explain why some workers advance the goals of an organization and others do not. In his view, managers within an organization must establish the conditions by which industrious workers proliferate and indolent workers are excluded. The cumulative effect of this new, so-called"human relations school" was to undercut the rigid formalism of the Orthodox School. By ignoring human psychology, orthodoxy failed to account for important variables in understanding how organizations function.
Herbert Simon and Dwight Waldo set forth perhaps the most cogent analyses of orthodoxy's failings in their landmark works,Administrative Behavior and The Administrative State, respectively.Simon argued that the Orthodox School had unwittingly accepted certain assumptions as true without investigating them to determine whether they were value neutral, as orihodox theorists claimed. Unfortunately, this meant that standard principles asserted by public administration scholars--such as the notion that administrative efticiency can be increased through a specialization of labor--contained hidden and unexamined presuppositions. Simon labeled these
presuppositions"proverbs "and cautioned against accepting theories without first explicating their underlying bases. "Most of the propositions that make
up the body of administrative theory today share, unfortunately, this defect of proverbs, Simon observed. Thus,mutually contradictory pairs of
assertions (such as "look before you leap"and"he who hesitates is lost") could be accepted as true and yet provide no guidance on organizational structure or
operation. "Although the two principles of the pair will lead to exactly opposite organizational recommendations, there is nothing in the theory to indicate which is the proper one to apply.
Simon's critique applied a rutless reductio an absurdum technique to undermine the logical consistency of the Orthodox School. Dwight Waldo also attacked orthodoxy, but in many ways his analysis was even more devastating than Simon's because Waldo used orthodox concepts against the school
itself. The Orthodox School claimed to be value neutral, but this claim contained an implicit value, namely, that public administration could be value neutral in the fifst place. Moreover, the values of neutrality and impersonality are at odds with democratic political theory, which prizes individual rights and representativeness above neutrality and administrative values such as
efficiency. Even if supposedly value neutral concepts such as "efficiency"and " economy"are accepted as desirable goals, the terms themselves are not operational. In other words, the terms do not provide sufficient direction to public administrators who were required to use discretion in implementing policies.