Wilson took a disparate set of examples to develop his argument (he started with the German army of World War II, prison systems in Michigan and Texas, and a public school in Atlanta). Some of the agencies were successful, some of them were not, and the performance of some bureaucracies went from good to bad, or vice versa. Wilson sought to explain what separated the successful agencies from the not so successful, and to understand variation in bureaucratic performance. In pursuit of this objective, he covered so much intellectual territory that it is difficult to provide a meaningful synopsis of the entire work. Key elements in his analysis, however, should convey some sense of the main arguments.