Rethinks how bureaucracy shapes foreign policy - miscalculation is less likely when political leaders can extract quality information from the bureaucracy.
The classic book on the way American government agencies work and how they can be made to work better -- the "masterwork" of political scientist James Q. Wilson (The Economist) In Bureaucracy, the distinguished scholar James Q. Wilson examines a wide range of bureaucracies, including the US Army, the FBI, the CIA, the FCC, and the Social Security Administration, providing the first comprehensive, in-depth analysis of what government agencies do, why they operate the way they do, and how they might become more responsible and effective. It is the essential guide to understanding how American government works.
Although they appear successful, are businesses incubating seeds of disaster? In this book, Kolind helps readers uncover the earliest signs of trouble and reignite a powerful new growth cycle instead of accelerating towards failure.
This volume examines Max Weber’s pre-World War I thinking about bureaucracy. It suggests that Weber’s vision shares common components with the highly efficient Prussian General Staff military bureaucracy developed by Clausewitz and Helmuth von Moltke. Weber did not believe that Germany’s other major institutions, the Civil Service, industry, or the army could deliver world class performances since he believed that they pursued narrow, selfish interests. However, following Weber’s death in 1920, the model published by his wife Marianne contained none of the military material about which Weber had written approvingly in the early chapters of Economy and Society. Glynn Cochrane concludes that Weber’s model was unlikely to include military material after the Versailles peace negotiations (in which Weber participated) outlawed the Prussian General Staff in 1919.
Most people are unaware of a quiet war that has been raging in the courts, federal regulatory agencies, and Congress, a war over federal agency preemption of state common law claims. This text offers scholars and policymakers a full analysis of the legal and policy issues under debate.
Over the past fifty years, many thousands of conflict simulations have been published that bring the dynamics of past and possible future wars to life. In this book, Philip Sabin explores the theory and practice of conflict simulation as a topic in its own right, based on his thirty years of experience in designing wargames and using them in teaching. Simulating War sets conflict simulation in its proper context alongside more familiar techniques such as game theory and operational analysis. It explains in detail the analytical and modelling techniques involved, and it teaches you how to design your own simulations of conflicts of your choice. The book provides eight simple illustrative simulations of specific historical conflicts, complete with rules, maps and counters. Simulating War is essential reading for all recreational or professional simulation gamers, and for anyone who is interested in modelling war, from teachers and students to military officers.
Selected for the 2019 Commandant’s Professional Reading List, Assignment: Pentagon takes the reader on an insider’s tour of the Pentagon, describing how the headquarters for the world’s largest multinational “corporation” functions. The reader gains insights into how this bureaucracy functions as well as the stresses and strains inherent to such a complex organization. Now in its fifth edition, Assignment: Pentagon remains the best practical guide for anyone who works for the Pentagon or any other large bureaucracy. Eminently readable, Assignment: Pentagon is the essential guide for the newly assigned military person, fresh civilian, or interested outsider to the Pentagon’s informal set of arrangements, networks, and functions that operate in the service and joint service world. With updated information about jobs and Pentagon vernacular, this fifth edition delivers a wealth of practical advice and helpful hints about surviving the challenges of working in “the Building.” If you’ve been assigned to the Pentagon or are starting work for any large company, you need to read Assignment: Pentagon.
How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy. The book is pioneering in bringing together historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages with scholars of post-medieval European empires, while a genuinely world-historical perspective is provided by chapters on China, the Incas and the Ottomans. The editors identify a paradox in how bureaucracy operated on the scale of empires and so help explain why some empires endured for centuries while, in the contemporary world, empires fail almost before they begin. By adopting a cross-chronological and world-historical approach, the book challenges the abiding association of bureaucratic rationality with 'modernity' and the so-called 'Rise of the West'.