Dwight Waldo

The modern period in organization theory is characterized by vogues, heterogeneity, claims and counter-claims.

— Dwight Waldo

Procedure is not a unique feature of public administration. It is a concomitant of all organized activity, and many procedures are equally usable by private administration or public administration. Private as well as public "red tape" can be time-consuming and annoying to those affected, as anyone can testify who has tried to exchange a purchase without a sales slip or to cash a check without "proper identification.

— Dwight Waldo

This is a study of the public administration movement from the viewpoint of political theory and the history of ideas. It seeks to review and analyze the theoretical element in administrative writings and to present the development of the public administration movement as a chapter in the history of American political thought.

— Dwight Waldo

Historically, "public administration" has grown in large part out of the wider field of inquiry, "political science." The history of American political science during the past fifty years is a story much too lengthy to be told here, but some important general characteristics and tendencies it has communicated to or shared with public administration must be noted.

— Dwight Waldo

[Messianic tendencies of management thought, especially scientific management had the tendency] to extend the objective, positivist approach to an ever-enlarging complex of phenomena.

— Dwight Waldo

We hold that efficiency cannot itself be a "value." Rather, it operates in the interstices of a value system; it prescribes relationships (ratios or proportions) among parts of the value system; it receives its "moral content" by syntax, by absorption. Things are not simply "efficient" or "inefficient." They are efficient or inefficient for given purposes, and efficiency for one purpose may mean inefficiency for another.

— Dwight Waldo

Students of administration, writes J. M. Gaus, have become "more uncertain in recent years as to the ends, aims and methods which they should advocate/' It is difficult to view in their entirety and in perspective the writings on public administration that now pour from the presses. But this is hardly necessary to confirm the truth of Gaus' statement.

— Dwight Waldo