It is not clear why Silberman's types are either exhaustive or dichotomous, unless his contention is merely definitional--either
bureaucracies have tight career structures or not, and, if not, are "rational" only if professionally oriented.
With exceptions, they clearly "work" in the sense that people from all over the world are clamoring to be admitted to them, even though they are run by big state
bureaucracies with heavy federal involvement.
The juxtaposition between
bureaucracies and markets is not only based on efficiency concerns or technical and investment-related specifics as in transaction cost economics.
Such ratios should be viewed more as measures of the integration of women and people of color into public
bureaucracies rather than indicators of representative bureaucracy (Lewis, 1988).
Performance reforms implemented in state-level
bureaucracies might have increased bureaucratic power in the states.
As open systems, however,
bureaucracies both shape their environment and respond to it.
The empirical support for this blame, however, has rarely matched the rhetoric, comparisons between private and public sector
bureaucracies (and private schools are
bureaucracies too) shows that public sector
bureaucracies perform about as well as private sector
bureaucracies when valid comparisons are made (Goodsell, 1994).
"As in Vietnam," wrote military reformer Edward Luttwak, "the people involved are so absorbed in the internal labyrinth of competing military
bureaucracies that they scarcely notice the external reality beyond their offices in Washington"--realities like kamikazes in trucks.
Yet Stein takes little notice of the weapons that give the federal bureaucracy ascendancy over the elected administration in making (or frustrating) policy: the virtually unlimited tenure of the jobholder versus the transitory life of any administration, and the powerful alliances
bureaucracies form with their congressional oversight committees and special interest groups.
First, everyone is forced to join something called a health-care "alliance." These are still largely mysterious, quasi-governmental
bureaucracies that both oversee and compel the arrangement of insurance-industry-run HMOs.
Stokes also wants to create a Trade Corps, a group of public-spirited civil servants who would work on "the development of common strategies on trade issues that transcend narrow departmental approaches." And to make sure that all these new
bureaucracies are doing their jobs, a Congressional Trade Office would be set up to be a legislative watchdog.
Government
bureaucracies look outward for a rescuing angel.
