INSIDE THE AMERICAN LEVIATHAN
Coleman, Mcalister
inside The American Leviathan | BUREAUCRACY, by J. M. Juran. Harper and Brothers. $2. Reviewed by McAlisfer Coleman THE author of this book, an Assistant Administrator in the Office of...
...he gives some specific remedies built around the idea of utilizing the "scientific principles of management in government to the same extent as is today practiced in progressive industry...
...Juran discussed this book...
...The chief difficulty with reading Mr...
...Juran is no David Lilienthal who, as is evident in TV A —Democracy on the March, is a glorious exception to the rule that lawyers and engineers can't write for sour apples...
...The author is a follower of the management movement pioneered by Frederick W. Taylor, whose outstanding leader today is the lovable, clear-headed Morris Llewellyn Cooke with whom Mr...
...The author is not content merely to describe the difficulties of running the vast, complex machines of government by administration...
...He is tangling with a problem which closely concerns everyone of us who lives under the shadow of Dr...
...So on his first two pages he compares our Federal Government to a far-flung territory, to a ship, to a meandering stream, to an organism, to the Greek gods...
...Juran makes no reference to such a system now in vogue in the Department of the Interior...
...This is the dizzying way it is with the engineering and legal brethren who try to popularize their stuff...
...Don't be alarmed, this isn't sticking stopwatches at the backs of Government workers' necks...
...Juran's otherwise provocative, common sense book is the irritating style in which it is written...
...Juran discusses duplication and red tape, the placing of responsibility, the centralization of agencies and their proliferations in the understanding manner of one who has had to face these problems every day...
...He provides for employe representation as does every other good Taylorite, and a rather elaborate system of incentive rewards for ideas from the rank and file...
...I wonder in passing, that in this last suggestion Mr...
...His underscoring of the human side of the subject is most welcome...
...Beard's American Leviathan, and he gives us a better description of the internal disorders of the monster than is contained in a whole collection of the annual reports of the various agencies...
...Most of these disorders arise not from the wickedness of the bureaucrats, as the National Association of Manufacturers (and where, by the way, can you find a more tightly held bureaucracy than in the NAM...
...is forever telling us, but rather from the complex nature of the functions which we the people have imposed upon the bureaus...
...Reviewed by McAlisfer Coleman THE author of this book, an Assistant Administrator in the Office of Lend-Lease Administration, undertakes a badly-needed job, that of explaining to the intelligent citizen the performances, good and bad, of the various Government bureaus, commissions which today so largely run our nation's business...
...Someone apparently told the author that to get over a dry subject such as the development of management-mindedness among our bureaucrats it would be necessary to pep up the book so all of us plain folks could understand it...
Vol. 8 • August 1944 • No. 35
