Article Analysis

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Administrative Theory & Praxis Vol. 28, No. 4, 2006: 642–645 R

Book Review

O’LEARY, ROSEMARY. The Ethics of Dissent: Managing Guerrilla Government. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006.

REVIEWED BY BRETT S. SHARP, UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL OKLAHOMA

The Ethics of Dissent illustrates an unusual and provocative concept. In short, guerrilla government is O’Leary’s metaphoric term for govern- ment employees who actively and covertly dissent from policies. These guerrillas take advantage of a variety of strategies. They work behind the scenes to assist favored interest groups. They leak information to the media. They covertly transfer data to other agencies. They sabotage projects. They bring unwanted attention to decisions that supervisors hope certain stakeholders would otherwise ignore. They let supervisors self-destruct from their own mistakes. Or, they simply drag their feet in performing their duties. According to O’Leary, the quintessential guer- rilla in the American context is W. Mark Felt, a.k.a. “Deep Throat” of the Watergate era.

This book richly illustrates the natural friction that occurs between career civil servants and political appointees. O’Leary contends that guerrilla government is a natural “manifestation of inevitable tensions between bureaucracy and democracy that will never go away” (p. 3). Although guerrillas often act on their own, they usually capitalize on a wider network. In conspiratorial fashion, they will go so far as to coor- dinate their efforts with other staff members and external groups. O’Leary’s guerrillas believe that their own professional roles extend be- yond the restraining boundaries of an agency’s mission statement. In a sense, these employees are loose cannons whose personal agendas often conflict with the direction preferred by agency administrators.

The Ethics of Dissent is a powerful book. It covers a lot of territory for such a short work. The large amount of information is framed by the author’s high level of critical analysis. Like other offerings in the “Pub- lic Affairs and Policy Administration” series by CQ Press, The Ethics of Dissent would make a wonderful supplementary text. It would certainly be appropriate for those interested in public sector ethics, public ad- ministration, and even environmental politics. In fact, the book empha-

2006, Public Administration Theory Network

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sizes environmental management to such a degree that it should have been included in the title. However, O’Leary understandably wants her work to have a broader application. She touches upon a wide variety of ethical management concerns such as malicious compliance, whistleblowing, groupthink, policy entrepreneurship, and the politics of expertise. O’Leary pays homage to a previous book by Needleman and Needleman titled Guerrillas in the Bureaucracy (1974). Their work pri- marily concentrated on community planners surreptitiously co-opted by particular clientele in disregard to the larger public interest. O’Leary differentiates her own book from their initial analysis by a broader ap- plication of guerrilla government.

O’Leary taps into several existing streams in public administration research and then reintegrates them into a whole. For example, she uses her guerrilla concept to reframe Kaufman’s The Forest Ranger (1960) as describing an effort to quell guerrilla activities among the rangers before they flourished beyond administrative control (pp. 12-13). She further connects her guerrilla concept to Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), Lipsky’s administrative discretion described in Street- Level Bureaucracy (1980), the politics of bureaucratic power first de- scribed by Appleby (1949) and Long (1949), and many other notable examples of political science literature (pp. 8, 13-14). The author chan- nels her analysis through the three perspectives of bureaucratic politics, organizational management, and ethical decision making. In doing so, O’Leary successfully distills an enormous amount of social science liter- ature in her first chapter alone. Her discussion of ethics, for example, takes the reader from the pragmatic American Society for Public Ad- ministration’s Code of Ethics to discussions of ethical philosophy as ap- plied to the public sector (pp. 16-22).

O’Leary goes well beyond an exclusively descriptive approach by providing advice both for guerrillas and those who manage them. In what may be the administrative equivalent to The Anarchist Cookbook (Powell, 1970), O’Leary presents a set of “Guidelines for Guerrillas from Guerrillas” (p. 92). These helpful hints include filing lawsuits, ghostwriting letters for external interest groups, and filing official com- plaints. She follows through with a set of ethical questions that public employees should ask themselves before undertaking guerrilla activities.

The challenge for the manager is to determine whether the guerrilla is a “canary in a coal mine that needs to be listened to or a delusional, single-issue fanatic” (p. 93). For managers of guerrillas, she suggests creating an open organizational culture which includes many well-de-

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fined conduits for dissent. She finally arrives at perhaps the most inter- esting thesis in the book: “guerrillas just might be creative assets to public organizations” (p. 108). Despite the risks posed by the presence of guerrillas in an agency, O’Leary suggests they may in fact serve im- portant functions. The author relates how she protected one of her own guerrilla subordinates when her supervisor ordered his termination. Al- though her decision proved to be career suicide, she believed that her guerrilla employee was “the leading edge of a system” whose creative force should be harnessed (p. 5).

The author wrestles with the uncomfortable balancing act between guerrillas as “ethical crusaders or insubordinate renegades” (p. 90). She notes, “Guerrillas run the spectrum from anti-establishment liberals to fundamentalist conservatives, from constructive contributors to deviant destroyers” (p. xi). As the book proceeds, O’Leary displaces such over- tures to objectivity with an increasingly obvious admiration for most of the guerrillas in her research. Moreover, she often portrays guerrillas of the progressive, activist persuasion with heroic flavor. The frequency of liberal-minded guerrillas might be explained as an artifact of her em- phasis on cases involving environmental protection. But O’Leary cer- tainly doesn’t reveal any sympathies for more conservative guerrillas (e.g., Oliver North) the few times they are mentioned. The author does not explore whether or not guerrilla government is more likely under a conservative regime. After all, career bureaucrats typically believe in the active role of government and especially in the missions of their own agencies. An energetic public service squelched by political leaders with a more conservative ideology would seem to create the optimum circumstances for guerrilla activities to emerge.

The Ethics of Dissent complements other contemporary readings. In particular, O’Leary’s book dovetails well with Unmasking Administra- tive Evil by Adams and Balfour (2004). Both books describe different sides of the same coin. The concept of guerrilla government seems to be one answer to the dilemma posed by administrative evil. Unfortunately, O’Leary herself seems to have completely misunderstood the work of Adams and Balfour as “acknowledging the potential dark side to guer- rilla government” (p. 100). The Adams and Balfour book is not about the dark side of guerrilla government at all. If anything, Unmasking Administrative Evil begs for guerrillas who won’t follow blindly the pol- icy direction of political leaders. That book portrays the classic example of administrative evil as an efficient public service mindlessly facilitat- ing the Holocaust through seemingly normal bureaucratic routine. O’Leary’s examples may not be as extreme, but she does offer several

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instances in which her guerrillas potentially save lives. In one instance, an EPA employee defies agency directives and publicly releases infor- mation about the health dangers of a deadly pesticide used on Idaho potatoes (p. 60).

The real value of this book is in its stories. O’Leary authoritatively writes from her own experience working in the public sector. She draws upon case studies written by graduates of the Maxwell School and she relates various experiences based on student feedback and her own sur- vey research. Each of her vignettes provides enough descriptive detail to capture the flavor of the prevailing organizational culture and the mythology that surrounds key staffers. Long after readers put down this book, they will remember its stories.

REFERENCES

Adams, G. B., & Balfour, D. L. (2004). Unmasking administrative evil (2nd ed.). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Needleman, M. L., & Needleman, C. E. (1974). Guerrillas in the bureaucracy: The community planning experiment in the United States. New York: John Wiley.

Powell, W. (1970). The anarchist cookbook. Mattituck, NY: Amereon.