Where Have You Gone, Harold Seidman? 481 Public Administration Review, Vol. 77, Iss. 4, pp. 481–482. © 2017 by The American Society for Public Administration. DOI: 10.1111/puar.12803. I find myself coming back frequently to lyrics from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you, What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson “Joltin’ Joe” has left and gone away My call is not for Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, however, but for Harold Seidman. Some readers will remember Harold; most of you will not. Seidman died in 2002. He completed his PhD at Yale University, where he was in the political science department with Dwight Waldo. He is best known for his classic Politics, Position and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organization. I remember Harold Seidman fondly. His classic book—and many of his other contributions about government corporations and bureaucratic behavior— helped to make good scholarly and practical sense of that which puzzled us during the more than 50 years Seidman contributed to the public administration literature. I recall Seidman nostalgically because few scholars these days are investigating the types of organizational issues that occupied Seidman. Let me offer an illustration of an understudied issue that would probably be getting Harold Seidman’s attention if he were still with us. The topic involves the proliferation of “chiefs” in government organizations. What do I mean by the proliferation of chiefs? Jobs with chief in the title have been proliferating for at least the last two decades (Rosenthal 2001), seemingly at an accelerating pace. Among the chiefs now found in many federal organizations are chief financial officer (CFO), chief information officer (CIO), chief human capital officer (CHCO), chief performance officer (CPO), and chief information security officer (CISO). The phenomenon is especially visible in the U.S. federal government, but it does not monopolize the “chief” designation, which has spread to other levels of U.S. government, nonprofits, and other countries (Greenblatt 2016; Schumpeter 2010). When I read about the “chief” phenomenon, some questions come immediately to mind: Why the growth? Are governments just following the latest fads in the private sector? Is proliferation a product of political gridlock and the demise of reorganization authorities? How is the chief phenomenon connected to thickening government (Light 1995)? What difference does a “chief” make? This last question strikes me as especially important. A rationale for chief positions often involves performance, but I see little evidence addressing this claim. 1 The decline of attention to the issues that occupied Seidman is put into historical perspective by Ni, Sugimoto, and Robbin (2017) in “Examining the Evolution of the Field of Public Administration through a Bibliometric Analysis of Public Administration Review,” which appears in this issue of PAR. In an analysis of PAR article titles from 1940 to 2013, the authors identify only 13 words, among them bureaucracy and budget, that appear consistently during PAR’s first 75 years (Ni, Sugimoto, and Robbin 2017, Appendix C). Organization and reorganization appear at or near the top of the list only for the 1940–1964 period. The shifting word choices over time are likely a product of a combination of forces, including changing field, fashion, and fad. I draw a couple of lessons from the shifts. One is that public administration is evolving—appropriately and organically—from changes in the contexts in which it is set. The second lesson is less transparent and more the product of my personal dispositions. It is that James L. Perry Indiana University, Bloomington Editorial Where Have You Gone, Harold Seidman?