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

196 W. J. M. Mackenzie
administration. In sheer volume of publication the study of private organizations
has a long lead; quite a substantial amount of work has been done on the
lower levels of public organizations in the United States of America, France
and the United Kingdom, but administrative theorists have been reluctant to
make a frontal attack on the problem of defining the special character of
public administration, if indeed it has a special character. Organization theory,
and the direct observation of organizations at work, tend towards a pluralistic
doctrine of human organizations. It seems that a hierarchy of command never
secures complete conformity; there is deference to it, and some conformity, but
lower echelons fight for and maintain such liberty of action as they can achieve.
To the hierarchical model one has to add a model of organizations and suborganizations
as systems surviving in an environment.
Control. It is not therefore possible to be confident that one can distinguish
public from private organizations in terms of control. For instance, the mechanism
of public control over a nationalized industry is of the same kind as the
control of a holding company over operating companies; in both cases, the
control can in the last resort be exerted, but it cannot be made continuously
effective in detail. Indeed, it is notable that, in both cases, both for great public
and for great private organizations, it is now usual to decentralize by means of
‘self-acting’ controls, intended so far as possible to simulate a market situation :
and communist countries are finding it necessary to use administrative expedients
formally similar to those used by the biggest capitalist organizations.
Setting. It is more plausible to distinguish public from private organizations in
terms of ‘ecology’ or ‘setting’. A big capitalist organization lives closely with the
banks, the money market, the Stock Exchange, and may change course to conciliate
them; whereas a large public enterprise, even though it is given a great
measure of autonomy, lives in a setting of politicians, parties, civil servants,
budgetary control and national planning. But perhaps this is a difference of
degree rather than of kind. Large private enterprises (for instance, in the United
Kingdom, the manufacture of cars, ships and aircraft) are of great importance,
and need State assistance in order to survive and prosper. They establish their
own connexions with ‘Westminster’ and ‘Whitehall’ ; conversely, the performance
of public enterprises is increasingly measured by market standards.
Generality. An attempt is made40 to draw a distinction in terms of the generality
and integration of the public field as distinct from the private field. Clearly
it is expected, in the present era of planning, that public enterprises, above all,
should be integrated into the plan and operated in the general interest rather
than for limited interests. But here we seem to be in the realm of normative
theory; the amount of research carried out has been very inadequate, but it is
not at first sight clear that public enterprises do in fact perform as they are
supposed to perform.
It will be noted that here empirical research impinges on normative problems.
There has been increased agreement that in the field of organizations practice
has tended to diverge so far from norms that norms become unrealistic; they
are paper doctrine, replaced in practice by a different set of operative norms.
The communist norm of detailed directive planning, the capitalist norm of