This article chronicles and critiques three primary perspectives reflected in the normative, empirical, and formal theoretical literature on overhead democracy and the professional state. After demonstrating how disparate the thinking is on the nature, causes, consequences, and dilemmas associated with the professional state, the article offers reasons for this eclecticism. Cited are conceptual, contextual, rhetorical, and normative shortcomings of this otherwise informative literature. In the process, the article offers several research strategies for developing midrange and contingency-based descriptive, instrumental: assumptive, and normative theories of the political-professional nexus in the United States.
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