Area and Administration Format: Paperback

A foundational classic on the organization and coordination of modern government.

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.
 

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.