ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of public personnel administration in the United States, emphasizing how the three major historical phases of public personnel administration maximized certain values but failed to deal adequately with others and revealing how those failures subsequently led to reforms. However, by and large the political and policy approach to public administration has ruled it out only because it could lead to chaos, but also because it tends to provide organized public employees with a means of compromising the responsiveness of government to the citizenry. The judiciary's concern with constitutional rights and values has led to a number of decisions that have had a major impact on public sector collective bargaining. One, already mentioned, is that public employees have the right to join unions, though there is no constitutional right to the engage in collective bargaining. Certain aspects of organization theory are so commonplace and ingrained that they have become part of society’s culture.
