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

Political science 197
competition in a free market, are both out of line with present reality; but not
enough is known about the behaviour of large organizations for it to be possible
to draw norms and reality together more closely. Much has been done to study
work norms at the level of the factory floor and of routine office operations: and
the sociology and social psychology of these face-to-face situations are quite
well understood. But research in the factory has been easier to organize than
research in the Director’s office; not surprisingly, since research into the rela-
tion between behaviour and norms, however objective it is, wil be taken to
imply criticism; Directors are as sensitive to criticism as Trade Union leaders,
and have greater power to suppress it.
There is here, therefore, a research frontier which is common to a number of
social sciences; political science is certainly one of these, in that research into
administration now comes close to research into the character of the State it-
self.
4. Comparative administration
Two other fields of administrative study should be mentioned briefly: biblio-
graphical material is most easily available from the Comparative Administra-
tion Group of the American Society for Public Administration, but interest in
these topics is world-wide.
One of these is the comparative study of systems of public administration.
This has been a relatively neglected field; there are a number of important books
relating to it, but in the ‘oceanic’ countries students have found the study of
parties and policy-making more attractive, and in continental Europe the study
of administrative law has till recently almost excluded the study of administra-
tive practice. Yet the subject is one of practical importance; for instance,
recent official inquiries into the reform of the civil service and the reform of local
government in England have collected for their own purposes a great deal of
material about practice in other countries. There is a growing habit of using
political scientists to conduct such comparative inquiries and to summarize
findings, and (in the United Kingdom at least) this branch of the discipline is
now far stronger than it was ten years ago. Nevertheless, the published litera-
ture is still very patchy, and here also we meet an almost universal demand for
an improved and agreed theoretical structure.
Almost all political scientists now treat the administrative system of a
country as an integral part of its political, economic and social system, and they
advise against the imitation of single institutions without careful regard to con-
text. But this is somewhat negative advice; meantime, the imitation of institu-
tions goes on in practice, and its successes and failures are not much studied.
Administrators have gradually become aware of the need of sophisticated fol-
low-up studies in other spheres of policy; but they rarely look for ‘feed-back’
about the effect of changes in administrative structure.
5. Development administration
The second field may be conveniently referred to as the field of development
administration; this is an ambiguous term, but no other is equally convenient.
This is the ‘Development Decade’; it is commonplace that the gap between