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Free keywords:
Bureaucracy, Organization, Sociology, Public administration, Political sociology, Political leadership
Abstract:
The article presents information on public bureaucracies and policy implementation. Public bureaucracies have often received less than their due share of attention from empirical social research. The sociology of organizations has dealt much more with private work organizations than with public administration. Political sociology has focused on the input side of the policy process, i.e. political parties and pressure groups, elections and political elites. The new generation of policy scientists has in turn been mainly interested in policy formation and in the measurement of policy impacts, while largely neglecting the implementation process, which transforms policy inputs into outputs. Where public bureaucracies theme selves did become the object of investigation, two problems have long loomed in the foreground, both concerned with a specific type of boundary relations: the relation between public bureaucracy and political leadership and the interactions with clients. The internal, organizational aspect of public bureaucracies has attracted the interest of social scientists only more recently when it became widely recognized that the success or failure of a policy often depends on the behavior of the administrative organizations charged with its implementation. This was forcefully brought home by some cases of spectacular policy failure, as in the United States 'war against poverty', in job creation or urban renewal programmes.
