The Entanglement of Public Bureaucratic Institutions : Their Interactions with Society, Culture, Politics, and the Economy

Abstract

Scholars of public administration apply different perspectives to understand bureaucratic institutions. Many excellent studies consider the influence of bureaucracies on one aspect of their environment, like politics, society, culture, or the economy. Alternatively, scholars sometimes analyze the impact of one of these factors on the public administration. However, the recent literature on institutional entanglement shows us that relationships between social institutions are often mutually constitutive, meaning that their interaction is not one-directional. In this chapter, I build upon a large number of previous studies on public administration to create a synthesized perspective of how public bureaucracies interact with their broader environment, including the social, cultural, economic, and political context in which they operate. Through a number of empirical examples, I show how useful this view can be for understanding the characteristics of public bureaucracies.