Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective (Public Administration and Public Policy, No 59)

By Ferrel Heady

This is an analysis of governments's development in various countries and of the relationships found between the development of government and technology, culture, economic systems and social order. This edition explains recent comparative research on civil service systems; discusses the implications of political changes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; offers a four-tier system to classify countries' level of development; introduces several new case examples; and more.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824796578
• ISBN13: 9780824796570
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Marcel Dekker Inc
• Length: 520 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 6.5" x 1.0"

Customer Reviews

Setting a standard

This is a very useful book with good references to other sources. Those who wish to compare public administration systems around the globe should read this book. It's a must have for any theorethical framework regarding comparision of public administration systems.Don't let chapter 1 disencourage you to read on, it gets better and more tangible along the way.Unfortunately the book has little illustrations like tables or diagrams. It's a very academic work with dense sentences.Printing could be better at least for my copy, especially the left side pages suffer from loss of quality and therefore sharpness. An encyclopedial benchmark for everybody with interest in this field.

Towards the Definitive Textbook

This is "the" textbook on the subject, the one that everyone uses, and written by an author the field owes a great debt of gratitude to. On the positive side, it's comprehensive and organized along the lines which have come to be the standard format for teaching in this field. On the negative side, there's a lot of, shall we say, "oral history" which will seem extraneous to the average reader. Unfortunately, there's a shortage of good books on this subject.