Commentary: Let's Look Again

• Author: Herbert Kaufman
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12778
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Date: 01 September 2017

752 Public Administration Review • September | October 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 5, pp. 752. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI:10.1111/puar.12778.

Herbert Kaufman was professor in

the Department of Political Science at Yale

University for many years and then a senior

fellow in the Governmental Studies Program

of the Brookings Institution in Washington,

DC. He has written extensively on public

administration, including books on red tape,

bureau chiefs, and the government of New

York City, and he has served on a number

of government task forces and in the

government of New Haven. Now retired, he

lives in Hamden, Connecticut.

E-mail: herbandruthkaufman@sbcglobal.net

Commentary

W hen an author ’ s message does not get

across to his readers, the author obviously

bears at least some responsibility for

that failure. My intended message in The Forest

Ranger evidently did not come through to Forrest

Fleischman. For that I apologize.

I set a circumscribed goal for my study—

namely, to analyze the way the administrative

behavior of the people at the lowest level of the

administrative hierarchy are influenced within and

by the organization. In so doing, I was pursuing

a path recommended by such leading students of

organizational behavior as Chester I. Barnard, Luther

H. Gulick, and Herbert A. Simon. They fired up my

curiosity about the subject. (I should also note for

the record that I concentrated on a single function

of the Forest Service, national forest administration,

and did not examine in detail the other programs of

the agency, such as research, relations with state and

local resource agencies, and service to industry and

communities.) My objective was not to evaluate the

policies of the Forest Service but to describe the way

those policy aspirations were translated into concrete

actions in the field.

Professor Fleischman infers from these limits on my

research that I ignored the political context of the

agency ’ s operations. Part One of my report, however,

titled “Tendencies toward Fragmentation,” addresses

the forces that the leaders of the Forest Service had

to overcome in order to shape the decisions and

actions of personnel in the field, including not only

political factors but also technological, sociological,

psychological, and biological elements. Thus, for

example, I took note of the maneuvers of Gifford

Pinchot to lodge the Service in the Department

of Agriculture rather than the Department of

the Interior, where jurisdiction over federal lands

was then vested, and where the logging and

lumber industries were much more influential in

both the department and in the Congressional

committees overseeing the public domain. And in

my conclusions, I also called attention to what

I called “the hazards of managerial success,” the

possible consequences of achieving such a high level

of compliance and consensus within the Service that

it might have difficulty adapting to changes in the

Service ’ s environment, including the political setting

(a justified concern, as I reported in the afterword

to the special reprint edition of The Forest

Ranger, published in 2006). So it is not quite accurate

to allege that I completely ignored the political

setting of the Forest Service.

But knowledge and understanding are advanced in the

long run by challenges to the findings of researchers,

so I welcome Professor Fleischman ’ s questioning of

my study. Out of such give and take, new insights

often emerge.

Herbert Kaufman

Let ’ s Look Again