: John Wiley.
• Simon, Herbert (1969) The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Third ed. 1996.
• Simon, Herbert (1979). Models of thought, Vols. 1 and 2,. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simon's papers on human information-processing and problem-solving.
• Simon, Herbert (1982). Models of bounded rationality, Vols. 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Simon's papers on economics. Volume 3, 1997.
• Simon, Herbert (1983). Reason in human affairs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Simon's lectures on human decision-making and information processing.
• Simon, Herbert (1996). Models of my life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Simon, Herbert and March, James G. (1958) Organizations. New York: Wiley. Written with the collaboration of Harold Guetzkow.
• Ridley, Clarence E. & Simon, Herbert (1938). Measuring municipal activities. Chicago: ICMA.
• Waldo, Dwight (1961). "Organizational theory: An elephantine problem." Public Administration Review, Vol. 21 (Fall): 210-215.
• Waldo, Dwight (1971). Public administration in a time of turbulence. Scranton, PA: Chandler.
• Waldo, Dwight (1978). "Organization theory: revisiting the elephant." Public Administration Review, Vol. 38, No. 6: 589-597.
• Waldo, Dwight (1980). The enterprise of public administration. Novato, CA: Chandler and Sharp.
• Waldo, Dwight (1984). The administrative state, 2nd edition. NY: Holmes and Meier.
• Wilson, Woodrow (1887). The study of administration. Political Science Quarterly II: 197-222.