Search

INTRODUCTION Among American scholars, elite Japanese universities have a bad name. Forget how well the schools do or do not teach. Forget what research they do or do not produce. [...], Scholars (for example, Chalmers Johnson) routinely argue that university cliques dominate Japanese firms and bureaucracies. The graduates of the most selective schools, they explain, control and manipulate their employers. They cause them to hire from their alma mater. They skew internal career dynamics to favor themselves. For most firms and bureaucracies, we lack the data on employee-level output necessary to test whether cliques do skew career tournaments. Because judges publish opinions, within the courts we may have what we need. In this Article, I use data on published opinions to test whether Japanese judges from the most selective schools are more likely--holding output constant--to reach the Supreme Court. They are not. I find only weak evidence of possible favoritism toward Kyoto University graduates, and no evidence of favoritism toward University of Tokyo graduates. Japanese judges do not find themselves named to the Court because of their school backgrounds. They find themselves named there because they are unusually productive.

Several analyses are conducted to explain the changes and differentiation that have been made in the organizational studies in Europe. The organization studies is shown to be extremely heterogeneous in Europe, as it has undergone various changes in different parts of the continent.

The history and the various ups and downs and the displacement of ends faced by the organization theory in the last few decades are analyzed. The various advantages, disadvantages and means of allocating resources for future researches regarding this displacement of ends are also explained.

FOUR YEARS AGO, I LEFT SILICON VALLEY TO accept a presidential appointment as a White House fellow. After undergoing months of interviews and obtaining a top-secret security clearance, I moved [...]

Convergence between Woodrow Wilson's and Max Weber's thought, as well as their differences with regard to the politicsuadministration dichotomy, can be ascribed to the Hegelian tradition of public administrative theory. On the one hand, Wilson was strongly influenced by Georg W. F. Hegel. On the other hand, there is an empirical connection between Hegel and Weber. Both shared a consciousness of the German bureaucratic tradition based on Hegel's Philosophy of Right. These insights have important methodological and theoretical implications for the contemporary comparative study of public administration.

Rapoport's Career This introduction will focus on the first author, Anatol Rapoport, because of his outstanding role in the development of systems sciences plus the fact that not much could [...]

'If legislatures are becoming irrelevant it is because governments want them to be. Cabinets benefit when legislatures meet less often.' --David C. Docherty, p. 177. The volumes in the Canadian [...]

This article examines the use of the president's pardon power from 1953 to 2000. Two different models are used to describe the pardons process: a presidential model and an agency [...]

This article examines how land use ideology and popular images of farmworkers contribute to the housing crisis for Mexican farmworkers in Fresno County, California. Despite the desperate need for affordable housing in the rural areas of Fresno County, local policy makers either have failed to aid or have actively discouraged attempts to increase the stock of affordable housing. Through an ethnographic examination of public policy decision making about residential construction on the west side of Fresno County, I document how public officials make policy decisions based on both a land use ideology that rationalizes governmental failure to serve Mexicans working in the agriculture industry and portraits of farmworkers and farmworker families that reflect stereotypes and nationally relevant population characteristics rather than regionally specific realities. This ideology and these stereotypical profiles operate to render invisible portions of the Mexican farmworker population who have been working in the area for decades and diminish affordable housing opportunities. Key words: agricultural work, bureaucracy, zoning, affordable housing, public policy, Mexican farmworkers

Evans and Rauch (1999) have demonstrated that there is a strong relationship between the 'Weberianness' of a national state's bureaucratic capacities and its record on economic growth. Using their data set and the best available data sets on the incidence of income poverty, this article investigates whether there is a relationship between a Weberian notion of effective bureaucratic capacities and the state's ability to reduce poverty. Using the same time frame as Evans and Rauch (1970-90) and analysing data for 29 developing and middle income countries, the article concludes that, in general, there does indeed seem to be a relationship between states with effective 'Weberian' public institutions and their ability to reduce poverty. KEY WORDS bureaucracies / economic growth / poverty / states

We analyze the impact of donor fragmentation on the quality of government bureaucracy in aid-recipient nations. A formal model of a donor's decision to hire government administrators to manage donor-funded projects predicts that the number of administrators hired declines as the donor's share of other projects in the country increases, and as the donor's concern for the success of other donors' projects increases. The model's predictions are consistent with results from cross-country empirical tests, using an index of bureaucratic quality available for aid-recipient nations over the 1982-2001 period. JEL classification: F35; O19 Keywords: Foreign aid; Bureaucratic quality

Bruce Kobayashi and Larry Ribstein apply the 'theory of the firm' to worker privacy with specific application to the employer's ability to monitor employee performance and behavior. They take the theory to drive toward a much reduced role for law in favor of regulation by contract. This essay unpacks their theory. It faults the theory for its failure to come to grips with the possibility of monopsony in the labor market, its failure to appreciate the 'public goods' nature of privacy policies and the related assumption that the employer's ability to adopt and apply privacy-invasive policies is invariably a product of a consensual arms-length bargain.

Government bureaucracy in Malaysia has faced public criticism on grounds of inefficiency, corruption, and failure to guard public interests. A study is presented to examine and analyze the various approaches taken up currently to combating corruption and accountability in the Malaysian public service. It particularly focuses on the limitations and constraints of the institutional mechanisms in keeping public bureaucracy under surveillance and control.

A social theory framework is developed to explain the common themes of recursive and adaptive practice underpinning the existing strategic management literature. The concept of management practices-in-use into a research agenda is developed along with nine broad research questions that may be used to investigate empirically strategy as practice.

The strategic choice, negotiated order and structuration theory are the three theories that are useful in the study of organizational boundaries. The way in which 'symbolic boundaries' have real consequences in forming and sustaining corresponding social boundaries is examined.

The way in which boundary characteristics of the various organizations in a particular field influence developments in that field is explained. The important realm of home working for 21st century workers is described by many fruitful directions.

Organizational or group boundaries influence the ways and the ability of its members to exert influence on other organizations. A framework of interpretation which helps to assist in the distinction between organizations on the basis of their boundary properties is developed.

The potential of Niklas Luhmann's autopoietic theory in relation to the epistemological foundations of organization theory are discussed. The autopoietic theory complements Giddens's structuration theory by providing a promising basis for recursivity-based organization theory.

Competency, a long-standing concern with the skills and capabilities of bureaucrats and bureaucracies, has recently attracted renewed attention for public service reformers and consultants. This study explores three questions about the recent fashion for competency language in public management. First, it considers whether contemporary approaches to competency have been diffused from a single source by briefly examining the history of the competency movement in three countries. Second, it analyses, on the basis of case studies drawn from the UK Department of Trade and Industry and the German Federal Economics ministry, how government departments organise competency by assembling policy teams that reflect the problem constellations for particular policy issues. Finally, it raises the issue of whether national administrations have adopted appropriate responses to competency in the light of contemporary demands placed in national bureaucracies. It concludes that there is only a limited tendency to diffusion, that departments respond to problems more by inertia than design and that the national responses offer only limited solutions to justified concerns about competency., Competency--avant la lettre, perhaps--has long been at the heart of debates about administration and bureaucracy, denoting the skills and capabilities that the state machine does or should possess, as well [...]

Despite the fact that hardly anyone likes them, hierarchies persist in business. They remain because they fulfill the human need for order and security. Despite the good they do, however, hierarchies are always authoritarian.

The significance of the irreversibility of an attacker's competitive move in interfirm competitive interaction is examined by using behavioral insights from organization theory. Irreversibility is a multifaceted construct composed of internal commitment and public commitment.

The Labour Party's Best Value program on public private sector cooperation on contracts to replace compulsory competitive tendering has failed because of the bureacracy, inspections, recriminations and paperwork that have cropped up in its wake.

Public discourse about the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) was dominated by media coverage since the commission's formation in 1992. The public is largely unaware of how important developing codes of conduct is to the ICAC's role. The ICAC produced a draft code for ministers of parliament in 1994, but parliament has neglected to turn this code into legislation.

The principles of public management can be applied to the UK's Civil Service by imitating the strategies developed by lobbyists and trade associations. The government could encourage competition between such individuals and organizations to develop policy analyses to measure the efficiency with which government policy is determined. This approach permits making policy development transparent while imposing reasonable limits on access to government thinking.

Japanese bureaucracy has become the object of criticism. It has been credited for the country's economic recovery after World War II. However, with the loss of power of the Liberal Democratic Party, the close relationship between political leadership and civil service was broken. Despite rampant media bashing, no serious study examining the causes or recommending solutions to bureaucratic decline, exists.

Bureaucrats do not serve the public interest because they focus on their own ministries rather than on the national interest as a whole. Since the private sector will not act in the public interest unless the bureaucrats do so, the latter must show that their morals are based on a public interest distinct from the interests of their specific ministries. They cannot base their acts on their moral position if such stance is contrary to public interest.

The principal purpose of the research reported here was to assess the extent to which the organizations created by 19th century railroad managers possessed the structural, procedural, and personnel characteristics of bureaucracy. Historical evidence indicates that the structural and procedural characteristics were quite prominent, but biographical data about the managers suggests that the personnel characteristics were less so, particularly with respect to the key factor of managerial career development. The managers who created these bureaucratic organizations did not have organizational models or principles available to them, but rather employed a contingency approach to their organizing decisions. The biographical data suggests that few of them had relevant experiences on foreign railroads or in the Civil War army to guide their organizing decisions. Finally, the biographical data suggests that late 19th century railroad managers were not only a clearly defined occupational group, but were also distinct with respect to selected social characteristics, forming the vanguard of the emerging managerial class.

Bureaucrats in the early 1970s were talented young people who were dedicated and enthusiastic about their job. People looked up to them and trusted them. During the 1990s, however, the public's perception of bureaucrats has changed. Bureaucrats are seen as incompetent, lazy, overpaid and misguided government personnel. The federal personnel system has been modified so that public servants are evaluated based on their performance, professionalism, accountability and their ability to take risks. Public servants face the challenge of preserving the competency and political neutrality of the civil service., Historians will look back on the US civil service as a phenomenon of great value. Let us hope they do not do so from the perspective of irretrievable loss. The [...]