Product Description

This book attacks the conventional wisdom that bureaucrats are bunglers and the system can't be changed. Michael Barzelay and Babak Armajani trace the source of much poor performance in government to the persistent influence of what they call the bureaucratic paradigm--a theory built on such notions as central control, economy and efficiency, and rigid adherence to rules. Rarely questioned, the bureaucratic paradigm leads competent and faithful public servants--as well as politicians--unwittingly to impair government's ability to serve citizens by weakening, misplacing, and misdirecting accountability.
How can this system be changed? Drawing on research sponsored by the Ford Foundation/Harvard University program on Innovations in State and Local Government, this book tells the story of how public officials in one state, Minnesota, cast off the conceptual blinders of the bureaucratic paradigm and experimented with ideas such as customer service, empowering front-line employees to resolve problems, and selectively introducing market forces within government. The author highlights the arguments government executives made for the changes they proposed, traces the way these changes were implemented, and summarizes the impressive results. This approach provides would-be bureaucracy busters with a powerful method for dramatically improving the way government manages the public's business.
Generalizing from the Minnesota experience and from similar efforts nationwide, the book proposes a new paradigm that will reframe the perennial debate on public management. With its carefully analyzed ideas, real-life examples, and closely reasoned practical advice, Breaking Through Bureaucracy is indispensable to public managers and students of public policy and administration.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #918076 in Books
• Published on: 1992-10-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 237 pages

From Library Journal
Barzelay teaches at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and his study of Minnesota state government reform was funded by the Program on Innovations in State and Local Government. Barzelay's text offers a practical examination of government management, while his extensive notes provide a theoretical critique of political leadership and bureaucratic administration. While similar to David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's Reinventing Government (Addison-Wesley, 1992) in arguing for more attention to outcomes (rather than inputs), empowered employees, and a customer orientation, Barzelay is less antigovernment and more pragmatic in his approach. His "post-bureaucratic paradigm" recognizes the importance of government and the problems of market-based operations. In addition, Barzelay's theoretical and less generalized arguments will make his work the more lasting critique of modern bureaucratic government. For academic and special collections.
- William Waugh Jr., Georgia State Univ., Atlanta
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap
"Simple, clear, and persuasive, Breaking Through Bureaucracy contains a lot of good advice on how to make government agencies work better."--Aaron Wildavsky, University of California, Berkeley

"An invaluable overview of the way government can change. This book doesn't simply identify problems, it also provides solutions. Right on!"--Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., Governor of Connecticut"Breaking Through Bureaucracy provides a diagnosis of what inhibits effective governance and offers a highly workable remedy for those ills."--Stephen Goldsmith, Mayor of Indianapolis

From the Back Cover
"Simple, clear, and persuasive, Breaking Through Bureaucracy contains a lot of good advice on how to make government agencies work better." (Aaron Wildavsky, University of California, Berkeley)

Customer Reviews

Some conceptual and practical keys for systemically addressing typical bureaucratic dysfunctions
At its broadest level, the argument of Breaking Through Bureaucracy is that nothing less than new ways of thinking and acting are required today in public service. The text makes the implicit case that administrators too often have become slave to a set of obsolescent ideas. This text could never have been developed without the interweaving of Babak Armajani's practical experience and Michael Barzelay's theoretical acumen. The argument proceeds on two levels of analysis interwoven throughout the text: 1) the level of ideas through which those with management responsibility typically construct administrative arguments and 2) that of daily administrative operations, most especially with respect to recurring relations between overseers, staff, and line operators.

The interweaving of practical and theoretical insights provides invaluable clues for the attentive reader. Part I demonstrates how during the reform era, the bureaucratic paradigm addressed effectively leading problems of its day. At the same time, it argues and illustrates with clarity that yesterday's bureaucratic solutions have become the source of unintended administrative ills and organizational dysfunctions that unnecessarily continue to plague bureaucratic functioning (in government and in business one might add) today. While this case study focuses entirely on governmental operations, its lessons for business are no less profound. Indeed, a colleague of mine restructured his business division after reading this text. It provides practical insight into principles of quality management that correspond with Deming's notion of profound knowledge, not readily available elsewhere.

Part I introduces the two main levels of analysis on which the book unfolds. The first level of analysis is that of ideas with which administrators typically frame issues of public management. At this level of analysis, the text sets up a debate, broadly between defenders of the status quo who see recurring troubles along the overseer-staff-line relations as conditions to be endured and possibilist thinker-doers who see these recurring troubles as problems to be solved. At its second level of analysis, the text begins to introduce the reader to concrete routines, constraints, and incentives that typically govern relations between overseers, staff, and line in everyday administrative operations. At this level of analysis, the text argues the need for innovative strategies capable of effectually altering these recurring routines. A principle finding at this concrete level of administrative analysis is articulating how the role of staff (those administrative experts who control inputs to line whether in budget, finance, purchasing, HR, IT etc.) typically constitute likely recurring bottlenecks in government agencies (or any other type of bureaucratic organization) that seek to strengthen responsiveness to customers and to develop a results-oriented culture.

Part II of the text presents a case study drawn from Minnesota State government and describes the inventing of new strategies, the reworking of organizational cultures (in ways that increased responsiveness and accountability for results), and discusses how developments in the case under consideration challenged financial paradigms dominant in government today. [It should be noted that independent of this text, an update on the subject of "Challenging Financial Paradigms" has been co-written by Bob Hutchison, [then Finance Commissioner in Minnesota] and published in paperback in 2006 as The Price of Government.) Part II demonstrates how daily administrative routine, constraints, and incentives were transformed by reflective practitioners in Minnesota through engaging constructively with the concrete particulars before them, and more broadly, presents an argument for seeing and treating these recurring troubles along the overseer-staff-line frontier as "problems" (due to malleable if insistent circumstances) rather than as "conditions" (or unalterable facts of life).

Part III discusses "generalizations" or lessons learned from the case study. A methodological note is appropriate here. As a case study, it is appropriate to note that the likelihood of its external validity or capacity for generalization is not predicated upon statistical inferences derived from an applied variance analysis, but rather depends upon the generation of its theoretical model (contrasting "bureaucratic" and "post-bureaucratic" ways of thinking and acting), a model derived from Michael Barzelay's effectual process analysis in this case study. In my experience with readers, for those who take the trouble to understand the conceptual contrast, resonance of this theoretical model with the experience of practitioners across a wide variety of local government settings is high. Any practitioner who takes the time for a careful reading of this text, of course, is entitled to draw his or her own inferences as to the likely external validity of generalizations drawn from this case study.

The author's "generalizations" or lessons learned are divided into three chapters. The first of these entitled "More Problems, Fewer Conditions" redefines bureaucratic accountability, suggesting that all too often bureaucratic reliance upon the enforcement model of control ends up breeding weak, misguided, and/or misplaced accountability. The chapter offers the authors recommendations for strengthening and redirecting accountability. One key to this text is Barzelay's contrasting the "enforcement model of control" with the "leadership model of control;" His analysis underscores the increased degree of control and accountability generated in Minnesota through the latter model of action. This model of control Barzelay argues is integral to the "post-bureaucratic paradigm." For those interested in a close understanding of what's entailed in such a leadership model of control, it's worthwhile to note that this approach to generating control is conceptually speaking, a direct descendent from different way of thinking and acting first articulated in a coherent form by Mary Parker Follett (and whose work once again is available in print today as Mary Parker Follett--Prophet of Management (thanks to the initiative of Pauline Graham [ed.] and the Harvard Business School Press. In this regard, see especially her articles on "The Giving of Orders," "Leadership," and "Control").

The second to last chapter of this text addresses the "then what?" question for public managers. Entitled "Managing Customer-Focused Staff Agencies," this chapter addresses what the author argues with considerable persuasion throughout is probably the key administrative bottleneck in developing more responsive and results-oriented governmental agencies. He offers six principles in line with the "post-bureaucratic paradgim" that reflective practitioners may take into account in their management practice. Finally, the last chapter, "The Post-Bureaucratic Paradigm in Historical Perspective," ties all the pieces of the text together. Largely incomprehensible to most public administrative students/practitioners when they begin here, it's the "aha" chapter that reward those who have carefully gone through each of the stepping stones in the argument of the text.


In closing, central to the argument of Barzelay and Armajani (and reminiscent of Mary Parker Follett's notion of reciprocal response and her treatment of the role of purpose in administrative affairs), is their pointing to the need for greater mutual adjustment in relations between overseers, staff, and line together with their arguing the practical need for administrators to reimbue work with purpose at every level of the organization.

Moving in this direction requires more than Barzelay points to in his analysis and more, unfortunately, than many of his associates in the New Public Management movement seem to have recognized. Nevertheless, Barzelay and Armajani take us to a critical threshold that I believe is key to developing new ways of thinking and acting in and for public service. This text does not have all the answers and there are some striking limitations in Barzelay's analysis based on the very case he presents. Yet if we as a field of professional practice in the broad area of public policy, public management, public administration, miss core lessons in this text, then I believe someone else will have to rediscover them in the future. This text deserves to be recognized as a modern classic in the field and widely studied, most especially by those who will be constructing our administrative infrastructures of the future.

Well thought out.
This book is for those of you who are sick of redundant and mundane bureaucratic routine work, and wan to learn about the ways to change such system. This books points out inefficiencies of bureaucracy and promotes the idea of simple and quick approach to technology, which the way we do things. It also gives some good examples from a few corporations that are being affected by their implementation of rational organizational structure i.e. bureaucratic structure. It's an advocate of creative behavior at jobs regardless of the nature.