The Bureaucratic Experience: The Post-Modern Challenge

Ralph P Hummel

The essential concepts of Ralph P. Hummel’s various editions of “The Bureaucratic Experience” are unfailingly about freedom. This edition emphasises the impact of the bureaucracy on freedom, reason and the self-made order of free people. It transcends the traditional discourse between the critical school of bureaucratic analysis and those who find a measure of value in the operations of bureaucratic operations. It uses another perspective to shed light on the two-sided debate to see if there is a fresh antithetical understanding that helps appreciate the bureaucratic experience.

This fifth edition remains true to the idea that humans are not a form of intelligence easily replicated by machines and takes on the computer as the representative of bureaucracy itself. After the journey through philosophical thinking, the book makes its way to an independent point, a tradition with the author. Most people will identify with the title of the book, because who among us has not had “The Bureaucratic Experience”? This is a compelling book that must be read by all to determine what must be the future of free men and women capable of reasoning out their own fate.

Ralph P Hummel Ralph P. Hummel (Ph.D., New York University) is a professor of public administration at the University of Akron and a co-director of the non-profit Institute for Applied Phenomenology. His original edition of The Bureaucratic Experience was the first book explicitly critical of the study and practice of American public administration. It has been widely used in courses of political science, sociology, organizational psychology, culture studies, language studies, and organizational philosophy, and has become in five editions one of the longest-published books in public administration. Dr. Hummel's other works include, with Robert A. Isaak, Politics for Human Beings, which criticized an increasingly managerial political science, and The Real American Politics, which cut below the veneer of America government courses to the foundations. Dr. Hummel is at work on a critique of business and public organizations under the title Pyramids of Knowledge/Pyramids of Power.