Reorganization Reconsidered: An Empirical Approach to the Departmentalization Problem

Once there was a set of prescriptions for reorganizations. Theseprescriptions were part of a body of literature known as the administrative principles.' Public officials and official study commissions adopted these principles at every level of government. For several decades this approach to reorganization served as the orthodoxy of theory. The classical approach to reorganization has gradually been rejected for two reasons. First, classical writers assumed that reorganization was motivated by the desire to improve organizational efficiency. More recent studies have demonstrated the multiplicity of goals which are served by reorganization. Indeed, they have argued that bureaucratic politics is a better predictor of reorganization than is rationality.3 Second, traditional theory suffers from technical as well as political problems.4 The criteria for reorganization are vague, contradictory, and subjective. The science of administration is unable to operationalize many of its basic assumptions, including those related to reorganizations