This is a highly specialized but excellent study of the operations of Mexico’s Secretaría de Recursos Hidráulicos. As the title suggests, Mr. Greenberg casts his work in the framework of bureaucratic activities in an environment of rapid change. In fact, his first chapter, “A Bureaucracy in a Transitional Society,” offers a set of major characteristics of transitional bureaucracies, utilizing some of Fred Riggs’ and Anthony Downs’ generalizations as a basis. Throughout the remainder of the book he tests these modal characteristics against the realities of the unit he studied. After describing Mexico’s irrigation problems and reviewing Revolutionary government activities leading up to the present Secretariat, the author discusses the following aspects of the unit’s staff and performance: the bureaucratic elite, the technical branches, bureaucratic behavior, and three functions—planning, control, and development of a bureaucratic ideology. His final chapter considers “The Ministry in Perspective.”
Mr. Greenberg is remarkably consistent in his application of the characteristics of transitional bureaucracies to the real practices of employees in the Secretaría. Apparently he enjoyed good cooperation from all levels of the unit’s staff, perhaps because the Secretariat has demonstrated a high degree of technical success and has been relatively free of disruptive internal and external politics. This is not to say that politicial factors do not affect Recursos Hidráulicos, or that they are not covered in the book. On the contrary, for me one of the most interesting and informative contributions of this study is Mr. Greenberg’s insightful discussion of the relationship between the Secretariat’s leadership and employees on the one hand and the PRI on the other. Rut a small and highly technical operation such as this maintains a good deal more autonomy from political pressures than do larger and less specialized agencies dealing with public works or agriculture. Again, a political system in which one political party has dominated the interpretation of the proper functions of government for over four decades is less apt to spawn disruptive shifts in personnel and policy than is a less stable environment.
Speaking more generally, Bureaucracy and Development is a mature and well integrated work, one of the best on bureaucratic operations in a transitional society that I have seen. It balances theoretical generalizations nicely with substantive fact. I can recommend it highly to students of politics as well as to the organizational theorist.
