This conceptual work addresses organizations' responses to management improvement efforts, offering a practical approach for ensuring desired results when making improvements in managing organizations. In examinations of three methodologies for organizational improvement -- strategic planning, management by objective, and executive development -- this exceptional book analyzes the critical factors that influence change. The ground-breaking hypothesis evolved from this research affords executives rational means for planning changes in their organizations. Changing Bureaucracies: Understanding the Organization Before Selecting the Approach will be invaluable to management personnel in federal, state, and local governments, as well as executives in the private business sector. In addition, senior undergraduate and graduate level students of public administration, political science, government, business administration, and economics will gain vital insights into successful approaches to organizational changes. Book jacket.

Every time control of the U.S. presidency is passed from one party to another, the entire top layer of the executive branch changes. Thousands of men and women take down their pictures, pack up their desks, and move back into private life, just as others dust off their pictures and move in. The U.S. stands alone in this respect. Nearly every other advanced democracy is managed-save for elected officials and a few top aides-by an elite cadre of top civil servants selected by highly competitive examinations. Hudleston and Boyer tell the story of U.S. efforts to develop higher civil service, beginning with the Eisenhower administration and culminating in the passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Arguing that the highly-politicized U.S. system simply hasn't worked, they examine why and how reform efforts have failed and offer a series of recommendations for the future.