Organizational Structures by Typesof Federal Agencies: A Policy Approach to Bureaucracy.

This is a revision of previous paper that was presented in MPSA, April 2003. In that original paper, the author (in line with Lowi’s idea: the typologies of policy) identified four different types of federal agencies and try to find their distinct organizational characteristics in terms of internal structure of agencies (e.g.,the degree of professionalism, the hierarchical structure, the proportion of employees whose works are associated with law/rule, the proportion of political appointees, the ratio of supervisor to employee, etc). According to the empirical data analyses (data source: the U.S. Office of Personnel Management), some of distinctive characteristics of each agency were: 1) Regulatory Agency: rule-bound, low autonomy, high proportion of colonels, high lateral entry by lawyers, high ratio of political appointees, etc; 2) Distributive Agency: high professionalism, more autonomy, lateral entry of professionals (e.g., Ph.Ds), etc; 3) Redistributive Agency: rule and administrative routine bounded, very low professionalism, weak autonomy, very high ratio of high ranking personnel in field offices, low political appointees, etc; and 4) Constituent Agency: rule bounded, weak autonomy, low professionalism, low ratio of high ranking officials in fields, large proportion of lower educational degree holders, high proportion of political appointees, high employee diversity, etc. In this revised paper, based on the above findings the author strengthens and elaborates theoretical aspects. That is, in order to explain the different structures of federal agencies, he adopts the ideas of “contingency theorists” in the field of organizational theory, such as Joan Woodward (1965), James Thompson (1967), Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), and others. Thus, this paper argues that the different types of federal agencies face different (policy) environments and in turn adopt different kinds of structures so that they can adapt to their own task environments (e.g., redistributive agency has the high proportion of clerical workers in order to process citizen’s demands effectively). In addition, the author considers policy (or agency) goal as a factor that leads to different organizational structure (e.g., since regulatory agency’s one of primary goals is to control the behaviors of citizens, the agency tends to emphasize rules and regulations, as a result, it has the high proportion of law professionals). In short, this paper seriously questions the traditional Weberian style bureaucracy, which argues a single best form of organizational structure, and suggests that the structures of federal agencies differ depending on their policy (i.e., regulatory, distributive, redistributive, and constituent policy) environments and policy goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]