The Politics of Bureaucracy: A contemporary classic
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148119861770 |
| Author | John Peterson |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Introduction |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148119861770
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2019, Vol. 21(3) 465 –467
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148119861770
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The Politics of Bureaucracy:
A contemporary classic
John Peterson†
Keywords
administration, breakthrough, Peters, Politics of Bureaucracy, public, symposium
Sometimes, revisiting a classic piece of scholarship yields new insights, even ones
that surprise. The case of B. Guy Peters’ The Politics of Bureaucracy (POB) is illus-
trative. Who would have guessed that the author never once took a single graduate
level course in public administration? Who knew that this lively, engaging book that
livened up so many graduate seminars on public administration (which often really
needed livening up) was written as ‘just a textbook’? Could it really be that the sig-
nature work (that designation being very arguable) of a major figure in American
political science remains better-known and more widely read beyond than within the
United States? If readers of the BJPIR find nothing here that is surprising, we would
be surprised.
In this issue, we are pleased to present the third in our series of ‘breakthrough’
symposia, following those focused on seminal works by G. John Ikenberry (2019)
and Henry Shue (2019). Each features an article by the author in question that recon-
siders the ground their original work broke and debates to which it gave rise, fol-
lowed by short commentaries by contributors to those debates. POB, however, is
exceptional in that it has provoked new debates over the course of 40 years by appear-
ing in no fewer than seven editions. Each time, Peters has done much more than
merely to update material on the themes covered in the previous edition. Instead, he
has engaged with new issues, debates, and research in the study of comparative pub-
lic administration. Accordingly, Peters’ (2018) most recent iteration offers insights on
the POB in Latin America, Africa and the European Union, the New Public
Management, the internationalisation of the work of public administrations, and the
impact of the post-2008 financial crisis. POB certainly qualifies as a classic, but it is
somewhere between unusual and unique in that it has remained contemporary over an
impressively long period of time.
Anyone who has imbibed POB would be hard-pressed to think of any other work that
has so convincingly argued – simply but shrewdly – that public administration is politics.
In other words, the ‘ancient proverb of public life that politics and administration are
†Deceased
The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Corresponding author:
John Peterson, The University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK.
Email: john.peterson@ed.ac.uk
861770BPI0010.1177/1369148119861770The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsPeterson
research-article2019
Introduction
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