ABSTRACT
Modern societies have been busier making complex organizations work, largely through trial and error, than studying them. Administration may innovate on any or all of the necessary dimensions, but only to the extent that the innovations are acceptable to those on whom the organization must and can depend. The organization must conform to the rules of the game or somehow negotiate a revised set of rules. If the basic function of administration involves shooting at a moving target of co-alignment, in which the several components of that target are themselves moving, then one can expect the central characteristic of the administrative process to be a search for flexibility. The paradox of administration, the dual searches for certainty and flexibility, to a large extent revolves around the dimension of time. In the short run, administration seeks the reduction or elimination of uncertainty in order to score well on assessments of technical rationality.
