Dan Wendlandt Dissecting the Beast: James Q. Wilson’s Analysis of American Bureaucracy

Wilson’s text is subtitled: “What government agencies do and why they do it”. In almost four hundred pages of text, Wilson answers these questions, and in the process implicitly develops an answer to a third: “What is bureaucracy?” The Wilson text ignores overarching theories and instead develops a framework for analyzing the behavior of administrative agencies given the particular influences on the individual office. While not void of avenues for improvement, Wilson creates a host of convincing arguments to help the reader comprehend the maze of American bureaucracy.

Even before delving into the motivations for bureaucratic action, Wilson must face the topic of defining the nature and scope of bureaucracy. Wilson wastes no time in making his first statement about the nature of bureaucracy. On the first page of the preface he stresses that bureaucracy is not a monolithic entity. He writes: “Bureaucracy is not the simple, uniform phenomenon it is sometimes made out to be. Reality often does not conform to scholarly theories or popular prejudices.” Wilson views the bureaucracy as being composed of thousands of individual units, all of which are governed by similar rules and circumstances, yet will react differently to the same stimuli because traits unique to their own organization. This view is critical to understanding the apparently contradictory actions of many government agencies. To solidify his argument on the diversity of bureaucracy he begins the text with examples about the German

Army, a Texas Prison and an Atlanta High School. While none of these organizations fall under the reader’s traditional notion of bureaucracy, Wilson is correct to include them, thereby expanding the scope of what is considered bureaucracy. Yet Wilson’s description of the bureaucracy does not unfold in the most coherent fashion possible. He begins his discussion of bureaucracy by looking at the lowest level of workers, those he calls operators, and then proceeds to discuss managers and finally administrative executives. Last of all he considers governing forces, such as Congress, the President and the Courts. Yet this is an unintuitive way to think about organizations in which everyday actions are defined by rules coming from above in a hierarchical authority structure. It seems illogical to thoroughly discuss the constraints and limited autonomy of agency managers before talking about how and why Congress, the President and the Courts levy these limitations on bureaucracy.

Wilson’s next task, defining what agencies do, is a difficult job of translating abstract principles to practical understanding. His early discussion of how agencies define their operation suffers from a high degree of abstraction. Wilson’s thoughts of how goals produce a critical task and mission venture too far into the area of organizational theory without first giving the reader a practical base to build upon. Yet as the text progresses Wilson becomes increasing helpful at giving the reader an understanding of agency operations. He develops two frameworks, one for understanding how an agency fits into its environment and the other for understanding how transparent the operation of an agency is. This language developed by Wilson to classify organizations is beneficial to understanding his arguments of why certain agencies are inherently difficult to control, or why a reform may work in one agency only to fail miserably in another.

Wilson’s third and most important objective is to develop a series of considerations that explain bureaucratic action as the result of a host of competing influences. It is in this area that Wilson focuses the greatest amount of his energy, and his analysis provides an amazingly effective framework for understanding what motivates people at all levels of bureaucracy. In addition to discussing the standard influences of

Congress, the President, the Courts and interest groups, Wilson also considers how circumstances, beliefs and culture affect the activities of an agency. Wilson’s thorough discussion of these many factors redefines how the reader sees government actions and sheds light on bureaucratic actions that might otherwise seem illogical.

While this portion is undoubtedly Wilson’s strong point, two main possibilities for improvement exist. First, much of the book is framed as a loose comparison between government agencies and private business, in which private business is in almost every count shown as being superior to the highly inefficient bureaucracy. Such is the case when he discusses topics such as government contracts or managerial autonomy. Yet it is not until the final chapters that Wilson explicitly acknowledges that government often has a different “bottom-line”. A second improvement would be a clear analysis of which of the myriad of considerations influencing a given agency tend to be the most potent.

Perhaps what makes Wilson’s text so reputable is that he does not claim to posses some grand theory of bureaucracy; in fact he explicitly denies the existence of such an overarching principle. Instead he focuses on one influence at a time, gives a clear example and develops a convincing argument for how a given factor may affect the actions of a bureaucratic organization. The arguments are believable because Wilson essentially argues that bureaucracies are motivated by many of the same incentives and disincentives as humans are in everyday life. While his views are not revolutionary, they are convincing.