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}Policymakers and managers rely to a large extent on stories told to them for information that shapes problem formulation and decision. But what can give them confidence in such stories? In this article, one of several articles by the author in which the value of stories is examined, the social origins of validity standards for storytelling. Based on sociological theory regarding the construction of social reality, the author argues that four questions typically are asked when the validity of a story is to be tested.

Three successive terms of market-oriented presidents raise difficulties for federal bureaucrats in legitimating past administrative doctrine and practices, which were government-centered. The present article responds to Charles Levine's call for a new administrative doctrine that is more fully descriptive of the needs and routines of today's federal civil servants than a doctrine based on either a liberal or neo-conservative ideology. The author introduces the concept of doctrine into public administration discourse in order to clarify the differences in ideology, doctrine, and practices between an era of top-down liberal progressivism and the era of bottom-up neo-conservative progressivism that dawned with the first Reagan administration. The purpose is to take a first step in describing emerging administrative realities that both traditional bureaucrats and free-marketeers must recognize.

Personnel management is vitally important to the maintenance and preservation of the administrative state and its democratic institutions. This reaction critically examines the personnel recommendations made by Floyd W. Reeves and Paul T. David in their study Personnel Administration in the Federal Service. It questions the degree to which there is a coherent set of political and constitutional expectations marking the progress of personnel policy that might enable us to forecast the future, both theoretically and practically. The authors highlight how and why the field should pay greater attention to the political ends that our personnel theories serve.