Area and Administration

by James W. Fesler
introduction by Donald F. Kettl

University of Alabama Press, 2008
eISBN: 978-0-8173-8122-6 | Paper: 978-0-8173-5506-7
Library of Congress Classification JF1411.F4 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification 351

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK

An updated classic of public administration

This fresh publication of James W. Fesler’s classic, Area and Administration is a powerful work of intellectual history. Richly illustrating how the Great Depression and World War II shaped the thinking of scholars who helped build modern American government.

It is also an authoritative work of powerful insight. The challenges of linking the center with the front lines, or securing vertical and horizonal coordination, and of connecting area and function, have only become more important in twenty-first century government. Fesler’s path-breaking book provides an extraordinarily useful foundation for grappling with issues that have become even more important for governance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

James W. Fesler was a distinguished professor of public administration, who earned his PhD from Harvard University and taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Minnesota, the University of California at Berkeley, and as the Cowles Professor at Yale University. His public service career included service with the War Production Board in World War II and later with other federal agencies and with the United Nations. In 1986 the American Society for Public Administration presented him with its Dwight Waldo Award “for outstanding contributions to the professional literature of public administration over a life-time career.”

Donald F. Kettl is Stanley I. Sheerr Endowed Term Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of System Under Stress: Homeland Security and American Politics, The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for 21st Century America, Deficit Politics: The Search for balance in American Politics, and The Global Public Management Revolution: A Report on the Transformation of Governance.

REVIEWS

“Thoughtful, workmanlike. . . . The essays deal with field service areas and a real coordination of field activities. Here Fesler is a master and shows his skill most effectively.”
—American Political Science Review
— -

“This is a book of great importance and usefulness. Fesler has brought to one of the most difficult problems of government an interpretation of administrative experience as a source of new insight into the general problem of government, as well as providing suggestions for the treatment of problems of organization and procedure.”
—Annals of the American Academy of Political Science
— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
I: The Problem of Administrative Areas	1
II: Governmental Areas	21
III: Field Service Areas	49
IV: Areal Co-Ordination of Field Functions	73
V: Emerging Areal Patterns of Intergovernmental and Interagency Co-
Operation
95
VI: The Reconciliation of Function and Area	119
Index	000

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