Bureaucracy Reading II: James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy

First, I wanted to thank everyone who sent me reading suggestions, or said they'd be reading along with me. I'm glad to know you all are out there. Just as a heads-up, though, my reading list is determined by a syllabus, so I don't have a lot of discretion to incorporate suggestions, since the list is extremely heavy (much more than I'm writing about here) and tied to assignments and class discussions. Otherwise I'd change directions in a heartbeat! I'll keep track of them, though, and perhaps extend the project further into the year if folks are interested.

But now to dive into this week's reading, James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy. Of everything I'm reading for this project, Bureaucracy is the thing I'm most embarrassed I didn't read on my own at some point, and that I regret not getting to. It's an extremely clear, cogent, lucid account of how government works that both tracks with most of my own experience as a reporter, and that I think would have been extremely useful to me when I was just beginning to get to know government agencies.