Heady's chapter on con®gurations attempts to isolate, by conceptual insight rather than statistical frequencies, groups of systems with shared attributes that presumably have a propensity to behave in similar ways. What emerges from overlaying a set of ®ve variables (relations to political regime, socio-economic context, responsibility for personnel management, quali®cations requirements, and sense of mission) are four types, fully de®ned and empirically veri®ed: ruler trustworthy, party controlled, policy receptive, and collaborative. The next step is to test their utility for more intensive research and policy guidance.
Peters provides a concise, well-informed survey of the intellectual history and the antecedents of the study of comparative public administration, relating them both to the ®elds of comparative politics and public administration. He then reviews some of the key theoretical issues, including the identi®cation of dependent variables (what is to be explained); appropriate levels of analysis, linkages to the surrounding society, polity, and economy; the dilemmas of cross-cultural analysis; and methods of achieving valid knowledge short of rigorous quanti®cation that appears to be unfeasible for most dimensions of public administration.
Though its readership is likely to be limited to teachers and researchers, this book is an important contribution to the science of public administration. For this the organizers of the 1990 and 1991 conferences, and the editors of this book, deserve our thanks. How far it will be followed up, and how far it will in¯uence subsequent research and practice, is questionable since these depend on factors such as ®nancial support for research and of®cial recognition of the salience of administration in economic development. Thus far the auguries are less than favorable. In the redirection and rebuilding of states and economies in Russia and Eastern Europe there is little evidence that governments or international ®nancial institutions have invested much effort in reconstructing decrepit and incompetent administrative institutions or, when they have, that they have gone beyond the shallow nostrums of the `new public management' with its links to the reigning economic fundamentalism of radical individualism, downsizing, and marketization. But until the intellectual foundations have been more ®rmly established by initiatives such as those initiated by this volume, even would-be reformers must continue to ¯y by the seat of their pants.