Deftly blending social and business history with economic analysis, Employing Bureaucracy shows how the American workplace shifted from a market-oriented system to a bureaucratic one over the course of the 20th century. Jacoby explains how an unstable, haphazard employment relationship evolved into one that was more enduring, equitable, and career-oriented. This revised edition presents a new analysis of recent efforts to re-establish a market orientation in the workplace. This book is a definitive history of the human resource management profession in the United States, showing its diverse roots in engineering, welfare work, and vocational guidance. It explores the recurring tension between the new professional order and traditional line management. Using a variety of sources, Jacoby analyzes the complex relations between personnel managers, labor unions, and government from the late 19th century to the present. Employing Bureaucracy: *analyzes the origins of the modern employment relationship's distinctive features; *combines a variety of disciplinary perspectives, from business and labor history to economics, sociology, and management; *shows the transformation of the American workplace over the course of the 20th century, from market-oriented to bureaucratic to recent efforts to move back to a market orientation; and *provides the single-best and most sophisticated history of the origins and development of the modern "HR" profession. For historians, social scientists, and practitioners, this book is a readable and rewarding study. With the future of work currently under debate, it is critical that the historical process that produced the modern American workplace is understood. Read the Workforce Management Magazine review about Employing Bureaucracy at www.erlbaum.com.

The present revised edition is an attempt to understand how industrial labor was transformed and to identify the historical process by which good jobs were created. It is, therefore, an account of the bureaucratization of employment, since many of the features that define good jobs; stability, internal promotion, and rule-bound procedures are characteristic of bureaucratic organizations. The book also examines the upheaval in the labor markets of the 1980's and 1990's, which has caused a reduction in the number of good jobs. Chapter 9 in this revised edition carries the narrative forward from 1945 to the present time, examining both the high-point of the bureaucratic system in the 1950's and 1960's--the golden years--and its erosion since then.

Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.

Work played a central role in Nazi ideology and propaganda, and even today there remain some who still emphasize the supposedly positive aspects of the regime’s labor policies, ignoring the horrific and inhumane conditions they produced. This definitive volume provides, for the first time, a systematic study of the Reich Ministry of Labor and its implementation of National Socialist work doctrine. In detailed and illuminating chapters, contributors scrutinize political maneuvering, ministerial operations, relations between party and administration, and individual officials’ actions to reveal the surprising extent to which administrative apparatuses were involved in the Nazi regime and its crimes.

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In Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions: The Politics of Controlling the U.S. Bureaucracy, the author argues that political control of the bureaucracy from the president and the Congress is largely contingent on an agency’s internal characteristics of workforce composition, workforce responsibilities, and workforce organization. Through a revised principal-agent framework, the author explores an agent-principal model to use the agent as the starting-point of analysis. The author tests the agent-principal model across 14 years and 132 bureaus and finds that both the president and the House of Representatives exert influence over the bureaucracy, but agency characteristics such as the degree of politization among the workforce, the type of work the agency is engaged in, and the hierarchical nature of the agency affects how agencies are controlled by their political masters. In a detailed case study of one agency, the U.S. Department of Education, the author finds that education policy over a 65-year period is elite-led, and that that hierarchical nature of the department conditions political principals’ influence. This book works to overcome three hurdles that have plagued bureaucratic studies: the difficulty of uniform sampling across the bureaucracy, the overuse of case studies, and the overreliance on the principal-agent theoretical approach.

Who determines the fuel standards for our cars? What about whether Plan B, the morning-after pill, is sold at the local pharmacy? Many people assume such important and controversial policy decisions originate in the halls of Congress. But the choreographed actions of Congress and the president account for only a small portion of the laws created in the United States. By some estimates, more than ninety percent of law is created by administrative rules issued by federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, where unelected bureaucrats with particular policy goals and preferences respond to the incentives created by a complex, procedure-bound rulemaking process. With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be but rather an intensely political activity in its own right. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often at the bidding of affected interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate their proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Tracing the rulemaking process from when an agency first begins working on a rule to when it completes that regulatory action, Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process. This exercise reveals that unelected bureaucrats wield considerable influence over the direction of public policy in the United States.

This book draws together internationally acclaimed scholars from across the world to address the roles of public officials whose jobs involve dealing directly with the public. Covering a broad range of jobs, including the delivery of benefits and services, the regulation of social and economic behavior, and the expression and maintenance of public values, the book presents in-depth discussions of different approaches, the possibilities for discretionary autonomy, and directions for further research in the field.

In Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John J. DiIulio Jr., one of America’s most respected political scientists and an adviser to presidents in both parties, summons the facts and statistics to show us how America’s big government works and why reforms that include adding a million more people to the federal workforce by 2035 might help to slow government’s growth while improving its performance. Starting from the underreported reality that the size of the federal workforce hasn’t increased since the early 1960s, even though the federal budget has skyrocketed. The number of federal programs has ballooned; Bring Back the Bureaucrats tells us what our elected leaders won’t: there are not enough federal workers to work for our democracy effectively. DiIulio reveals that the government in America is Leviathan by Proxy, a grotesque form of debt-financed big government that guarantees terrible government. Washington relies on state and local governments, for-profit firms, and nonprofit organizations to implement federal policies and programs. Big-city mayors, defense industry contractors, nonprofit executives, and other national proxies lobby incessantly for more federal spending. This proxy system chokes on chores such as cleaning up toxic waste sites, caring for hospitalized veterans, collecting taxes, handling plutonium, and policing more than $100 billion annually in “improper payments.” The lack of competent, well-trained federal civil servants resulted in the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the troubled launch of Obamacare’s “health exchanges.” Bring Back the Bureaucrats is further distinguished by the presence of E. J. Dionne Jr. and Charles Murray, two of the most astute voices from the political left and right, respectively, who offer their candid responses to DiIulio at the end of the book.

How did working people find jobs in the past? How has the process changed over time for various groups of job seekers? Are outcomes influenced more by general economic circumstances, by discriminatory practices in the labor market, or by personal initiative and competence? To tackle these questions, Walter Licht uses intensive primary-source research—including surveys of thousands of workers conducted in the decades from the 1920s to the 1950s—on a major industrial city for a period of over one hundred years. He looks at when and how workers secured their first jobs, schools and work, apprenticeship programs, unions, the role of firms in structuring work opportunities, the state as employer and as shaper of employment conditions, and the problem of losing work. Licht also examines the disparate labor market experiences of men and women and the effects of race, ethnicity, age, and social standing on employment.