Bøker av Richard Stillman

In this new deep dive into Dwight Waldo's writing, editor Richard Stillman offers a representative selection of Waldo's most important works alongside introductory essays to help the seasoned public administration scholar and the novice student alike appreciate Waldo's contribution to public service as a crucial and colorful field of study. ¿¿

Reveals that the modern administrative state emerged from a complex base of ideas rather than as a result of a simple plan or cataclysmic event. The text argues that its origins lie in the lives of seven individuals who, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, invented its various elements.

In the arena of public-administration scholarship, one of the most prominent performers is Dwight Waldo. Such an outstanding position was not given to him; he achieved it by giving his entire career--more than forty years--to the study of institutions and ideas. His prolific writing and lecturing took him to six continents but often put him in the controversial position of steadfast neutrality when volatile issues dramatically polarized his colleagues. This book, which consists of transcribed interviews with Waldo plus separate analyses and comments by the authors and by Waldo, was written by two of his former students. Brown and Stillman's informal conversations with their mentor give new perspective to the events and forces that shaped public administration in the post--World War II era. Being open to new concepts, refusing to embrace academic partisanship, and "generalizing" his studies in order to view public administration as a whole in an era of specialization make Waldo an almost unclassifiable academic. He is known for critiquing and recording events that have shaped public administration, and his favorite topics range from traditional views to emerging trends in mid-twentieth-century public administration scholars--the socalled Minnowbrook Conference--is an example of his receptiveness to change and to the probing of old ideas and new frontiers. Dwight Waldo is a preeminent interpreter of public administration as a profession, as he would like to see it, and his practice of answering questions with questions indicates that the search for public administration--how to support or deny funding, how to divide responsibilities, how to compromise between private enterprise and central authority--is not finite and that public administration is not a static exercise but a goal to be sought, however much searching it takes.