Explanations for the political beha

Explanations for the political behavior of bureaucracy and bureaucrats have deep roots in the organization theory literature. For example, Robert K. Merton (1957) argued that institutions structured as classic bureaucracies shape the personalities of the people who work for them. A bureaucratic environment, Merton argued, pressures people to conform to expected patterns of behavior—to follow rules, to be methodical and detailed. Given these pressures, bureaucracies will often substitute rules for ends, and they will adhere to SOPs even when those procedures clearly interfere with the organization’s main mission. William Whyte Jr. echoed a similar theme in his work The Organization Man (1956). Whyte’s research detailed the willingness of managers in US corporations to adopt the goals of the organizations they worked for as their own, to subsume their personalities into the larger organizational environment of their employment. Similar arguments about the pathologies of bureaucratic behavior have resurfaced more recently in such influential works as David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s Reinventing Government (1992).