Breaking Through Bureaucracy A New Vision for Managing in Government or History Derailed

Breaking Through Bureaucracy - A New Vision for Managing in Government

Author: Michael Barzelay

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 isindispensable to public managers and students of public policy and administration.

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

New interesting textbook: Esophogeal Cancer or Brown Skin

History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century

Author: Ivan T Berend

There is probably no greater authority on the modern history of central and eastern Europe than Ivan Berend, whose previous work, Decades of Crisis, was hailed by critics as "masterful" and "the broadest synthesis of the modern social, economic, and cultural history of the region that we possess." Now, having brought together and illuminated this region's storm-tossed history in the twentieth century, Berend turns his attention to the equally turbulent period that preceded it. The "long" nineteenth century, extending up to World War I, contained the seeds of developments and crises that continue to haunt the region today.
The book begins with an overview of the main historical trends in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, during which time the region lost momentum and became the periphery, no longer in step with the rising West. It concludes with an account of the persisting authoritarian political structures and the failed modernization that paved the way for social and political revolts. The origins of twentieth-century extremism and its tragedies are plainly visible in this penetrating account.

Publishers Weekly

UCLA history professor Berend (Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II) succeeds in capturing the common as well as the diverse features of the parts of a notoriously complex region during the period from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to the start of WWI. Berend has made the smart decision to organize his book topically: individual chapters cover economics, politics and culture, but he hews closely to the field in which he first made his mark, economic history. The opening chapter provides an effective synthesis on the origins of backwardness in the region, from the "second serfdom" in the Baltic region to Ottoman domination in the Balkans. But Berend also demonstrates that Balkan societies were themselves resistant to the modernizing impulses coming from the West. Perhaps surprisingly for an economic historian, the author is equally good at covering cultural and political developments, especially the grand appeal of romantic nationalism. By showing how modernized, literary languages were reformed and even invented by nationalist intellectuals, Berend sides with those scholars who believe in the "constructed" nature of ethnic and national identities. Yet he is also keenly aware that nationalism developed upon preexisting religious and regional identities. The later chapters depict the belated, and incomplete, industrialization and the conflicts between democratic and authoritarian politics. Berend's prose is always clear if not exactly inspired. For those readers looking for a sober, effective historical synthesis on a very complicated region, this is a good place to start. 97 b&w photos, 2 maps. (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

For Berend, history is a whole, and when cultural, economic, social, and political trends are taken together, they distinguish central and east Europeans from the rest of Europe, notwithstanding important differences between the Balkans and east-central Europe. The region, he argues, has long lived in the shadow of the European states to the west, sometimes avidly borrowing from them, as with early-nineteenth-century German romanticism, which soon turned into a century-long grounding for eastern Europe's special, embattled nationalisms. More often, however, the influences coming from Europe's other half were warped or stymied by the frustrations and excesses of peoples denied a natural path to freedom, as well as by social and economic forms laggard since the sixteenth century. Berend, a first-rate economic historian, treats the often neglected economic dimension with special skill.