The basic building block of large-scale administration is structure. The structural approach to large organizations tends to concentrate on hierarchy or the top-down delegation of authority from higher officials to lower ones. Both Luther Gulick’s classical model and Max Weber’s bureaucratic model are examples of this structural approach. Though Gulick emphasizes the classical model of power coming from the top and moving down with a high value on efficiency, Weber created the bureaucratic model which ponders three models of legitimate authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal. Systems theory, which is the major alternative to the hierarchical approach, views an organization as a black box that translates inputs into outputs. It is the most ambitious effort to generalize about all organizations, public and private, large and small, open and closed.

                The structural approach and systems theory, which focus on an organization’s basic structure and on the relationship among its elements, have been challenged by four other approaches. The humanist approach looks inside the bureaucracy, focusing on the life of individual workers within the organization. The pluralist approach emphasizes the ability of society’s politically active interest groups to shape bureaucracy’s behavior. The third-party approach posits that the more government administration relies on third-party tools, the less it fits structural models and so new ways of integrating third parties are necessary. Finally, formal models view bureaucracy as networks of contracts, built around systems of hierarchy and authority. The author concludes that despite all the theoretical disagreements, each approach embodies a significant truth about government organizations.