Book Reviews : The Art of Administration. By ORDWAY TEAD. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc. 1951. Pp. xvi, 223. $3.75.)

• Date: 01 December 1951
• DOI: 10.1177/106591295100400433
• Published date: 01 December 1951
• Subject Matter: Articles

676
A group of social scientists from the Bureau of Applied Social Re-
search, Columbia University, repeated in 1948 a program of research
conducted from May until November, 1940. They remained in Erie
County, Ohio, during these two periods to interview 600 respondents
during the respective presidential campaigns for the purpose of clarifying
research techniques and observing voter behavior during the last seven
months of a presidential campaign. They found that 13 per cent of the
voters changed their minds during the last few weeks of the campaign.
What caused these people to vote as they did? Or, what caused them
to change their minds? The factors determining their vote became the
basic problem of the project, leading to one of the most complete studies
of voting behavior ever undertaken. Both the student and the politician
can learn a great deal about voting behavior and campaign procedures
from this thorou2h piece of work. -
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11
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BOYD A. MARTIN.
University of Idaho.
The Art of Administration. By ORDWAY TEAD. (New York: McGraw-
Hill Book Co., Inc. 1951. Pp. xvi, 223. $3.75.)
This book is a stimulating, reflective, and concise discussion of the
tasks of administration in a society marked by conflicting group interests
and struggle for profit and power. Its major objective is to discover &dquo;how
individual personalities can become enriched as they are necessarily im-
mersed in corporate affairs.&dquo; The author’s general approach is that of the
sociologist and the social psychologist studying how people behave in
mass organizations. His characterization of administration is essentially a
refinement of Brooks Adams’ concept as &dquo;the capacity to coordinate many,
and often conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that
they shall operate as a unity.&dquo; Administration in an industrialized, techno-
logical society is regarded as a process of harmonizing conflicting purposes
and interests among groups, and of relating the individual and...