ABSTRACT
Administrative reform takes place in different environments at every level of human cooperation and at all times for a great variety of objectives and motives under diverse pressures. The penultimate stage in the evolution of the modem bureaucratic state in France, Britain, Russia, and the United States of America illustrates different approaches to bureaucratic reform. The experience of the newly independent states emphasizes that, stripped of controversy, publicity, propaganda and gloss, what really counts in administrative reform is what the indigenous people themselves actually accomplish in permanently improved administrative performance. Automation seems to be the obvious choice for administrative scientists, as it seems already to be heralding a Second Industrial Revolution. Modernization tends to obscure one of the most obvious features of administrative reform in public bureaucracies, namely, the continuing class basis of different attitudes toward reform. It may be possible to anticipate reforms and to rationalize reform processes, and ultimately, to institutionalize reform.
