Content area
Full text
Bureaucracies, particularly government bureaucracies, are intrinsically sclerotic, preferring stability at the expense of change. This statement sums up what has been orthodoxy in our change-besotted popular culture for at least the last quarter century. Associate professor of space studies Stephen Johnson joins the attack on this orthodoxy by arguing convincingly in The Secret of Apollo that the stability provided by bureaucracies has been absolutely necessary for change in the high-stakes, high-risk world of aerospace research and development (R&D) of the 1950s through the 1970s.
Johnson examines bureaucracies based on a variety of information practices and command hierarchies collectively known as systems management (SM). These techniques originated with the Air Force soon after World War II. At the dawn of the Cold War a renegade Air Force colonel named Bernard Schriever received a presidential sanction to circumvent the Air Force R&D establishment, centered on Wright Field near Cleveland, and to set up a dedicated project organization to develop the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile. Schriever believed that the Wright Field organization, arranged along disciplinary and functional lines, was too unfocused for a project as...