by Howard E. McCurdy (1993)
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration began its space flight program in October of 1958 by launching the 84-pound Pioneer I space probe. Scarcely a decade later, in July of 1969, NASA amazed the world by landing the first humans on the Moon. In the two decades that followed, however, the agency appeared to lose both its vigor and its creativity. Inside NASA explores how an agency praised for its planetary probes and expeditions to the Moon became noted for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and a series of other malfunctions. Using archival evidence as well as in-depth interviews with space agency officials, Howard McCurdy investigates the relationship between the performance of the U.S. space program and NASA's organizational culture. He begins by identifying the beliefs, norms, and practices that guided NASA's early successes. Originally, the agency was dominated by the strong technical culture rooted in the research-and-development organizations from which NASA was formed. To launch the expeditions to the Moon, McCurdy explains, this technical culture was linked to an organizational structure borrowed from the Air Force Ballistic Missile Program. Over time, however, changes imposed to accomplish the lunar expedition - as well as the normal aging process and increased bureaucracy in the government as a whole-altered NASA's original culture and eroded its technical strength. McCurdy observes that NASA's early success depended on a number of related characteristics: extensive testing, in-house technical capability, hands-on experience, exceptional people, stoic acceptance of risk and failure, and a frontier mentality. He concludes that, given the conditions of modern government, the performance of high-technology agencies like NASA inherently tends to decline. Inside NASA offers a revealing study of both organizational culture and bureaucratic aging.
Derek S. Pugh and David J. Hickson
Summarises the work of experts to provide an overview of the theory and practice of organization management. This book covers the structure and national and international environments of organizations, management problems, managerial decision-making and influence, people problems, and organizational change and learning.
Martha S. Feldman
This useful book outlines four key strategies for interpreting qualitative data: ethnomethodology; semiotics; dramaturgy; and deconstruction. To demonstrate, the author applies the techniques of each method to a single data set, highlighting the differences in results.
Andrew Massey
This major book reviews and analyses the changes that have taken place in public administration in Britain and North America over the last ten years and which will continue to have a profound impact on central and local bureaucracies well into the next century. Managing the Public Sector provides a critical introduction which successfully combines a review of the literature with original research. It relates theory to practice and highlights the problem of implementation. It covers all the major issues including privatisation, and the importance of the business sector both as a partner and a powerful lobby for efforts to use market mechanisms to devolve power. This thoroughly modern, up-to-date book, will be essential reading for all courses on public administration and policy analysis and the management of the public sector.
Jeremy M. Wilson, Clifford A. Grammich
A summary of the presentations, discussions, and opinions offered by panelists at a National Summit on Police Recruitment and Retention in the Contemporary Urban Environment held at RAND in June 2008. Topics examined include changing police workforce issues, strategies being employed, lessons that could be learned from other organizations such as the military, and in-depth analyses of police recruiting and retention in selected cities.