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The organizational goal concept is important for significant types of organizational research but its utility has been downgraded in recent scholarship. This paper reviews critically key contributions to conceptualizing the organizational goal and synthesizes many of their elements into a more concrete and comprehensive conceptualization. The efforts of Etzioni, Seashore and Yuchtman, Simon, and Thompson to bypass the need for a goal concept in evaluative and other behavioral research are unconvincing in important respects. However, they are persuasive in underscoring the importance of viewing organizational goals as multiple and as empirically determined. Perrow, Gross, and others convincingly suggest a dual conceptualization, so that goals are dichotomized into those with external referents (transitive goals) and those with internal referents (reflexive goals). Deniston et al. contribute the desirability of subsetting the goals of organizations into "program goals" and of differentiating goals from both subgoals and activities. The existence and relative importance of organizational goals and an allied concept, "operative goals," may be operationally determined by current social science methods. The goal concept as presented here has implications for the evaluation of organizational effectiveness, for research on organizational behavior, for organization theory, and for views of the role of organizations in society.

Unquestionably, Woodrow Wilson's scholarly essay, "The Study of Administration," (1887) stands as an historic landmark in American administrative thought. As Leonard D. White once wrote, "Wilson's essay introduced this country to the idea of administration." Based upon the recent publication of the Woodrow Wilson papers by Princeton University Press, the present paper attempts to examine the origin and enduring contribution of Wilson's administrative thought. The central thesis of the paper is that Wilson's administrative theories grew out of the salient ideas of late nineteenth century America, particularly, Social Darwinism and the pressing demands for political reform. In many respects, however, Wilson's essay created more issues than it resolved since it failed to delineate clearly the substance and boundaries of the field of administration.

In the modern House of Representatives party competition for seats is not strongly correlated with or predictive of party voting behavior. The most plausible explanation for this weak relationship is that less than 20 per cent of House seats are competitive from one census to the next. In this study the Hasbrouck-Jones Fluidity Index was applied to House elections in the 1890—1900 period, and almost 50 per cent of House seats in this era were found to have been competitive at that time.From the 1892—1900 period the 55th and 56th U.S. Houses were selected for analysis. A varimax factor analysis was run on the party votes in these Congresses, and the resultant factor scores formed a unidimensional measure of the number of times a member voted with a party majority. A multiple regression analysis was run, with these party support scores used as the dependent variable and with party competition and occupational composition of the district used as the independent variables. The results showed that in both houses party competition was strongly correlated with and predictive of party support scores. The same analysis on the 89th House yielded much weaker correlations and showed little predictive ability.