Customer Reviews

The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928.

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This book narrates several episodes of executive leadership in the USPO, the USDA, and Department of the Interior during the last decades of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th centuries. The author shows how post office and agriculture department bureau chiefs effectively managed upward, outward, and through their organizations to create public value and thereby gained considerable operating discretion for themselves and their departments and how managerial failures in interior's reclamation bureau resulted in its loss. For students of public management, this book provides case evidence for many of Mark Moore's strongest normative claims. It is first rate, well written, plausible historical narrative. Its weaknesses are too little attention to the creation of public value (perhaps because that would smack too much of normative economics) and far too much attention to issues that could only be of interest to academic political scientists.

I was assigned this book for a paper in a Master's level Public Policy course, and it was surprisingly interesting. The book gives a detailed account of the bureaucracy involved with the creation and early operations of the United States Postal Service and United States Department of Agriculture, and the process by which the departments gained autonomy within the federal government. Similarly, it also points out the steps which led to the eventual loss of bureaucratic autonomy by the Department of the Interior. The book is long, but it's a relatively easy read, and it made for a pretty interesting paper, if I may say so myself.

This is a must read book for anyone interested in American political development, as long as you don't mind the academic language and narrow focus. As a study on statebuilding it is too narrow, but as a study of the development of bureaucratic autonomy it is a major achievement. In my opinion, Carpenter also shortchanges the antebellum era. It is an excellent compliment to Skowronek's book "Building a New American State." For a different perspective on the 19th centutry American state, see Jensen's book "Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy" and "Shaped by War and Trade" edited by Katznelson and Shefter.