Organization and Management

Selected Papers

Chester I. Barnard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415279895
• eBook ISBN: 9781134465811
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industrial Management
• Index: Business

Barnard was prompted by Vilfredo Pareto's seminal four volume work Mind and Society to apply his theories of sociology to management studies. Barnard's study of interaction between people in economic settings was contentious in that he concluded that human behaviour within these settings is largely non-economic and instead approaches ritualistic symbolism.

VI

ON PLANNING FOR WORLD GOVERNMENT¹

If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.—ABRAHAM LINCOLN

It is the greatest of mistakes to believe that it has required the high-grade intelligence of mankind to construct an elaborate social organization. A particular instance of this error is the prevalent assumption that any social routine whose purposes are not obvious to our analysis is thereby to be condemned as foolish.—ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

And if the world is to come before you for judgment, are you unfit to decide the most trivial cases?—SAINT PAUL

MY purpose is to discuss limitations of social and political planning. They should be emphasized, I think, to avoid erroneous effort, false hopes, and disillusionment in connection with the plans for world government now being developed and exploited. First, I should like to present considerations which lead me to believe this purpose worthy of the attention of the readers. Then I shall offer some general observations on various kinds of planning and their effects. Third, I shall present a few historical illustrations of failures of planning. Next, and mainly, I shall discuss structural aspects of organization in order to suggest kinds of organization problems and the kinds of means and obstacles that need to be taken into account in political and social planning. Finally, following a short summary, I shall give brief suggestions on the theory of planning.

I

To maintain world peace, it is now generally supposed, calls for some system of improved world government or organization. Such a system, like governments in the past, could come about through blind evolution. However, many men have aspired to make sure of good social organization by design. They have recently been impressed, perhaps, with the extent and success of planning on the small scale, or have been intrigued with planning on the large scale as attributed to the totalitarian governments, or they have accepted socialist or communist doctrines in which the feasibility of successful large-scale planning is a basic assumption; and so they have hoped that more perfect systems of government could be attained by deliberate planning.

No doubt, a great number of schemes for world organization could be constructed. They might differ widely in the degree of reliance upon formal organization; in emphasis upon political, economic, social, or religious forces and conditions; in extent of dependence upon authoritarian methods as contrasted with those of free agreement; in the scope of the matters reserved for centralized control; in the degree to which they are provisional “realistic” schemes or ultimate ideal plans; and in other respects. But they would all have this in common: they would appear to be quite simple, compared with the immense intricacies of world-wide social life.

The complex relationships involved in plans for large-scale organization and the wide knowledge required to discuss them cogently make it probable that the leaders in such planning will be chiefly intellectuals, students, and observers who have not had much responsible experience in guiding organizations. Accordingly, we might expect that much of the presentation and discussion of such plans will be in terms of broad generalizations, high abstractions, and dogmatic assumptions. These tendencies will be strengthened by the emotional appeal of the high ideals of the world order and world peace. Indeed, the very complexities will lead to such dangerous characteristics if discussion and writing are to be kept within workable limits. We may also expect the political advocates and often the opponents of any such plans to give emphasis to what is known or thought to be known, to grant little attention to factors concerning which there is recognized ignorance, and scarcely even to admit the probability of crucial areas of ignorance not recognized.

Surely there is in all this the possibility that our planning for world organization may lead or add to bitterness and strife, division, and disillusionment. Moreover, there is danger that failure of plans or refusal to accept particular plans will be ascribed to “politics,” selfishness, and hypocrisy. Of these, no doubt, there will always be a plenitude; but if there is failure or apparent obstinacy, it may better be first assumed that there are more fundamental causes which name-calling tends to obscure, and of which, perhaps, the planners were unaware.

II

To attain better perspective regarding wide-scale, long-run planning, it may be helpful to record a few general remarks about planning itself. At this place I shall present them in terms of an everyday approach. At the conclusion of this paper I shall offer further remarks in terms of a more thorough analysis.

Probably the chief analogy in the minds of most political planners is the planning of concrete structures made by engineers or architects and the designing of particular mechanical devices. Undoubtedly this type of planning is the simplest and the most successful of all. Yet, even in such planning errors are numerous, though seldom of public knowledge or interest. Two kinds of errors may be noted: that in which failure is unequivocal, and that which eventuates into structures or devices quite different from, but as or more useful than, those contemplated. The latter are seldom acknowledged as failures and are often counted successes even by those with intimate knowledge of facts. In witness of this, the following account may be of interest. In the early nineteen-twenties, I had the privilege of aiding the late J.J.Carty, then vice-president and chief engineer of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, prepare an address for the inaugural meeting of the New York Regional Plan, under the auspices of the Russell Sage Foundation. General Carty said to me in the course of that work: “You know, we often make plans which eventuate into achievements quite different from, and much better than, those we contemplated. Then we are apt to credit ourselves in all seriousness and sincerity with accomplishments that are really fortuitous. We put in our thumbs and pull out the plums and cry: ‘What great engineers are we!’”

I shall not stop to show how evolutionary in fact is the process of designing concrete physical structures and devices. But I would point out that the real planning associated with such structures is much broader and more comprehensive than the bare designing of the physical elements, which are indispensable but subsidiary. For example, very few buildings are designed to be mere physical structures. Of course, they are intended to be useful in particular ways, to be of value to certain kinds of clients, to have uses of certain minimum values, and to involve outlays of certain maximums. Judged by even this curtailed list of limiting considerations of the planned project, failures are numerous. The completed building, if successfully designed as a structure, may be but a part of an unsuccessfully planned undertaking. It has perhaps cost more than intended, or its uses are worth less than expected, or the kind of uses is diff erent than contemplated. To few are these errors evident or known. The permanent structure stands for all to see—the apparent evidence of successful planning, though in fact it frequently was a failure from the decisive position of the planner.

However, I think it may be granted without much reservation that planning with respect to specific structures and devices may on the whole be accepted as in general successful and indispensable to intelligent behavior in even simple affairs or to complex technological systems. This is nearly equivalent to saying that planning, with respect to a single strategic factor,² in a total situation assumed to be fixed in all, or nearly all, other respects, is in general successful and often indispensable. It involves, however, the “all other things being equal” fallacy common to all planning. Whether this logically fallacious assumption is practically valid can usually be learned only from trial and error.³

When we turn from planning with respect to strategic factors to the planning of new complex systems comprised of numerous independent and dependent variables, there seems to me to be no evidence it has ever been more than fortuitously successful on a large scale. Social and political planning is necessarily of this kind. The best simple illustration of this known to me is furnished by an example of Pareto, a leading mathematical economist of the past century. Taking a supposititious community of 100 individuals, having for exchange only 700 products, even under absurdly oversimplified assumptions he calculated that 70,699 simultaneous equations were required to determine the prices equalizing demand and supply. He noted that for a society of 40,000,000 people and several thousand products, the number of equations would be fabulous. This led him to remark that the simplest practicable solution was the market, not the mathematician.⁴ This example seems most apt to the present subject, since I would regard an economic system, or rather the economic aspects of a social system, as much simpler than a political or social system as a whole.

III

The practical significance of the preceding general observations is at least suggested by the study of history.

In trying to build social and political systems in the past, men seldom knew what they were doing, though some thought they did; and so frequently what came about was not what they intended. In support of this I have sometimes recalled the conquest of Greece and Macedonia by the Roman Republic against its own wishes and policy, the British political control of India which both the East India Company and the British Government sought to avoid for many years, and the change of position in the Reformation from one directed toward reform of administrative, fiscal, and political conditions in the Church to that of a conflict of dogma. But in connection with political and social planning, the following two modern examples are especially apposite:

A.Lawrence Lowell, asked to illustrate from history the principles brought out in a symposium at the Harvard Tercentenary, said that his utmost was to take some specific method of attaining a political result and describe a particular case of its use. Taking the British Parliamentary System, he showed that it was by no means contemplated by the men who brought it about. In a fundamental respect, its lack of separation of legislative and executive powers, the reverse of the original intention expressed in the Act of Settlement of 1702, was actually put into effect. Indeed, this occurred almost immediately after ter the adoption of the Act which forbade any one holding an office of place or profit under the crown from having a seat in the House of Commons. Yet three distinguished writers—Montesquieu, the Swiss DeLolme, and, most notably, Sir William Blackstone—all wrote of English Government as if literally in accordance with a statute which was not of effect in the respect stated above, and of a philosophy of government definitely contradicted by concrete practice known to them. Moreover, the books of these men in their day were accepted by the British as correctly presenting the theory and practice of their Government.⁵ It appears to be the wish and a common practice of men, if the circumstances permit of it, to assert that they are doing what, and only what, they say they are doing, or to say and believe that they have done what they intended to do.

Again: The framers of the American Constitution provided that the president and the vice-president should be chosen by an electoral college, not by popular election. Though the Constitution remained unchanged, the intention was early frus trated by the pledging of candidates for the electoral college to nominees for these offices. This was inherent in the national party system of politics. Not only was the national party system not provided for in the Constitution—it still is not—but it was deemed undesirable. This most important part of the “unwritten” constitution of American government developed contrary to plan. It may be argued that the party system is something external and auxiliary to the government proper, yet in fact it affected almost every aspect of government so that little of it works as originally intended or imagined. For example: the organization of legislative work is quite different from what it could be under a nonparty system. So also are the obligations, degrees of independence, and the loyalties of the principal executive officers. The criterion for the selection of the personnel of courts and of administrative and semijudicial boards is bipartisan rather than nonpartisan, as it would be under a nonparty system. It seems to me probable, also, that the organization of parties of country-wide scope made the relationships of the states to the federal government very different from what they otherwise would have been.

Facts and cases of the same import as these few could be multiplied indefinitely. At first consideration they seem to justify Brooks Adams’s statement: “Another conviction forced upon my mind, by the examination of long periods of history, was the exceedingly small part played by conscious thought in moulding the fate of men.”⁶ The error of Adams’s conclusion, I think, lies in underestimating the effect of deliberate thought because it has not been a single determinant nor a dominant factor of the course of events. This arises, I judge, from the belief that effective thinking for social control is analogous to planning of a mere physical structure. At root it comes from failure to note the difference of function of thought when directed to human action in a concrete changing environment, strategic thinking, and thought directed to abstract propositions in a fixed isolated system. Lowell understood this, and so did not deny the role of “conscious thought in moulding the fate of men” nor, on the other hand, overestimate its possibilities as implicitly as most planners seem to me to do. Hence, he could write:

The object of this paper is…merely to point out that men, like animals, may attain a self-consistent and harmonious system of conducting their affairs by a process of striving for immediate intentioned objects, if the conditions happen to be such as to lead to a system of that kind; and this although the actors themselves do not contemplate it, or even if the result is quite contrary to their preconceived ideas.⁷ [Italics mine]

IV

These examples from history can properly be only suggestive of the need of circumspection on the part of planners and of caution on the part of their followers. It could be argued, moreover, that modern science and technologies have made a new world, requiring and permitting a new kind of management.⁸ More to the point, then, and also more constructive as presenting materials for the real solution of real problems, would be the study of existing organizations and of successful and unsuccessful experience with them. However, with respect to our capacity for large-scale social planning, it is unfortunate but significant that little is as yet known with assurance concerning organizations and their operation. But that little is clearly pertinent to the present subject. I propose to present that which appeals to me as most important under the following headings: (I) Informal Organization; (II) Lateral and Scalar Organization; and (III) Two Problems of Structural Balance in Scalar Organization. A few introductory remarks will make the meaning of these headings more intelligible.

The exposition which follows will be fragmentary and cannot be comprehensive. It is intended only to be suggestive and illustrative of the kind of problems to be faced by organization planners. Accordingly, I shall limit it to some major matters of organization structure, because that is the least difficult aspect of organization. Thus, I shall mention only incidentally, if at all, the more delicate and intricate problems of the dynamics of organization—such as their modes of operation; the relations of individuals to them; the functions of leadership; the effect of organization upon individuals; incentives; the fictions inherently necessary; the nature and apparatus of authority; the judicial functions; the numerous and complex kinds of balances required. I intend, as it were, to limit myself to certain problems of the anatomy of organization and to disregard its physiology.

From the standpoint of structure all organizations reveal three kinds of material. To the first and most fundamental, I have given the name “informal organization.” It pervades a society or any subdivision of it. It provides the bases for, and is itself structured by, formal organizations. These are of two kinds. I shall focus what I have to say about the two kinds of formal organization on the contrasts between them; for the choice between them is the primary problem of world formal organization.

Finally, assuming that rightly or wrongly an effective decision were made to organize the world hierarchically, as many advocate, I shall discuss merely two structural problems of the scalar type of organization which seem to me to be of first importance to the planners of such an organization.

I.
INFORMAL ORGANIZATION

The words “society,” “community,” and “informal organization,” for very general purposes are nearly synonymous. “Society” perhaps puts the emphasis upon a “group of people” who somehow have a distinguishable existence as a group living in some sense in common. “Commun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I. Some Principles and Basic Considerations in Personnel Relations
• II. Dilemmas of Leadership in the Democratic Process
• III. Riot of the Unemployed at Trenton, N.J., 1935
• IV. The Nature of Leadership
• V. Concepts of Organization
• VI. On Planning for World Government
• VII. A Review of Barbara Wootton’s Freedom under Planning
• VIII. Education for Executives
• IX. Functions and Pathology of Status Systems in Formal Organizations