Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Political science 195
relation with the framework of public law, and how that was in turn related to
criminal law and private law. Students were initiated into the ancient tradition
of the European State and law; but about administration, its technology, its
social structures they learnt nothing, except by experience and hearsay.
In the ‘oceanic’ States, the intellectual structure of the subject was greatly
inferior: nevertheless, it contained seeds of growth, in that the public services
were continually subject to pressures from outside. Some of these democratic
pressures tended to increase corruption : but others tended to promote a search
for efficiency and economy - what we should now call costlbenefit analysis - in
the public service. The service’s prestige was low: where should guidance be
found ? Inevitably reformers looked to the management of great commercial
and industrial enterprises; and public administration was instructed to Iook
towards the findings of research and experience in profit-making organizations.
2. Research on orgunizativns
The first development of research in that field did not work out well, either
conceptually or in practice, and by 1930 it was already in process of change in
face of criticism. At least until World War n, administrative doctrine in the
oceanic States consisted only of scraps of practical wisdom drawn from the
early efforts of the business schools.
In thirty years the situation has been radically changed, in two respects.
Firstly, academic research workers have taken in hand the study of organiza-
tions of various types, and can now propound general principles with a good
deal of scientific confidence. Secondly, public administration itself has changed,
in that all Western States are now involved in the management and supervision
of enterprises of an industrial character : these enterprises are ‘politicized’, in
the sense that they are deemed to be a matter of public concern, but nevertheless
they retain their industrial character as systems of cash flows and material
flows. This means that the barriers are down between the organization of public
administration in the old regulatory sense and the organization of industrial
production for profit. In terms of work method and of social research the
sectors are now inseparable, and all the findings of the sociology of organiza-
tions, the social psychology of work situations, the various disciplines involved
in operational research, are now brought to bear on the public sector of adminis-
tration.
It is to be noted that important contributions to this field are now coming
from countries steeped in the tradition of administrative law, notably France
and Germany, and from the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugo-
slavia. The study of organizations is world-wide.
3. Public and private organizations
One point about which there can be no dispute is that the modern State is an
organization State, and that research into organizations is profoundly impor-
tant for the study of the State. Such research covers many intellectual levels,
from the pure theory of organizations as systems39 to the compilation of case-
studies of particular incidents and the critical analysis of limited sectors of