Waldo argued that administrative scholarship’s failure to incorporate politics explicitly into its theoretical development was a product of its early cultural and intellectual environment. While recognizing the impossibility of cleanly dating the beginning of public administration scholarship as a self-conscious body of thought, Waldo took as his starting point writers such as Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow, and Frederick W. Taylor, namely, influential management, administration, and organization theorists who wrote near the turn of the twentieth century. The work of these scholars reflected not only the dominant cultural values of their time but also the contemporary problems in administration they sought to address. Cultural values led them to accept science as the surest path to knowledge and commerce as the central activity of society. The central problems they sought to address consisted of an unappetizing stew of inefficiency marinating in political cronyism and seasoned with graft.