Bureaucratic Opposition: Challenging Abuses at the Workplace focuses on bureaucratic oppositions that reveal the "informal dimensions of behavior within bureaucracies. This book is an attempt to show that contemporary bureaucratic organizations are not only administrative entities but are also political structures in the sense that power, conflict, and domination are normal within them. This text is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the myth of neutral administration and proposes the alternative political interpretation of organizations. The grounds or "good reasons for oppositions and their normative justifications are systematically detailed in Chapter 2. The third and fourth chapters discuss the "empirical dimension, detailing the barriers that oppositions confront in getting underway and the strategies that they employ once they have been initiated. The last chapter analyzes some of the responses to oppositions by the official hierarchy and some of the policies that have been proposed to eliminate the abuses uncovered by dissidents. This publication is a good reference for students and specialists interested in bureaucratic oppositions.

Human rights are politically fraught in Turkey, provoking suspicion and scrutiny among government workers for their anti-establishment left-wing connotations. Nevertheless, with eyes worldwide trained on Turkish politics, and with accession to the European Union underway, Turkey's human rights record remains a key indicator of its governmental legitimacy. Bureaucratic Intimacies shows how government workers encounter human rights rhetoric through training programs and articulates the perils and promises of these encounters for the subjects and objects of Turkish governance. Drawing on years of participant observation in programs for police officers, judges and prosecutors, healthcare workers, and prison personnel, Elif M. Babül argues that the accession process does not always advance human rights. In casting rights as requirements for expertise and professionalism, training programs strip human rights of their radical valences, disassociating them from their political meanings within grassroots movements. Translation of human rights into a tool of good governance leads to competing understandings of what human rights should do, not necessarily to liberal, transparent, and accountable governmental practices. And even as translation renders human rights relevant for the everyday practices of government workers, it ultimately comes at a cost to the politics of human rights in Turkey.

The call to "reinvent government"—to reform the government bureaucracy of the United States—resonates as loudly from elected officials as from the public. Examining the political and economic forces that have shaped the American civil service system from its beginnings in 1883 through today, the authors of this volume explain why, despite attempts at an overhaul, significant change in the bureaucracy remains a formidable challenge.

Author Ludwig von Mises was concerned with the spread of socialist ideals and the increasing bureaucratization of economic life. While he does not deny the necessity of certain bureaucratic structures for the smooth operation of any civilized state, he disagrees with the extent to which it has come to dominate the public life of European countries and the United States. The author's purpose is to demonstrate that the negative aspects of bureaucracy are not so much a result of bad policies or corruption as the public tends to think but are the bureaucratic structures due to the very tasks these structures have to deal with. The main body of the book is therefore devoted to a comparison between private enterprise on the one hand and bureaucratic agencies/public enterprise on the other.

This book investigates the methods used by the Bush Administration to control bureaucratic agencies, including executive orders, signing directives, political appointments, and others, as well as the effects those methods have had on agency outputs.

This book explores contemporary and historical examples of bureaucratic discretion to describe a continuum of resistance to authoritative directives by hierarchical superiors. Resistance ranges from blind obedience or complete nonresistance to street-level opposition; in between these extremes, however, are minimal compliance and resistance sanctioned by immediate superiors. Although politicians may pass legislation, the subject of bureaucratic implementation or lack thereof remains an area of vital concern. Grounded in administrative theory (beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s seminal discussion of the virtue of adopting a businesslike approach to American governing) and emphasizing the power of street-level bureaucrats, the aim of this book is to expand awareness of the potentially dangerous power of insulated bureaucrats.