One of the cornerstones of the distinction between the “Politics” and “Administration” dichotomy noted by Woodrow Wilson 125 years ago is the tension bureaucrats face between allegiance to one's own agency that reflects hierarchy and accountability concerns (as noted by Herman Finer (“Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government,” Public Administration Review 1[Summer 1941]: 335–50) and an allegiance to one's own profession that represents the type of professionalism concerns expressed by Carl Friedrich (“Public Policy and the Nature of Administrative Responsibility,” in Carl J. Friedrich and E. S. Mason, eds., Public Policy, 1940, pp. 3–24). This tension reflects whether one views bureaucracy's main objective as being faithful stewards serving the best interests of democratic institutions (responsive competence) or, instead, independent experts seeking to utilize their professional expertise to improve policy administration (neutral competence).

Manuel P. Teodoro's Bureaucratic Ambition addresses this critical tension between democratic values and professional concerns by offering a highly valuable and insightful investigation into bureaucratic entrepreneurship and innovation in the modern administrative state. Innovation is defined for the purposes of this study as relating to the “import of policy ideas from the broader profession into an organization” (p. 60; emphasis original). This definition of bureaucratic innovation, while general in nature, is conceived throughout the book as arising from sources external to the organization—as opposed to being internally developed or emanating in a top-down fashion from elected officials.

Standard principal-agency theories of bureaucratic politics focus on responsiveness and accountability relationships with elected officials in organizational hierarchies, whereas the literature on bureaucratic professionalism focuses on the cultivation of clientele support and application of professional norms and values to further a given agency's policy mission. This book makes several significant intellectual contributions to the scientific study of public bureaucracy. First, using both solid micro-level theorizing and empirical evidence garnered from a combination of case studies and statistical analyses of data, Teodoro convincingly demonstrates that agency leaders exhibiting “diagonal/ramp” career paths (i.e., administrators who engage in interagency career advancement) are more effective at bureaucratic innovation than their counterparts who adhere to “ladder” career paths (those promoted vertically consistent with intraagency career advancement).

Following from these distinct types of career paths, the author asserts that administrators following diagonal/ramp paths are more likely to have their policy choices rooted in achievement motivation based on a standard of professional excellence, whereas those committed to hierarchical ladder career advancement within a given agency are more likely to have their policy choices shaped by power motivation centered on the capacity for impact, control, or influence. In other words, administrators' career paths are not merely random, but rather reflect a matching of their intrinsic career motivations to their career paths. This is a critically important insight. That is, being a bold innovator bearing fresh ideas means being motivated by achievement that is reflected in diagonal/ramp career paths. Conversely, being a statist-type company leader reflects power motivation that relies on organizational control since these leaders are heavily invested in the fortunes of their organization and, hence, are less willing to engage in risky entrepreneurship activities. Therefore, individuals on diagonal/ramp career paths are more willing to incur the requisite risk that comes with bureaucratic innovation because they have less invested in a given organization compared to those exhibiting ladder career paths. However, such differences involving bureaucratic policy innovation become attenuated as job status increases since the costs of risk-taking behavior rise for both types of agency leaders.

Although this book is both a carefully crafted and finely articulated study, it suffers from three conceptual limitations that restrict the generalizability of its insights to the broader study of bureaucratic organizations. First, although bureaucratic innovation is risky, the author's logic is premised on the assumption that innovation/entrepreneurship activities are inherently positive for all organizational arrangements. This logic does not hold more generally. For example, bureaucratic innovation and entrepreneurship activities can possibly undermine democratic values in some instances, while they may result in policy failure if elected officials and/or mass publics are not supportive of such changes. That is, policy innovation may produce inferior outcomes relative to status quo policy or administrative arrangements. The author is silent on this issue as he does not analyze whether bureaucratic innovation yields Pareto optimal policy outcomes—only whether or not innovation transpires.

Second, and more broadly, bureaucratic effectiveness may often require organizational stability—which runs counter to an administrative culture of innovation and entrepreneurship that is the focus of this book. Agencies that undergo rapid turnover in leaders or alterations to their policy jurisdiction or mission may be adversely affected by “outside” leaders seeking bureaucratic innovation in a time of organizational upheaval and uncertainty. In these circumstances, a steady leader promoted within the agency who seeks to emphasize control and responsiveness may be in the agency's best interests for purposes of attaining both continuity and stability.

Finally, the logic of the book includes the presumption that innovation can only emanate from mezzo-level administrators—and most notably those hired from outside the bureaucratic organization. This logic ignores the numerous instances where major bureaucratic policy initiatives have originated in a top-down manner from elected officials (e.g., Ronald Reagan's issuance of Executive Orders 12291 [1981] and 12498 [1985] that were intended to limit agency rulemaking discretion and Vice President Al Gore's spearheading of National Performance Review standards in the Clinton administration's Reinventing Government initiatives). Further, it gives short shrift to bureaucratic innovation and entrepreneurship activities that emanate internally within bureaucratic agencies (e.g., see Daniel P. Carpenter's Forging Bureaucratic Autonomy, 2001). Therefore, the author falsely restricts bureaucratic innovation as being a decentralized process in the purview of career administrators that necessarily spans different bureaucratic organizations.

Notwithstanding these limitations, Bureaucratic Ambition represents a vitally important contribution to the study of the often overlooked yet critical aspects of bureaucratic governance in a democracy that are centered on the career incentives confronting administrators. First and foremost, this study builds upon the work of bureaucratic personality types advanced by Anthony Downs in Inside Bureaucracy (1994), and further developed in interesting and theoretically novel ways by Sean Gailmard and John Patty's recent research program focused on the endogenous development of expertise within government bureaucracies from an applied microeconomics perspective. Teodoro deftly blends social psychology theories of motivation, in conjunction with theories of career advancement, to persuasively advance our scholarly understanding regarding bureaucratic innovation that emanates from agency leaders based on their career paths. This study's novel and compelling insights linking intrinsic performance motivations to career trajectories, and how they subsequently impact bureaucratic policy innovation, will serve as a touchstone for future research on both leadership and performance in government agencies for years to come.