Revisiting Waldo's Administrative State: Constancy and Change in Public Administration

1 Introduction: Dwight Waldo’s The Administrative State

edition, which remains in print. Following Waldo’s subtitle, our book forms a study of the political theory of American public administration . While not diminishing the importance of traditional administrative concerns such as cost-effectiveness, the ensuing chapters address one of Waldo’s “big questions”—the reconcilability of the U.S. political and administrative systems. Revisiting Waldo’s Administrative State: Constancy and Change in Public Administration contains eleven chapters. They follow the structure of Waldo’s first and second editions. The introduction summarizes Waldo’s book and explains why The Administrative State became so influential and one of the most widely read books in the field. The next two chapters deal with the material and ideological background of modern public administration, a subject that formed the focus of part I of Waldo’s original work. These are followed by three chapters covering what Waldo in part II of his book characterized as “problems of political philosophy.” The titles of these chapters parallel those used by Waldo. Next are four chapters that closely analyze particular challenges inherent in contemporary administrative reform: understanding the “thinning” or hollowing of administrative institutions; securing human capital for administrative institutions, in this case maintaining the U.S. all-volunteer army; managing the complex relations among public agencies and the private organizations on which public administrators depend for the performance of government work; and developing the capacity to deal with “wicked” policy problems having both ominous consequences and no apparent civilized solutions. These chapters parallel part III of Waldo’s book, which critiques special problems arising from the manner in which the then-dominant approaches to public administrative theory treated principles, organization, science, and administrative values. The final chapter shares its title with Waldo’s conclusion, “Notes on the Present Tendencies.” It weaves together the book’s main ideas in assessing the forces shaping the future directions of public administrative thought. During a lunch at a professional meeting of the National Academy of Public Administration in the early 1990s, one of this book’s editors (Rosenbloom) asked Waldo (essentially), “The Administrative State was such a devastating attack on the mainstream of the field. How did people treat you when you came to professional meetings like this after the book first appeared?” Waldo replied (exactly), “Nobody spoke to me before 1953.” He was serious. Eventually, of course, almost everybody in the field wanted to talk to him. The editors and authors of this book hope readers will talk to them. Our collective purpose is to advance public administrative thought by x Preface gaining a better understanding of public administration’s big ideas and questions, how they come to the fore, and what their impact on further theoretical development and practice may be. We share Waldo’s belief that public administration needs to be well understood because it plays such a major role in the future of civilization. PREFACE xi This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments xiii Revisiting Waldo’s Administrative State grew out of a symposium on “The Administrative State Reconsidered,” hosted by American University ’s School of Public Affairs in 2003 to honor the fifty-fifth anniversary of Dwight Waldo’s classic work. The symposium could not have been held without the enthusiasm and support of American University ’s provost at the time, Cornelius Kerwin, and the dean of the School of Public Affairs, William LeoGrande. We thank them for making the entire endeavor possible and contributing greatly to its overall quality. We also thank the people who joined us as authors of this book, John Cadigan, Robert Durant, Patricia Ingraham, Donald Kettl, Norma Riccucci, Barbara Romzek, and Larry Terry, for their participation in the symposium and willingness to revise and carefully craft their papers into the following chapters. We are grateful to everyone else who attended and participated in the symposium, though they are too numerous to name here. Special thanks go to Kimberly Martin and other members of the school staff who completed the often invisible work that allowed the symposium to occur. Professor Suzanne Piotrowski of Rutgers University–Newark helped to keep things running smoothly and to facilitate valuable participation by the symposium ’s attendees. The book benefited substantially from the very helpful suggestions of anonymous readers for Georgetown University Press, as well as those of its public policy series editor, Professor Beryl Radin. The book is dedicated to the late Dwight Waldo, who made so many things possible for so many...