This classic study brings to bear the findings and principles of political science, sociology, psychology, and economics on various proposals for the solution of ills traditionally associated with governmental administration.
This classic study brings to bear the findings and principles of political science, sociology, psychology, and economics on various proposals for the solution of ills traditionally associated with governmental administration.
Without Sympathy or Enthusiasm: The Problem of Administrative Compassion
142
Without Sympathy or Enthusiasm: The Problem of Administrative Compassion
142eBook
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Overview
This classic study brings to bear the findings and principles of political science, sociology, psychology, and economics on various proposals for the solution of ills traditionally associated with governmental administration.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817389871 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 07/25/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 142 |
| Lexile: | 1410L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 276 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Without Sympathy or Enthusiasm
The Problem of Administrative Compassion
By Victor A. Thompson
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1975 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8987-1
CHAPTER 1
The Problem Defined
Mary Brown didn't mind that her husband, Laurence, an Air Force sergeant, was being sent to Vietnam. Only she wanted to be with him. To that end, the Air Force nurse, a lieutenant, extended her service for 15 months with, she claims, a promise they would serve at the same base. On Friday the Danvers (Mass.) couple said he got orders for Phan Rang. She's assigned to Ton Son Nhut, 160 miles away. "I feel I was deliberately deceived to make me re-enlist," she said.
Aside from its "human interest" aspect, this story raises a fundamental question about organizations: Can an institution make personal promises? Stories such as this abound. They make good newspaper copy. Every reader sympathizes with the couple; the story reinforces his low evaluation of bureaucracy, possibly paralleling an experience of his own.
This kind of story stimulated the most widely distributed and deeply held sociological theory of bureaucracy, the notion that bureaucrats invest the means of administration with more value than they do the ends — the "inversion of means and ends," or "the displacement of goals." In fact, a leading book on organization comes close to stating that this proposition is the sociological theory of bureaucracy. Administration has been defined as the triumph of technique over purpose.
Although the proposition antedates Robert Merton's famous essay on "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality," published in 1940, he, too, uses such a story to launch his discussion of the inversion of means and ends. He quotes a story from the Chicago Tribune concerning Bernt Balchen, Admiral Byrd's pilot in the flight over the South Pole.
According to a ruling of the department of labor, Bernt Balchen ... cannot receive his citizenship papers. Balchen, a native of Norway, declared his intention in 1927. It is held that he has failed to meet the condition of five years' continuous residence in the United States. The Byrd antartic voyage took him out of the country, although he was on a ship carrying the American flag, was an invaluable member of an American expedition, and in a region to which there is an American claim because of the exploration and occupation of it by Americans, this region being Little America.
The bureau of naturalization explains that it cannot proceed on the assumption that Little America is American soil. That would be trespass on international questions where it has no sanction. So far as the bureau is concerned, Balchen was out of the country and technically has not complied with the law of naturalization.
In this case, the special circumstances of Bernt Balchen were not recognized. He was treated universalistically as one instance of a special problem category, not as a unique individual. If I had been making these decisions, I am sure that I would have given Mr. Balchen his citizenship and sent the nurse to live with her husband. I suspect that I would have reacted to the unique and personal aspects of these cases. But can modern organizations respond in that way?
A few years ago I read a short item in a Gary, Indiana, newspaper that captured the essence of this problem. A state trooper had stopped a car that was driving down a country road at night without lights and weaving slowly back and forth across the road. The driver had no license. A woman was in the passenger side of the front seat. A man and a woman occupied the back seat. They were taken in and a ticket was issued and bond posted. Very simple. There was more information, however, that was irrelevant to the administrative problem and its disposition. A police reporter wrote up the whole case, including the additional, but administratively irrelevant, information. It seems the man driving the car had been blind from birth and had never experienced the feeling of driving a car. His wife and some friends decided to take him out on a quiet moonlit night on a quiet stretch of road and let him drive for a few minutes. The lights were not on because he did not need them. Of course, he had no driver's license. The car was weaving for obvious reasons. But all of these facts were irrelevant to the problem category that he represented to the police. Once this category had been established, the associated routines rolled out of the mill as inevitably as time. Could it have been different? Could the local organization have acted compassionately? That is the question I have set out to answer in this little book.
Stories like the above are commonplace. They make good newspaper copy. Most people can identify with the client in such cases because most people have acquired certain emotional habits and needs by being brought up in the small group security of the nuclear family. They want to be treated as special cases. They want someone to "really care." They do not want to be just problem categories. They want compassion.
Many of the frustrations of individuals when dealing with the large organization arise from the scope of the particular problem or transaction they attempt to negotiate. The typical problem or transaction of an organization is too large for effective handling by an individual, given the current technology (e.g., that involved in making an automobile). Otherwise, it would be very difficult to explain the existence of organizations. Furthermore, given this broad scope, the range of persons interested in the outcome of the transaction is normally much broader than the individual client, and these broader interests usually have some kind of organizational representation, governmental or private. The effects of this situation on the gratifications or frustrations of the individual client, and on the individual organization employee, have been clearly stated elsewhere:
Administrative action in the modern world is impersonal and institutional. It is not the product of one person's mind or heart. It reflects the concerns of all legitimate interests in the appropriate administrative constituency. Elaborate horizontal clearances and coordinating procedures assure this broad scanning of proposals before action. Furthermore, administrative action is expected to be (and usually is) objective, impersonal, unsentimental, occasioned by universalistic criteria rather than particularistic personal appeals or sympathies. To protect against charges of subjectivity or personal favoritism, considerable documentation is collected before any action is taken. All of this preparation takes time and frequently leads to charges of bureaucratic red tape.
This impersonal, objective, institutional approach to action, while demanded by the norms of an industrial society, is somewhat at war with basic sociopsychological needs of individuals, most of whom have been socialized in primary groups where personal loyalty and action are stressed. Clienteles press for particularistic treatment, and many are tempted to use primary relations with officials to secure it. Reciprocally, officials may be tempted to appropriate authority to their personal use so that such particularistic requests can be granted (or denied). The desire for money side-payments need not be behind this conversion of institutional power to personal use. In fact, in the modern age it is probably more likely to be the understandable human need to be rewarded with gratitude or admiration.
Consequently, administrative assurances are sometimes given which cannot subsequently be redeemed. They cannot be passed through the impersonal, objective, institutionalized decision-making process of the bureaucracy. Generally speaking, if an individual has the personal power to grant or withhold favors, he has managed to appropriate administrative power to his personal use. One of the hardest lessons modern industrialized man has had to learn is neither to demand nor to promise special favors.
Often, however, the problem presented or the transaction attempted by the individual client is too small for the organization and it is left to an individual functionary to give an appropriate explanation of an event, to write an appropriate letter, to carry out a simple restitutive routine (such as exchanging a returned item for another from stock), or to initiate an appropriate and simple automatic routine of the organization (such as giving credit for a returned item). Some of the most frustrating client experiences develop out of such small-scope problem situations. The employee may misunderstand the nature of the problem, either because of poor communication on the part of the client or, on the part of the functionary, a low capacity for understanding (being "not very bright"), an inadequate rehearsal of organization routines because of newness in the role, or unfortunate attitudinal postures of indifference or even hostility (such as that arising from racial prejudice or a client gesture interpreted as threatening).
A colleague of mine experienced a typical case of this kind. Upon moving into a new house, he had gotten an estimate from a local firm for the cost of attaching some electrical appliances. When the bill came, it was more than the estimate. He refused to pay it. Several letters and telephone calls (and months) later, he received a check for the difference between the estimate and the bill — which he had not paid. He finally decided that the easiest way out would be simply to pay the inflated bill. His work took him to many underdeveloped countries where experiences of this kind are common. As he said, "I decided that if they wanted to do it the hard way, it was all right with me." He regarded the whole situation as comic rather than infuriating and frustrating. By virtue of his travels, he was accustomed to such situations.
Another colleague tells of recently trying to pay a motel bill somewhere in the West. The clerk asked him for his credit cards. He said he did not use them; he would pay cash. She had no instructions covering so outlandish a situation and had to call her supervisor — but not before he had given her a short lecture on the theory of money. He was an economist.
Mass industrial society poses many challenges to individuals. The resulting malaise is too complex to be easily understood, but one has to be deaf not to hear the cry for compassionate treatment, as witness the phenomenal growth of "hotlines" — telephone numbers that troubled individuals can call to get friendly advice or help on problems from lost dogs to drugs to suicide. A generation ago it was speculated that perhaps at the bottom of much industrial conflict was an alienated, lonesome, frightened, insecure working man who wanted his company to respond to him warmly and personally. He could not strike for love; so he sublimated his need into a demand, through his union, for better wages and hours.
If this depiction of the industrial worker has some merit, how many more persons must be in this fix today. Not just industrial laborers, but white collar functionaries, students, clients of large government agencies, customers of the giant private companies — all of us at times receive and hate the dehumanizing, stripping treatment dealt out by mass administration, from having our identity turned into a number (usually the Social Security number) to having our brief cases searched when we leave the library. Part of the recent program of campus activism was aimed at this dehumanization. Activists harangued the students: "They don't care about you."
Suggestions of all kinds, such as academic proposals for a "new political science" or a "new public administration," are stimulated in part by a strong need to bring compassion into our affairs. Someone has to care. Internation dealing will often turn on popular evaluation of the compassion in the arrangements. States are personified in the persons of their leaders and in this way abstract reality is rendered intimate, personal, understandable, compassionate. Media evaluation of events is largely of this kind, the important question being the motives of the actors — their kindness, honesty, altruism, sincerity, compassion. A good example is a late-1971 column about former President Richard M. Nixon ("Unpredictable Nixon") by James Reston that he ended in this way: "And this is where we are at the beginning of the new year — or so it seems here — alive, but confused and divided. And the paradox of it is that the new year is a presidential election year, and the central issue of the election may very well be between the men who are clever and the men who can be trusted." Counterculture religions are proliferating to cater to the needs of people (mostly young) seeking identity and companionship in an impersonal world. Such religions are often substitutes for the more extreme adaptations of drugs (for which, indeed, they are often cures).
Rightly or wrongly, industrial societies increasingly channel the energies of their members through the large, purposive, rationalized organizations that we have come to call bureaucracies. Not only productive or economic energies but much expressive energy is likewise so channeled, as in organized religion, organized sports, administered vacations, highly regulated parks and forests and campsites, and in many other areas of life. For many students, modernity is equated with organizations. Modern society has been called the "organizational society," modern man the "organization man."
The organization of minorities into neighborhood corporations or various kinds of action groups, like the organization of workers into unions, concerns a different problem. These are political events aimed at concentrating power with the idea of affecting policies. I am discussing the problem of the individual in the application of policies, and that problem, as I shall seek to demonstrate in the chapters that follow, remains the same regardless of the policy.
CHAPTER 2The Nature of Modern Organizations
Can modern organizations be compassionate? Can they "care"? Can organizations be depicted as good or bad, kind or cruel? From everything we know about modern organizations, the answer has to be "No!" In this essay I want to explore briefly why this has to be the answer, why the need for compassion persists, and what kinds of adaptations or solutions to this serious impasse have occurred or been suggested. If I succeed in clarifying the situation, perhaps more human ingenuity will be spent in seeking imaginative solutions and less in empty rhetoric and despairing cries of anguish.
There are two sides to the problem. On the one side is the organization and its nature, on the other, the individual person and his needs. Let me discuss the nature of the organization first. The key to both the number and nature of modern organizations is specialization, or "differentiation" as the sociologists say. Even as individuals specialize in function or occupation to survive competitively in the face of explosively increasing knowledge and technique, organizations specialize or differentiate to channel these specialized skills to meet needs of specialized customers, clients, or interested groups. Fewer and fewer needs can be met by individual efforts, and this state of affairs generates the need for more and more organizations.
These organizations are staffed, increasingly, by specialists who deal not with human beings but with categories of problems. They deal with one kind of problem affecting many people rather than with many kinds of problems affecting few people. Specialists are psychologically incapable of becoming personally and deeply involved with all these people. Furthermore, only a small amount of information about the customer, or client, or colleague is relevant to the solution of the specialized problem. The client becomes part of a problem category, not a historical person: he becomes an applicant for welfare, a speeder, a cardiac case, etc. In this transaction, he is not a person. The transaction is impersonal, and this fact actually facilitates the expert solution of his problem. Interpersonal emotions do not interfere with the instrumental application of the specialist's expertise. ("He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client," as the lawyers say.) But the client suffers the absence of compassion — he is not important just because he is he; his treatment is contingent. Payment of the fee is only one of the contingencies. His unique individuality, which is his identity, is ignored.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Without Sympathy or Enthusiasm by Victor A. Thompson. Copyright © 1975 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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