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.