Where Have You Gone, Harold Seidman?

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Author	James L. Perry
DOI	http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12803
Published date	01 July 2017
Date	01 July 2017

Where Have You Gone, Harold Seidman? 481

Public Administration Review,

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12803.

I find myself coming back frequently to lyrics from

Simon and Garfunkel ’ s “Mrs. Robinson.”

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

A nation turns its lonely eyes to you,

What ’ s that you say, Mrs. Robinson

“ Joltin’ Joe ” has left and gone away

My call is not for Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, however, but

for Harold Seidman.

Some readers will remember Harold; most of you will

not. Seidman died in 2002. He completed his PhD at

Yale University, where he was in the political science

department with Dwight Waldo. He is best known for

his classic Politics, Position and Power: The Dynamics of

Federal Organization .

I remember Harold Seidman fondly. His classic

book—and many of his other contributions about

government corporations and bureaucratic behavior—

helped to make good scholarly and practical sense of

that which puzzled us during the more than 50 years

Seidman contributed to the public administration

literature.

I recall Seidman nostalgically because few scholars

these days are investigating the types of organizational

issues that occupied Seidman. Let me offer an

illustration of an understudied issue that would

probably be getting Harold Seidman ’ s attention if he

were still with us.

The topic involves the proliferation of “chiefs” in

government organizations. What do I mean by

the proliferation of chiefs? Jobs with chief in the

title have been proliferating for at least the last

two decades (Rosenthal 2001 ), seemingly at an

accelerating pace. Among the chiefs now found in

many federal organizations are chief financial officer

(CFO), chief information officer (CIO), chief

human capital officer (CHCO), chief performance

officer (CPO), and chief information security

officer (CISO). The phenomenon is especially

visible in the U.S. federal government, but it does

not monopolize the “chief” designation, which

has spread to other levels of U.S. government,

nonprofits, and other countries (Greenblatt 2016 ;

Schumpeter 2010 ).

When I read about the “chief” phenomenon, some

questions come immediately to mind: Why the

growth? Are governments just following the latest

fads in the private sector? Is proliferation a product

of political gridlock and the demise of reorganization

authorities? How is the chief phenomenon connected

to thickening government (Light 1995 )? What

difference does a “chief” make? This last question

strikes me as especially important. A rationale for

chief positions often involves performance, but I see

little evidence addressing this claim.

The decline of attention to the issues that occupied

Seidman is put into historical perspective by Ni,

Sugimoto, and Robbin ( 2017 ) in “Examining the

Evolution of the Field of Public Administration

through a Bibliometric Analysis of Public

Administration Review ,” which appears in this issue

of PAR . In an analysis of PAR article titles from 1940

to 2013, the authors identify only 13 words, among

them bureaucracy and budget , that appear consistently

during PAR ’s first 75 years (Ni, Sugimoto, and Robbin

2017 , Appendix C). Organization and reorganization

appear at or near the top of the list only for the

1940–1964 period .

The shifting word choices over time are likely a

product of a combination of forces, including

changing field, fashion, and fad. I draw a couple

of lessons from the shifts. One is that public

administration is evolving—appropriately and

organically—from changes in the contexts in which

it is set.

The second lesson is less transparent and more