Continuity and Disruption

Through thoughtful essays linking historical concepts and practices, current issues, and modern research, Matthew Holden argues that administration is indispensable to politics. Essentially, public administration consists of making decisions about information, money, and force - the three crucial sources of power. Politics and administration cannot be separated, and no political system can be sustained when its administrative core collapses. In Holden's view of administration, a crucial problem is turbulence: the presence of simultaneous pressures toward continuity and toward disruption. Holden examines turbulence in the intellectual history of administration as reflected in traditional political theory and in specific contemporary theories of organization, bureaucracy, and management. He also analyzes political dogmas as a form of control over turbulence, considering such concepts as executive leadership and the emergence of administrative law. He turns an unblinking eye on the practice of public administration today, buffeted by changes in technology and ethnic diversity.