This study explores the work life of mayors, city managers, and other top executives in city government. Based on a survey of 527 city executives and enlivened with numerous anecdotes, the book documents time allocation patterns and work routines. City Executives makes comparisons with previous studies to show how city executives compare with managers in other types of organizations. The authors also note how city managers' role has changed over a 20-year period. City executives are shown to be like their private-sector counterparts. For example, they function at a relentless pace, are frequently interrupted in their work, and are generally overburdened. However, because city workers operate in an environment open to public scrutiny, they are left with only a minority of their professional time to attend to matters that they describe as priorities. Instead, they must constantly respond to intergovernmental demands, emergencies, and the needs of citizens and legislative officials.

Scholars may have widely differing views of the Progressive Era, but all see business as holding the key to the reforms of that period. In this new book Judith Sealander amplifies our understanding of the relationship between business leaders and reform through a detailed examination of Dayton and the Miami Valley of Ohio. She focuses specifically on four progressive projects that made this nine-county region nationally known as a center for reform activism. The four "projects" include an extensive program of employee benefits instituted at the National Cash Register Company; the creation, in the Miami Conservancy District, of a massive flood prevention system; the institution of a new businesslike city-manager government in Dayton; and a new experimental approach to education in the region's public and private schools. Well grounded in the scholarly literature on progressivism and drawing from a rich trove of local manuscript sources, Judith Sealander has provided an integrated analysis of the role of business leadership in these four reform areas that corrects the exaggerated treatment business has often received. She shows how this one group of businessmen functioned as reformers, the "grand plans" they had for changing society, their merger of scientific engineering, business management, and moral fervor, and the benefits and costs of their kind of progressivism. Grand Plans contributes new insights into the Progressive Era and will interest scholars of that period as well as historians of American business, urban affairs, and reform.