ABSTRACT
The city's civil service has responded to the changes slowly. Its bureaucratic byways would still seem familiar to a traveler who had passed though a generation ago. It may be the very essence of any bureaucracy to move cautiously, even ponderously. New York's civil service is expected to be both productive and democratic, and therein lies the essential paradox that accounts for much of the public's displeasure. Despite all the logic and evidence one can produce in defense of the proposition that productivity is only a "sometime" thing for the public service, its allure persists. At the end of the 1980s, New York City's public bureaucracies were organized in 34 departments, over 2,500 job titles, and more than 300,000 incumbents. The Police Department is an excellent example of a "complex mission" department. The profile of the people in this bureau is invariably lower than those of the union leaders.
