Leisha DeHart‐Davis, Creating Effective Rules in Public Sector Organizations (Washington: Georgetown University Press ,2017). 177 pp. $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781626164468

• Author: Charles T. Goodsell
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12944

488 Public Administration Review • May | June 2018

P rofessor DeHart-Davis’s several scholarly articles

on various aspects of bureaucracy and its rules

are well known in the field. For this reason, I

was somewhat wary of being asked to review her new

book on rules in public organizations, fearing it would

be a compendium rehash of what was already in print.

However, I was most pleased to discover that Creating

Effective Rules in Public Sector Organizations —while

drawing in part from her previous work—is instead

an original intellectual creation of independently

high merit. It presents, no less, our first comprehensive

theory of rules in governmental administration. This

is no mean feat. For one thing, the topic is of gigantic

scope. For another, other scholars have already done

significant theoretical work on the subject. For a third,

her model is both unified and applied in its coverage.

Several assumptions underlie her analysis. Rules are

social constructs that create relationships between

people and organizations and thereby yield behaviors

that yield desirable conduct. Rules can be seen as “the

sheet music” of organizations in that they coordinate

the work of many players. Rules not only constrain

workers from undesirable conduct but also empower

them by providing bounds beyond which they can be

creative. Rules provide expectations for individual and

group performance and thereby reduce goal ambiguity.

In making these claims, DeHart-Davis is not a

Pollyanna. She readily admits that rules can yield

bad conduct, produce discordant music, box in field

workers, and add goal ambiguity. Yet the title of her

book says it is about effective public organization

rules and how to make them more so. In other

words, there is in her thinking the mega-assumption

that it is fully possible for a modern bureaucracy in

an industrialized state “to work.” This worldview

seems almost outlandish in the face of decades of

public administration theory we have gone through

that approach bureaucracy in the darkest possible

mood: narrow-minded personalities obsessed with

rules; street-level bureaucrats callously manipulating

Leisha DeHart-Davis , Creating Effective Rules in Public Sector

Organizations ( Washington : Georgetown University Press ,

2017 ). 177 pp. $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781626164468

Reviewed by: Charles T. Goodsell

Virginia Tech

Charles T. Goodsell is professor

emeritus at the Center for Public

Administration at Virginia Tech in

Blacksburg. His recent books are The

New Case for Bureaucracy (2015) and

Mission Mystique: Belief Systems in

Public Agencies (2011). In process at CQ

Press/Sage Publications is Public Servants

Studied in Image and Essay: A

Fanfare for the Common Bureaucrat

(expected 2018).

E-mail: goodsell@vt.edu

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 3, pp. 488–490. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12944.