Taking Time Seriously: Progressivism, the Business–Social Science Nexus, and the Paradox of American Administrative Reform

In his classic book, Reflections on Public Administration , John Gaus (1947) wrote about the factors that he saw interacting to either increase or reduce growth in government in the United States. “I put before you,” he wrote, “a list of the factors which I have found useful as explaining the ebb and flow of the functions of government.” His “ecology of government” included changes in “people, place, physical technology, social technology, wishes and ideas, catastrophe, and personality.” He continued, “Such [are] the ‘raw material of politics’ and hence of administration [and] are in themselves the raw material of a science of administration” (9).