Charles Goodsell The Bureaucratic Experience

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Bureaucracy can essentially be defined as the administrative system that governs any institution, but within that definition lies a large range of what exactly goes on in a bureaucracy, and whether or not the administration's policies are helpful or harmful. It is a hotly contested issue, with authorities on the subject having a wide-ranged set of beliefs. Particularly, if one were to examine Ralph Hummel's 5th edition of The Bureaucratic Experience and Charles Goodsell's The Case For Bureaucracy, they would find that the two offers differ greatly in how they feel about what bureaucracy offers. While one author believes that bureaucracy is a plague on society that continues to control the will of its citizens, the other believes that the idea has received a poor reputation based on a misinformed comparison to the business world, and that author spends his time trying …show more content…

Many wish that the government bureaucracy could be run like that of a large company's. Goodsell argues that this is naive ideology; comparing government bureaucracy that of Google's is akin to comparing apples and oranges. Their purposes are so vastly different that they have to operate in different manners (Goodsell 2004, 1166). Bureaucracies may not always radically be changing operations in an effort towards improving, but it is difficult to steer a ship that organizes processes for hundreds of millions of people. By maintaining a status quo, one that can be argued is one of the highest standards of living in the world, government bureaucracies complete their mission each and every day. It is ludicrous to think that policies could be enacted and enforced by a public administration without some system of rules to govern