Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis: Federal-Professional Relations in Modern America

Abstract

Twenty years after Louis Galambos published “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis,” the organizational strand of revisionist history has become a mainstay of scholarly interpretation. One hallmark of its maturity is that today the organizational synthesis is itself a subject undergoing revision by charter members and critics alike. High priests like Galambos have underscored the wealth of scholarship spawned by the organizational approach and have discerned broad new trends and tensions in that scholarship. Galambos recently blessed three denominations that have embellished and elaborated upon the founders' abiding faith in the forces of modernization to reshape state-society relations: technology, as mediated through large-scale corporate development; the administrative state, as it has developed over the twentieth century to embrace a new, corporatist form of liberalism; and the pervasive professionalization of society. Yet many leading historians remain outside of the organizational flock. Alan Brinkley, one of the agnostics, has criticized organizational historians for pushing “vast segments of society to the periphery of historical analysis.” Michael McGerr, an outright heretic, has questioned the whole endeavor, doubting whether there “really was an ‘organizational society’ in the early twentieth century (or even now)” and charging the historians who in-vented that society with the sin of “presentism.”