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Bureaucratic Autonomy

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Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance

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Synonyms

Autonomy; Bureaucracy; Bureaucrats; Discretion

Introduction

Bureaucratic autonomy is one of those concepts that have fascinated the scholars of both public administration and political science for a long time. Such fascination inspires the scholars to carry out research from diverse perspectives on different aspects of bureaucratic autonomy. However, such diversified literatures fail to produce consensus among the scholars over the meaning, definition, nature, measurement mechanism, etc. of bureaucratic autonomy. Formal scholars rely primarily on principal-agent models while some focus on more political definition of bureaucratic autonomy and European public administration scholars come up with various types of autonomy. In the words of Caughey et al. (2009), “while each scholarly approach has its own strengths, none offers a portrait of bureaucratic autonomy that is both complex enough to be realistic and general enough to travel across historical and spatial contexts.”

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Administration, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Sadik Hasan

Authors
  1. Sadik Hasan
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Correspondence to Sadik Hasan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

    Ali Farazmand

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Hasan, S. (2018). Bureaucratic Autonomy. In: Farazmand, A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_684-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_684-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31816-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31816-5

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