Public Administration in Today's World of Organizations and Markets

749-756. t is a special pleasure for me to give a lecture named in honor of John M. Gaus. My files still retain several PS: Political Science gracious letters from him to a young & Politics, 2000, 33 (4) colleague, one after a session in which we had participated at the 1950 APS A meeting; another commenting on a paper 1 had published in APSR in 1953. When I encountered the world of public administration 65 years ago, John Gaus was just undertaking, with Leon O. Wolcott. their remarkable study, Public Administration and the United Stales Department of Agriculture (1940). Don Smithburg, Vie Thompson, and I drew heavily on that work when we wrote our textbook, Public Administration, in 1950. Gaus and Wolcott's work today continues to throw valuable light on how organizations come into existence and grow, often under the influence of technological advances that provide them with the by Herbert Simon/ Carnegie Mellon University potential for important new activities. The innovations in the Department of Agriculture that their book examined included forest conservation, vaccines to combat animal diseases, and the parity principle to deal with agricultural overproduction during the Great Depression. In fact, Gaus and Wolcott's analysis of the interaction of organizational and technological change resonates strongly with today's interest in the processes and rates of growth of public and business organizations.