To that end, subsequent chapters present an overview of those theories of the individual, the organization, and society that have been proposed as guidelines for explaining the actions of public organizations; a specific question will be how those theories and the arguments on which they have been built inform our own processes of theory building-processes that lead to our implicit theories of administration. In the course of reviewing these works, the relationship between theory and practice is critically examined, and this relationship is ultimately reconstructed around the concept of personal action.