Currents and Soundings: From the Professional Stream.

UNITED States. General Accounting Office; AMERICAN Society for Public Administration

WEBB, James E.; CLEVELAND, Harlan

The article presents several excerpts from the speech given by different public administrators, at annual meetings of the American Society for Public Administration. The administrator of National Aeronautics and Space Administration, James E. Webb said at the presidential address given at the annual meeting of the year 1996, that public administrators should think of ourselves as members of a profession with working relations with all disciplines and in a new environment, not only outside the campus of a university but on the campus of a university. Harlan Cleveland, U. S. Permanent Representative on the North Atlantic Council, in a keynote address presented in 1966 annual meeting, said that "We live and work in a modem industrial society which is a complicated collection of very large organizations." It is, therefore, necessary to come to terms with the bureaucratic society, to discover that large bureaucracy is not a pyramid of authority with all control at the top, but a cooperative enterprise in which control is loose, power diffused, and the centers of decision plural.