levels. However, this time the scope and influence of government in U.S. life would not diminish. The United States was changing from a rural agricultural society to an urban industrial nation. This required a considerable response from public administration because so many new functions and programs would be established. The number of paved highways would increase tenfold in the 1920s. Cities would install traffic management systems, and states would impose driving tests. As the population became increasingly urban, vastly expanded programs would be needed in public parks and recreation, public works, public health, and public safety. Public administration as an activity was booming throughout the 1920s. The federal government’s response to the Great Depression of the 1930s would make public administration all the more pervasive as part of American life.36
Public administration theorists, such as Dwight Waldo,37 Vincent Ostrom,38 Nicholas Henry,39 and Howard McCurdy,40 have described the pattern of development within public administration within public administration after the First World War as a period of ortho- doxy. The tenets of this orthodox ideology held that “true democracy and true efficiency are synonymous, or at least reconcilable,”41 that the work of government could be neatly divided into decision making and execution, and that administration was a science with discoverable principles. The initial imprint of the scientific management movement, the progressive reform political movement, and the politics-administration dichotomy became central focuses for pub- lic administration as both a profession and a field of study.
A critical linkage for the study of administration was its concern, indeed almost obsession, with organization and control. By definition, control was to be built into organizational structure and design to assure both accountability and efficiency. In fact, early management theorists assumed that organization and control were virtually synonymous. Remember that traditional administrative notions were based on historical models provided by the military and the Roman Catholic Church, which viewed organizational conflict as deviancy to be severely punished. When government units were small, less significant, and relatively provincial, the management of their organizations was less consequential. However, as the size, scope, and level of effort increased, pressures for better organi- zation and control mounted. Under the influence of the scientific management movement, public administration became increasingly concerned with understanding bureaucratic forms of organiza- tion. The division of labor; span of control; organizational hierarchy and chain of command; reporting systems; departmentalization; and the development of standard operating rules, policies, and proce- dures became critical concerns to scholars and practitioners in the field.
Bureaucracy emerged as a dominant feature of the contemporary world. Virtually everywhere one looked in both developed and developing nations, economic, social, and political life were extensively and ever-increasingly influenced by bureaucratic organizations. Bureaucracy, while often used as a general invective to refer to any organization that is perceived to be inefficient, is more properly used to refer to a specific set of structural arrangements. It may also be used to refer to specific kinds of behavior patterns that are not restricted to formal bureaucracies. It is widely assumed that the struc- tural characteristics of organizations correctly defined as “bureaucratic” influence the behavior of individuals—whether clients or bureaucrats—who interact with them.