The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928.

Rating:
Summary: The work of federal bureau chiefs
Review: This book narrates several episodes of executive leadership in the USPO, the USDA, and Department of the Interior during the last decades of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th centuries. The author shows how post office and agriculture department bureau chiefs effectively managed upward, outward, and through their organizations to create public value and thereby gained considerable operating discretion for themselves and their departments and how managerial failures in interior's reclamation bureau resulted in its loss. For students of public management, this book provides case evidence for many of Mark Moore's strongest normative claims. It is first rate, well written, plausible historical narrative. Its weaknesses are too little attention to the creation of public value (perhaps because that would smack too much of normative economics) and far too much attention to issues that could only be of interest to academic political scientists.