Creating Accountable Public Bureaucracies

Excerpt from the full-text article: During the past several decades there has been a persistent and constant trend in our society that has not gained the prominence it deserves. This trend has been the continuous growth in the autonomy and power of public bureaucracies. The community power literature, for example, has systematically ignored public bureaucracies in its search for the power structure of cities (Aiken and Mott, 1970). The reasons why public bureaucracies have been overlooked by these researchers stem from a number of theoretical and methodological shortcomings that need not concern us here. The point, however, is that we have not regarded public bureaucracies as loci of power in our cities