Administration & Society

"Administrative responsibility " connotes multiple and even conflicting meanings, including (a) political responsibility, which embodies the virtue of duty; (b) professional responsibility, embodying the virtue of integrity; and (c) personal responsibility, which reflects the qualities of self-awareness and authentic relationship. The theory of countervailing responsibility holds that any one of these three meanings is not only inadequate for a full understanding of responsible action, it also becomes pathological unless it is "countervailed" by each of the other two meanings. Drawing from the fictional exploits of C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower, the article explores the subtle and complex relationships among the virtues and pathologies associated with the three meanings of responsibility. The intended contributions of the article are (a) to show why responsible action should not be equated with morally or legally correct action, and (b) to argue that responsibility is both a psychological issue and an intellectual or cognitive one.

The implementation of wastewater treatment policy in American municipalities provides a particularly useful context for the exploration of important issues in implementation research. Recent developments at the national level have stimulated the innovation of capital-intensive privatization in this sector. How this structure for implementation compares with alternatives, especially the conventional federally grant-funded route, is a question that can be explored through the use of implementation theory and can in turn help clarify and advance that theory. For instance, although top-down implementation research suggests the importance of hierarchically integrated structures for implementation success, this study shows that integration can be induced without hierarchy (as capital-intensive privatization) and that hierarchically managed structures (like the grant setting) may lack integrative capacity. Empirical research provides evidence for theoretically derived expectations that privatization can assist implementation processes in this field without sacrificing clean water output. Theoretical and practical implications of the analysis are sketched.

In 1968 the Israeli government began to develop a local, publicly directed, autonomous network of community service centers (Matnas) parallel to the traditional, statutory welfare bureaus. Similar claims made by both organizations overpopulation, needs, and services to be implemented caused a domain overlap. This article is based on a long-term observation of such overlap. It describes the case and analyzes the different reactions that evolved. In some places these two organizations managed or were made to coexist. In other settlements domain overlap created a conflict. Reactions to such conflict varied from competition to cooperation, influenced by organizational environments in each settlement. The community and its representatives, local politicians, clients, and professional and lay staff played a critical role in entering such domain overlap and determining the nature and intensity of reactions to it.

Robert Denhardt has made a unique contribution to organization theory. Drawing on depth psychology, In the Shadow of Organization (1981) lays bare the hidden religious underpinnings of organization as cultural symbol of the denial of death. In exchange for the magical, protective embrace of the organization, however, we unconsciously submit to domination and abdicate responsibility for our actions. Only by using the dynamite of "negation" and Critical Theory, argues Denhardt, can we explode the repressed truth: Our toleration of instrumentalism and domination is a form of faulty self-knowledge, of bondage to hypostatized powers. This article probes the strengths and weaknesses of Denhardt's "theology " of organizational life. It contends that Denhardt's religious orientation—once four important limitations of his Critical Theory are recognized-should be accepted into the mainstream of organization theory.