Government Agencies Books

"The Complete Idiot's Guide to the FBI" is a good (although very basic) guide to the agency and its functions. Not surprisingly, just like other books in the "Complete Idiots" series, it caters to readers who only need a simple overview of the FBI.

"The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide," by Athan Theoharis, is even better. Thomas Ackerman's "FBI Careers: The Ultimate Guide to Landing a Job As One of Americas Finest" is also a great book for agency information and history, and it's the best book on the market for FBI career seekers.

With this book, Judge Posner has completed what he refers to as his trilogy on the U.S. Intelligence System. The core of each book is an argument for creating a domestic intelligence agency that would be independent of the FBI. In this book this argument is amplified and joined with a detailed and effective critique of the FBI as an intelligence organization. Now Posner has no experience in the often arcane processes associated with production of intelligence nor has ever openly been affiliated with any intelligence agency. Yet his criticisms and suggestions should not be taken lightly. Much like the academic Amy Zegart (Spying Blind, Flawed by Design), he has made a serious and informed analysis of the U.S. National Security systems and found them badly wanting.

Posner does not denigrate the FBI. Indeed he recognizes it as a world class law enforcement agency, but points out clearly and carefully that the very attributes that make it so effective at law enforcement, make it highly unsuitable for the role of a domestic intelligence agency. Much as Zegart has done in her books, Posner identifies the cultural characteristics of the FBI that prevent it from developing into an effective intelligence producer. His arguments are logical and well constructed but are inadequate to force a change on the entrenched and complacent bureaucracies that make up the U.S. Intelligence System, and especially a bureaucratic force like the FBI.

In addition, to his primary purpose of building an argument for a new domestic intelligence agency, Posner offers some sound advice on how to make the Directorate of National Intelligence into more effective and more relevant agency. However, in this area Posner may have gone astray. He assumes the ill-conceived and badly executed reforms mandated by congress in the wake of 9/11 were really worth doing and that fixes at the top of the U.S. intelligence structure will make real improvements. In point of fact an argument can be made that imposing additional bureaucratic hierarchies on top of an already top heavy bureaucracy is analogous to putting a new roof on a building whose walls and foundation are rotting away.

Incredibly interesting and surprisingly easy to read. I'm very glad I read this book and would recommend it to anyone

This book discusses the FBI's program of targeting authors as possibly subversive to the USA-- authors such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, EB White (Charlotte's Web) and others. It also discusses how the FBI tried pressuring the American Library Assn into maintaining reading lists of its patrons but the Assn refused. Some universities do this and have been doing it. This book a frightening account of an agency with broad police powers and the capability of labelling anyone as an enemy of the state for expressing ideas.

One of the best books in the subject. E-government initiaves are to be understood more as a cheallenge than as a solution. It goes beyond a technical problem. This book may help decision makers align their strategies for better performance... to at least avoid great damages

This book is very difficult to put down once started. It amazes one to realize that one special agent, in a 14 year career, was involved in cracking the KGB code, identifying Klaus Fuchs as a spy, and bringing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their ring to justice. Robert J. Lamphere's book moves along quickly, and treats the investigations in sufficient detail without becoming dull. And having rubbed shoulders with J. Edgar Hoover, James Angleton, and British double agent Kim Philby, his first person reminiscences are fascinating. This is history that leaps off the page.

The overarching practical suggestion of this book is that substantial public value is being lost due to insufficient collaboration in the public sector and that new ways of thinking and acting are necessary if systemic tendencies toward organizational fragmentation in increasingly obsolescent forms are to be reversed and public value interactively created. In this volume, Bardach is in search of a mode of discourse capable of standing up to social science scrutiny and modes of concrete action able to support the creation of public value in the face of public problems that do not conform well with our taxonomically formed organizational jurisdictions of the 20th century.

This is not your usual text on collaboration. It does not remotely consider collaboration a panacea to problems of policy and/or administrative fragmentation nor does it settle for the usual focus on collaborative behavior merely. It is concerned with understanding and building inter-organizational capacity. Understanding matters of potential or capacity, is not a historical strength of the social sciences. As such, the inquiry requires methodological advance rather than mere application of established methodologies. The methodological aspect of the text cuts in two ways. On the one hand, focus on methodological development is a seminal contribution of the text. On the other, it is an aspect of the text that makes access more difficult, in part for readers with academic backgrounds who were not exposed to such practical challenges in their methods courses, and most especially for practitioner readers whom the author also expresses hope to reach in its writing. It is a nuanced text that moves on and in-between theoretical, methodological, and empirical levels of abstraction simultaneously. Its risk is that it may appear too professionally-oriented for academics and too academic for practicing professionals. In its first edition, at any rate, I believe this text will prove to have been most accessible to a minority of reflective academics whose methodological questions probe beyond the ordinary and to a few reflective practitioners who happen to be more conceptually adept at differential levels of analysis than most practitioners or than most academics for that matter. Although it is not an easy read, the issues it raises are substantial and the text deserves a wider audience, most especially among that subset sometimes known as "pracademics," who straddle, however uncomfortably, the worlds of learning through and for practice and academic-based learning.

It may help to appreciate Bardach's contribution by placing it in a larger historical context of enduring contributions. For example, Bardach's concern for strengthening possibility inquiry and practice and for how we may learn purposefully to promote creativity in public management in ways that create public value is remarkably reminiscent of ways of thinking and acting articulated long ago by Mary Parker Follett in her 1924 volume, Creative Experience. As Peter F. Drucker, Warren Bennis, Paul Lawrence, and others underscored in their contributions to Mary Parker Follett--Prophet of Management, Follett's thinking was far ahead of her time perhaps just because she was able to perceive the world through a different "zeitgeist" or world view than did her contemporaries or most of her organizational successors in the last century. After her death, her work was largely forgotten (or conveniently pigeonholed in uncomprehending categories) so that even when sometimes ritually cited, her contribution was effectually lost to main currents of the twentieth century. Yet the challenge of possibility thinking that she posed in the organizational field endures and Bardach is one of a minority of scholars to pick up this challenge again on the cusp of a new century. Just as Follett was neither an empirical thinker merely, nor a normative thinker merely, but one concerned with the more creative process of actualizing potentials for the creation of public value, so likewise, is the challenge of better interactively understanding this creative process at the heart of Bardach's inquiry in this volume.

At a theoretical level, the text argues against "the more or less deterministic worldview of workaday social science" (p. vi). It is an attempt to articulate a conceptual frame of reference that gives central place to contingent notions of potentiality and capacity in human affairs. Bardach communicates this frame of reference by elaborating on the generative metaphor of "craftsmanship." He articulates a frame of reference in which the purposive activity of actors may be explicitly understood as playing a causative (and hence explanatory) role in human affairs. Although he doesn't cite the notion of causality as articulated in the literature of some realist (see e.g., Ray Pawson, 1997; 2006, chs.1-2) or critical realist methodology (see e.g., Andrew Sayer, 1993 and 2000), in this reviewer's judgment, his practical and theoretical concerns as reflected in this text are substantially inline with the theoretical re-conceptualization of causality for the social sciences as articulated in that literature.

In a language that would be appreciated by realist or critical realist methodologists such as those above, Bardach states "the analytic problem is in understanding purposiveness not as a product of individual will alone but as a product of the interaction between individual will and certain conditions in the environment." Bardach's discussion does usefully build upon Lawrence Mohr's important and still under-appreciated distinction (1982) between variance theories (typically employing quantitative methods), process theories (typically employing qualitative methods), and notions of causality corresponding to each (for readers interested in a concise summary of distinctive notions of causality corresponding with these distinctive types of social science theories, see e.g., Joseph Maxwell, 2005). Bardach instructively draws attention to how a sensible variance analysis is functionally dependent upon a prior qualities analysis. Perhaps most fundamentally from a methodological perspective, Bardach makes a constructive and empirically grounded foray into conceptually unconfining notions of causality in the social sciences and broadening understanding of this fundamental notion in ways appropriate for action, which is also to say, for acting upon the potential of a situation when it matters most, in real time.

Unfortunately, in his focus on methods and causality interwoven throughout the text, the author seems to leave many practitioners shaking their heads wondering what he's talking about. His thoughtful exploration of uses and limits to conventional boundaries of social science methods for addressing real world challenges deserves further serious attention by policy and organizational scholars. This book is courageous in attempting to articulate a theoretical connection that holds much promise for distinguishing modes of inquiry relevant to worlds of practice, yet whose theoretical groundings I do not believe anyone has articulated fully or even adequately for a practitioner's audience to date.

Bardach's focal concern for potential and capacity lead him to be centrally concerned with the interaction between "an evolving medium of linked possibilities and purposive intervention." The interactive process with which he is concerned is resonant not only with the work of Mark Moore on creating public value (a referent he explicitly draws upon), but is also resonant with what is conceptualized in the notable yet currently less attended to policy work of Giandomenico Majone (1989) and Donald Schon and Martin Rein (1995) as a dialectical policy process. Surprisingly, Bardach makes no mention of these referents despite the obvious relevance of a policy dialectic to this focal issue he examines.

In speaking of the process of potentiality in-between linked possibilities and purposive intervention, Bardach refers more generically to "an ongoing developmental process." Bardach's focus here is also notably similar to what Alberto Guerreiro Ramos articulated as "objective possibilities" with respect to developmental issues at large (1971). Indeed, it seems to this reviewer that Bardach would substantially strengthen his case by placing his work explicitly in the frame of reference of possibility-thinkers just as Michael Barzelay carefully did in his insightfully developed (1992) work. Neither scholar, however, developed a historical frame of reference for articulating possibility thinking. To the best of my knowledge, that is a task still left unaddressed in the policy-administrative field. Bardach's specific concern in this text is with articulating, building, and acting upon situational potential for interagency collaboration. In so doing, he surfaces issues that have been at the periphery of social science concerns in the last century. Yet in so doing, he appears remarkably perceptive to this reviewer and to offer important methodological cues for the further development of professional scholarship in the century to come.

Whatever direction social science programs take in the coming century, I believe professional schools such as programs of public policy and public administration are going to need to recover actionable forms of inquiry and knowledge if they are going to remain closely relevant to the practitioner base that they ostensibly serve. I believe that however it is assessed in the short term, in the long term, Bardach's text will be understood as one of those critical stepping stones that help the professional policy and organizational fields begin to rethink their methodological foundations and seek to help practitioners creatively engage experience in a 21st century world whose problems are not likely to be well handled either within jurisdictions of the formal taxonomic organizations created in the 20th century or via ways of thinking and acting currently commonly fostered in the social sciences.

In conclusion, this is one of those books where a mature scholar was truly thinking as he wrote. It's clear he's not simply regurgitating anything he had already figured out before he started writing. As such, it is a book that requires serious study rather than a text that can be lightly breezed through. It's got enough accessibility challenges in this regard to withhold one star. But in terms of the worthiness of the read, it's a five star book. One could hope that the author may make room for a second edition. It's a unique contribution and addresses a set of topics that are only likely to increase in relevance and import as the new century wears on.

As the editor, I can tell you that my goal in writing this book is to get students of international affairs to start looking systematically at what happens when international organizations like the UN or the EU decide to directly engage local non-governmental organizations in the Third World. This phenomenon, while widespread, has only just begun to penetrate the awareness of most experts in the field, and they often don't even know which words to use, let alone ideas, to describe and explain what is happening. I brought together a number of people with quite different perspectives on the issue and had them each write their own piece, after which we met together at a conference and compared notes. What you will find is that, although we use very different terminology, we all ended up saying many of the same things, that UN efforts to build up local organizations from the outside are analogous to other things in international relations, from neo-colonialism to balance of power politics to development aid projects. In other words, we already have the analytical tools to understand most of what is going on. We are also ina position to predict that these efforts to strengthen "civil society" within Third World countries is probably going to largely backfire unless it is done very carefully with great sensitivity to local political and social conditions. Enjoy the book!

This may have been published for political purposes (in part), but the wisdom contained between its covers sure makes sense to me.

Gore goes out of his way to target waste within the government, spotlighting a host of needlessly duplicated work and costly contracts that do no one but the contractors any good. This series of problems and suggested solutions really comes across as a breath of fresh air, and it sadly demonstrates that many of the common-sense solutions are easy to identify and impossible to implement, even for top government officials.

This interesting reader describes various examples of public services and how they are financed by taxes. The book's clear text and vivid illustrations clearly communicate that the government provides a number of services that impact children's lives when they go to school, visit the library, play in a park, need help in an emergency, and receive a letter in the mail. A color-coded flow diagram in the back shows how the government channels tax payments into public services. The lessons are reinforced with a glossary and some examples of government agencies, such as NASA, that children may recognize. This book is ideal for teachers, parents, and volunteers who are seeking books for younger readers with important lessons about the economic role of government.