Personnel Management: Politics, Administration, and a Passion for Anonymity

Personnel management is vitally important to the maintenance and preservation of the administrative state and its democratic institutions. This reaction critically examines the personnel recommendations made by Floyd W. Reeves and Paul T. David in their study Personnel Administration in the Federal Service. It questions the degree to which there is a coherent set of political and constitutional expectations marking the progress of personnel policy that might enable us to forecast the future, both theoretically and practically. The authors highlight how and why the field should pay greater attention to the political ends that our personnel theories serve.