Power and Politics in Organization

study drag- proscribed and Politics in Organizations cosmos and reclusive Sector Comparisons Joseph LaPalombara Wolfers Professor of Political Science and commission School of Management Yale University A chapter for the Process of Organizational Learning slit of the Handbook of Organizational Learning, ed. Meinolf Dierkes, A. Berthoin Antal, J. Child & I. Nonaka. Oxford Oxford University Press, forthcoming. DRAFT Please do non cite with bring unwrap authors permission. force and Politics in Organizations Public and Private Sector ComparisonsJoseph LaPalombara Yale University Political Organizations and Their Mi finesseu Organizational tuition derives or so of its k straightwayledge from research on organizations in the tete-a-tete empyrean, fractureicularly from the manoeuvre away of the blotto. Its rich interdisciplinary timbre is reflected in the range of social sciences that nominate contri anded to the ranges robust development. The contri saveion from polity- devising science, however, has been minimal ( campaigns argon suggested in the chapter on semi g overnmental science by LaPalombara in this volume).The mutual trouble of political scientists to profits untold than than than organizationatic anxiety to organisational acquire and of organisational education specialists to ex turn tail their inquiries into the earthly caution/political ambit is fatal in at to the lowest degree three senses. First, a general possibleness of organisational discipline is un identically to emerge unless and until what is claimed to be kn let right al around this phenomenon is shown to be the case (or non) in the favorite/political sphere as well.Second, sufficient evidence in political science til now if non ga at that set with organizational agreeing as the inter interpolate vestigializeshows that organizations in the earthly concern/political sector do take issue in remark open ways from those in the clandesti ne sphere. And third, catchations of major billet and its elaborate argon so omnipresent in unrestricted/political-sector organizations, then they argon so cardinal to an netherstanding of these bodies, that wizard delight ins wherefore practically(prenominal) meager perplexity has been gainful to this innovation in the literature on organizational theory and organizational tuition.The present chapter is intended to show that the integration of political science into the field of organizational learning give be purifyd and that knowledge roughly organizational learning itself leave behind be racyened if increased attention is foc utilise on cardinal general questions What characteristics of organizations in the overt/political sector distinguish them from organizations in the surreptitious sector? And what atomic number 18 some of the implications of these losss for the general field of organizational learning?The Normative Dimension The answer to th e offshoot question must(prenominal) be that one and perhaps the most large distinguishing characteristic of public/political-sector bodies is that they argon normative at their core. For organizations in the private sector, utility and efficiency atomic number 18 univers anyy current as unproblematic set. Theories around them argon natur wholey based on the assumption that these bodies be nonionised and be run through according to rational principles that reflect these values and non otherwise statuss.This assumption, however, clay so central to judicial writing virtually circumspection that, as shown below, it in reality serves to impede almost any serious attention to source and politics in private-sector, for-profit entities. To be sure, any portrayal of private-sector, for-profit entities as monolithic organizes exclusively and rationally oriented to the market and the question equal to(p) target line is much too stark and oersimplified.Even when this f law is recognized or conceded, however, organizations in the public/political sector atomic number 18 kinda a polar, so the logic and reason that whitethorn apply to a private-sector body nookie non intimately be extrapolated to them. These differences atomic number 18 to a fault reflected in the ways in which public-sector organizations consort to the learning process. The situation that they typically scat precise heavy and classifiable normative baggage is completely one of umteen dimensions a broad which differences whitethorn be assessed.Normative con facial expressionrations be endemic to public/political-sector organizations, first because they ar in a flash or indirectly refer in what Easton (1953) once called the authoritative storage allocation of values(p. 129). This phrase is a pathetichand way of describing a g oernances vast organizational apparatus that engages in a coarse range of activities over people. These activities typically include up to nowts over which hitherto the meekest of persons touched allowing argue and fight with separately other, some epochs violently. These contrasts, or differences in p propagations (i. e. hat politics should do or non do), apply non bonny to the ends of government but in like manner to the symbolizes chosen to accept these ends to fruition. In Lasswells (1936) brutally unvarnished observation, politics is around Who Gets What, When, How. Where organizations argon constrained or hemmed in by normative considerations, appeals to logic and rationality do non travel furthest or r severally many a(prenominal) a(prenominal) receptive ears. Even when political issues face to be gettled and consensus is reached, say, on the desirability of a given insurance, normatively drive questions will arise over the mode or method of policy proceeding.Because these policies rent things that happen (or do not happen) to human beings, considerations of expediency and efficiency will frequently take a backseat to normative ideas about goal achievement. In Etheridges (1981) intelligence operations, much(prenominal) normative outlets as well elevation the issue of what should government learn and what should government not learn (p. 86). To put it bluntly, learning things about goal-setting or policy death penalty that whitethorn be rational and cost-effective but that be palpably unfeasible politically is not wholly a counteract of resources but as well as a one-way ticket to political bankruptcy.This and other aspects of public/political-sector organizations to be handleed below mark for a good do it of messinessin organizational boundaries in the peculiar(prenominal)ation of organizational missions and potency in the functional, territorial, and graded division of labor that relates to political and policy exploit and so on. This messiness cautions against a too-easy extrapolation to the public sphere of agency theory or concepts much(pre nominal)(prenominal) as of import doer relationships. These theoretical frame wrenchs whitethorn work quite well for the private sector, where one dislodges much cle atomic number 18r statements of urpose or of kernel and ends and where the boundaries demarcating organizations, their authority, and their responsibility atomic number 18 much much than unambiguously define than in the public political sphere. To cite the most obvious specimen (see Mayntz and Scharpf 1975, for sheath), in the public sphere it is not easy to separate, say, the legislature (as principal) and the bureaucracy (as agent) for the simple reason that in many fate the bureaucrats not notwithstanding administer policies but to a fault de facto counter residuum policies.In fact, the framework of public policy-making and its administration is typically a seamless adulteration of official and unofficial bodies interacting together in ways that fudge it next to impossible to distinguish principals f rom agents. This aspect is in part what I mean by messiness. Other Dimensions of Differentiation. It will help clear up the above explanation if one considers some of the redundant dimensions that differentiate organizations in the public/political sphere from those in the private sector. The distinctions inducen argon not a matter of black or white but or else one of degree.In every instance, however, differentiation is at least a caution against sentiment that differences between the private and public/political spheres atomic number 18 superfluous, mis racetracking, irrelevant, or nonexistent. The dimensions are the organizations (a) points or goals, (b) accountability, (c) autonomy, (d) orientation to work on, and (e) purlieu. Purposes and Goals Political organizations are typically multipurpose. The public policies they are expected to draw in or administer will a good deal be quite vague, diffuse, contradictory, and even in betrothal with each other (Levin and Sa nger 1994 648).What governments do is so vast and touches on so many different aspects of organized society that it would be astonishing if these policies did not pay such(prenominal)(prenominal) characteristics. Even where single agencies of government are concerned, their purposes, goals, specific marching sound outsto say nothing of their procedures and actual portwill seldom be coherent or logically consistent. Not all are the mandates of government normally quite vague and diffuse (Leeuw, Rist, and Sonnichsen 1994 195 Palumbo 1975 326), they whitethorn not be known to many of the people who contract up the organizations designated to carry them through.It is not unusual for such organizations to have no goals at all (Abrahamsson 1977), or to have goals that appear to be quite irrational (Panebianco 1988 20419 26274). For this reason rational-actor postures, in which it is assumed that preferences are exogenous to the organizations themselves, rightly draw criticism when applied to public/political organizations (Pfeffer 1997). Accountability In the private sector, a timeworn cliche is that those who manage publicly held upstandings are accountable to their shareholders.As Berle and Means (1933) farseeing ago established, this claim is largely a myth. If the prove decades have transplantd this situation at all, it is tho in the influence now exercised over the unshakable by some of the rather large institutional investors as well as by some tenor analysts. Occasionally, even the mass media whitethorn influence what a corporation does. The in corporal conjunctions relatively recent references to circumspections accountability to stakeholders does not set the publicly held loyal equivalent to public/political organizations.In resemblance with those who are in public office or who manage political and other political organizations, incarnate managers live in splendid freedom. remunerative attention to stakeholders is, like many other a spects of corporate policy, a matter of managements choice. In the public/political sphere, accountability to a simple spectrum of privates and organizations is an ines receptive fact of organizational life. People in the public/political sphere who fail or refuse to understand this fact spend very little time there.Public-sector officials, especially those who occupy governmental office, whether ap period of timeive or elective, wisely pay attention to and worry about many constituencies, all of which are much or less spry and able to apply sanctions if their admites or advice are not followed. The vaunted autonomy of the administrator branch is much more limited than one supposes (Levin and Sanger 1994 17). In all democratic systems, what the executive does is subject to oversight by legislatures and to challenge in the courts. And the latter two institutions are themselves subject to checks by comfort others.All of them are under continual scrutiny by extracurricularrs p repared to intervene. In addition, many activities that are considered legitimate, and even praiseworthy, in the private sphere would subject public office-holders to arrest, prosecution, and possible imprisonment were they to practice them (Gortner, Mahler, and Nicholson 1987 604). Consider, for example, the publics quite different reactions to lecture like broker and influence peddleror the variety of meanings ascribed to a endpoint like corruption.As noted by Child and Heavens (in this volume), the universal condition of governmental and other public-sector organizations is that they are subject to constitutions, laws, administrative regulations, judicial decisions, executive rescripts, and so on. The actions of these persons called upon to manage these organizations are constrained by external and midland de facto rules, and limitations (Rainey and Milward 1981). Comparable examples of accountability in the private sector are rare. Public/political-sector organizations are as well for more porous than private loyals are.The former are soft permeated by organized immaterial(a) interest groups determined to pull these organizations, and therefore their leaders and managers, in different policy directions. The mass media (often the instruments of government agencyful interests in civil society) also often make quite explicit and sometimes contradictory demands on them. Because these organizations are presumptively existatives of the public and are expected to behave in its interest, the press is expected to be especially vigilant on behalf of the public. loftyer up all, public-sector organizations in democracies are subject to the influence of political parties.These parties have their own preference orderings of issues and their own sense of the public policies required to deal with them. Their agendas are essentially normative seldom do they brook qualification or balk on aims of efficiency or similar considerations (Gortner et al. 1987 659). Members of governmental organizations, even when protected by civil service laws, apply political parties at immense risk. This exposure whitethorn be extreme in the unite States, but it is endemic to European and other parliamentary systems as well. AutonomyThis condition of multiple accountability, formal and on the loose(p) in personality (Cohen and Axelrod 1984), implies that political organizations are considerably less autonomous than private-sector organizations. Not only are the formal chains of command multiple and complex, but informal influences and pressures often limit, sometimes drastically, the degrees of freedom free-spoken to persons in these organizations. Although managers in the private sector are also not free to act on the nose as they dexterity prefer, their organizations (as long as they operate deep down the law) are immensely more autonomous than public/political sector organizations are.Two additional characteristics relating to autonomy are wor th noting. First, not only the goals of these organizations may not only be dictated from the outside, they may also be certified on other external bodies to achieve them. Lawmakers need the executive branch, as do the courts, to have their policies enforced. Central governments need regional or local governments. A single policy may require the coordination and collaboration of different governmental bodies, many of which are in competition or conflict with each other.And, as I noted earlier, successful goal achievement may in part also lie in the detainment of political parties and interest groups. Furthermore, governmental bodies or agencies often disagree about goals and policies. Evaluations of how well or poorly organizations are doing will be driven not by objective criteria (assuming they are available) but rather by political ideology and partisanship. Even within the same government, existing organizations will be in conflict over policies, such as in the case of minist ries and departments that spend money while others have to worry about deficits, exchange rates, inflation, and so on.Even in passing authoritarian or irresponsible political systems, such factors make organizations in the public/political sphere, if not innately different in kind from their counterparts in the private sector, consequently indisputablely different in the valence of the factors that I have been enumerating. To summarize, the missions of these public/political bodies, their membership, the resources provided for trading operations, the vantages and punishments for good or bad goal achievement, and often the contract survival of the organization itself are all matters that typically lie outside the organization itself.Hence, before taking initiatives, persons in political and governmental organizations will make careful inner and external assessments. First, they seek to discover how their superiors or immediate colleagues may feel about a policy or mode of pol icy implementation. Second, they look to how this policy or mode of implementation will sit with those indwelling or external forces that can trespass on their professional careers, their economic well-being, or the welfare of the organization itself.Third, they make assessments about what will lie in the way of their ambitions, including, perhaps, their desire to make and enforce given policies. This basic pattern suggests that these organizations are under abundant pressure to engage in learning. Attention will sure as shooting be paid to other governmental agencies, political parties, labor unions, trade associations, religious or ethnic groups, the courts, the mass media, professional associations, the corporate community, and other political and governmental jurisdictions at home or a broad(a) that may accept the organizations well-being.The list is very long of constituencies that wield tolerable power, formal or otherwise, to either dictate or veto certain policies or facilitate or nullify their successful implementation (Dean 1981 133). Failures to complete calculations of this kind and to learn about these thingsand at a reasonably higher(prenominal) level of competencewill hobble or defeat the persons or organizations involved. The corporate community has taken to engaging in somewhat similar scanning in recent years, largely because of the internationalization of the firm.When managers extend their operations abroad, they neck to appreciate the value, indeed the necessity, of scanning these raw(a) surroundingss for aspects that are not, stringently speaking, directly related to the market. As noted above this scanning has also been practiced at home, for national and local governments have come to exercise jurisdiction over matters that affect the life and grouchyly the profit or loss of private enterprise. One can generalize this tendency by noting that managers are increasingly impelled to engage in scanning whe neer gaps amaze to a ppear between a corporations policies and its actual performance.Failure to understand sight of such gaps before the media do can carry consummate(a) consequences. Orientation to Action The conditions described above do not get on much initiative by public/political-sector organizations. Action tends to be reactive, not proactive, and prophylactic, not innovative. Fresh ideas are typically viewed as threats to a ethereal symmetricalness between internal and external forces. Few people wish to risk taking steps that skill trigger chain reactions with undiscovered consequences.Conservatism, not risk-taking, becomes the modal orientation to action. Persons in the private sector, and the mass media, threnody attitude, sometimes stridently. They overlook, perhaps, that they themselves are partly responsible for the shortcomings that they criticize. Conservatism also grows out of the fact that these organizations are much more tied to tradition and more profoundly institutionaliz ed than is true in the private sector. These traits, too, make them exceedingly resistant to change.Whether legislatures (Cooper 1975), political parties (Panebianco 1988), or bureaucratic agencies (Powell and DiMaggio 1991 Scott 1995) are meant, the length of time they have been around will greatly condition what the organization is capable of doing, including its capacity to learn and, on this priming coat, to change. Max Webers (1958) reference to bureaucracys dead hand (p. 228) suggests that this type of conservatism is brought about by the very same characteristics that he associated with legal-rational authority systems.Some writers have label this phenomenon strong institutionalization (Panebianco 1988 53). Others have called it the embeddedness of values, or norms, that affect the cognitive systems of organizations (Herriott, Levinthal, and March 1985), the governmental sphere, therefore, endless examples show that efforts to reform these organizations fail more often tha n not (Destler 1981 16770). This pattern does not mean that the bureaucrats who run these organizations are beyond anyones control or that change is impossible (Wood and Waterman 1994).It does mean, however, that organizational change is extraordinarily serious to carry off, given the magnitude of inertial forces (Kaufman 1981). The cipher process and goal parapraxising in the public/political sphere are additional factors that impinge on an orientation to action. For instance, not only are public budgets controlled from outside the organizations that depend on these allocations, in the short and medium terms, they can be modified and redirected only minimally, and at the margins. This retainer is one reason why political scientists who wish to identify the most powerful groups and organizations, within government tself and within civil society, will visibility public budgetary allocations over fairly long periods of time. Goal displacement occurs when the personal interests an d expediency of organizational leaders and members come to dominate and flip-flop the purpose(s) of the organization itself. This tendency is present in the political sphere. Cooper (1975) nicely summed it up in his observation on the U. S. Congress He rig that institution quite vulnerable to the deleterious effects the pursuit of symmetry goals of its members involves. These self-regarding goals distort policy orientations and block institutional reforms by making exclusive self interest or collective partisan advantage the focus of attention and the criterion of action (p. 337). Mayhew (1974) found that the beat out explanation for the action orientation of members of Congress is the strength of each members the desire be reelected. In extreme form, and in many different types of organizations, these characteristics actually result in a transformation of the organization itself (Perrow 1972 17887).The Environment Because the environment of organizations in the public/politic al sphere is so strongly normative, the policies enacted there are not only temporary but also contest in their implementation every step of the way twain at heart and outside government. Knowing about these aspects of their environment, the managers of public/political organizations engage in a predictable type of environmental scanning and learning. For example, they learn whether to pay more attention to the legislature or to the executive office (Kaufman 1981).In order to be at least minimally effective in their environments, the organizations involved must learn the ways and means of overcoming the kinds of constraints that I have been summarizing (Levin and Sanger 1994 668, 1716). Indeed, considerations of organizational efficiency may be and often are entirely irrelevant to decision-making and choice in the political sphere. Successful entrepreneurs in this background are the ones who learn how to survive and/or help their policies survive in an environmental landscape fu ll of dangerous surprises and subject to frequent and stand change.The basic knowledge to be internalized is that this struggle will remain invariable and that space for freedom of action will not last long. It is these qualitiesambiguity, messiness, and constant struggle and conflictin the political and governmental environment that lead political scientists to give huge attention to power and its statistical distribution twain among and within organizations. That attention remains intense, notwithstanding that power is an elusive concept invariably laden with all sorts of normative claims about to what type of power is legitimate and what type is not.In political science there is fairly broad agreement (Dahl 1968) that power is the ability, through whatever means, of one to person make other do his or her bidding, even and particularly in spate in which doing so is not what the other person wishes or prefers. Power and Organizations The Role and Anatomy of Power Struggles P ower, and the struggle over it, describe the warmheartedness of the political process. Rothman and Friedman (in this volume) note that scholars writing on organizational learning rarely take conflict and conflict resolution into consideration.They add that organizational conflict, even in the hands of authors as skilled as March and Olsen (1976), is not mentioned as one of the factors that may inhibit the successful development of a learning cycle (see also March 1966). This neglect stems in part from the tendency, widespread in two the corporate community and management literature, to consider conflict itself as something highly unsuitable and potentially pathological and, therefore, as something to be defeated ( daring and horsefly 1996 6278 Pfeffer 1981 29).It cannot be without ostracize consequences, either for the theory of organizational learning or for attempts to apply it in the workplace, that such organizations are almost neer studied from the vantage point of power a nd of the competition that takes place to create and throw control of it or wrest it from others (Berthoin Antal 1998 Dierkes 1988 Hardy and horse tick 1996 631). One author (Kotter 1979 2) noted that the open seeking of power is widely considered a sign of bad management.Indeed, the authors of management literature not only skirt the behavior associated with power struggles but also condemn it as politicking, which is seen as parochial, selfish, divisive, and illegitimate (Hardy and clegg 1996 629). Kotter (1979) found, for example, that in 2,000 articles published by the Harvard Business Review over a twenty-year period, only 5 of them included the word power in their titles. This finding is astounding. It suggests that power is treated like a dirty little family secret Everyone knows its there, but no one dares come right out to discuss it.One might imagine, though incorrectly, that the situation has changed for the better in recent decades. An run of the Harvard Business Rev iew with Kotters same question in headspring shows that only 12 of more than 6,500 articles published in the period from 1975 to mid-1999 contained the word power in their titles and that 3 contained the word conflict. Leadership appeared in nine titles. In a sample of abstracts of these articles, one finds, as expected, the term power somewhat more often than in the articles titles.But the term is almost never treated as a central concept that orients the way the researcher looks at an organization or develops pro military positions about its internal life. This finicky, backup-it-in-the-closet attitude toward power is puzzling. For political scientists, the question of power in organizations is central for many reasons because power is held unequally by its members, because there is a continuous struggle to change its distribution, because these inequalities and efforts to change them inevitably lead to internal tensions.A persistent quest in political science, therefore, is to illuminate the structural aspects of public/political management that permits those involved to confront and handle power confrontations without defeating the purpose of the organization itself. Is There a Power Struggle? The puzzle of disregard to power in the fields of organizational theory and organizational learning is all the more intriguing given that leading organizational theorists, such as Argyris and Schon (1978, 1996) and Perrow (1972), have certainly addressed this matter.For example, Perrow treated organizational traits such as nepotism and particularism as means by which leaders of economic and noneconomic organizations maintain their power within them. Because these organizations are the tools of those who lead them and can be used to accumulate vast resources, a power struggle typically occurs over their control (pp. 1417). And because of goal displacement that may ac partnership such power struggles, organizations may well become things-in-themselves (pp. 1889).It is possible that leading theorists such as Argyris and Schon (1978, 1996) and Senge (1990) have themselves been excessively reticent in treating phenomena such as power struggles within the firm (Coopey 1995). It may be that corporate managers are in denial and therefore loathe to acknowledge that even they, like their counterparts in politics, are playing power games. tautens, and the literature about them, stress the beauty of teamwork and team players. Plants are organized around work teams and quality circles. Mission statements are endlessly reiterated.Human resource managers expend enormous capacity instilling the firms culture as a typical way of doing things. People who excel at the approved traits are rewarded with promotions and stock options. All these practices might be cited as evidence that corporate behavior is instrumentally rational and that the search for power, especially for its own sake, is alien to the firm. This way of thought and describing things leaves little room for attention to the power games that lie at the centralise of most organizational life.Thus, making decisions about corporate strategic plans and the budgetary allocations that go with them defining of core businesses and the shedding of what is not core effecting mergers, acquisitions, and alliances and carrying out radical corporate restructuring that may separate thousands of persons from their jobs and yet dazzlingly reward others would typically be seen by political scientists as behavior that is quite similar to the kind of power struggles that take place every twenty-four hour period in public-sector organizations.Behind the veil of corporate myth and rhetoric, managers obviously know about this aspect of their environment as well. So do writers for the financial upstartspapers, where words such as power struggle appear much more frequently than they do in the management journals. How could it be otherwise when the efforts at leveraged buyouts, struggles to i ntroduce one product line and abolish others, and differences over where and how vanquish to invest abroad take on the monumental dimensions reported in the press?It would be astonishing if the persons involved in these events were found to actually believe that considerations of personal and organizational power are not germane(predicate) to them. Nevertheless, as Hardy and Clegg (1996) noted, the hidden ways in which elderberry bush managers use power behind the scenes to further their position by regulate legitimacy, values technology and information are conveniently excluded from analysis. This narrow comment obscures the true workings of power and depoliticizes organizational life (p. 629). Attempts to correct the foul orientation to the reality of conflict and power struggles have been relatively rare.One reason is that not just the actors in the corporate community but also students of such things come to believe in the mythologies about empowered employees, concern for the stakeholders, the rationality of managerial decisions, and the pathology of power-seeking within organizations. Their belief is a pity in that, without doubt, the structure of power, explicit or implied rules about its use, and the norms that attach to overt and hiding power-seeking will deeply affect the capacity of the organization to learn (Coopey 1995).In any case, there can be no doubting the fact, however much it may continue to be obscured in the corridors of corporate power, that struggles of this kind deeply affect corporate life its external behavior and who gets what, when, and how within these institutions (Coopey 1995 2025). The Benefits of Power Struggle Power struggle, of course, is not the only aspect of organizations worth study, and the homo of politics is not just Hobbesian in nature. Cooperation is the obverse of conflict.How power is defined and whether the definition reflects left-wing or right-wing bias makes a difference in thinking about or conceptual izing the salience of power in organizations (Hardy and Clegg 1996 6235). In particular, it is essential that one avoid any definition or relatively broad conceptualization that does not take into account that, in any organization the existing rules of the game even if they are considered highly rational and legitimate, constitute in themselves the outcome of an earlier (and typically ongoing) struggle over control of an organizations resources (Hardy and Clegg 1996 629).When the ubiquitous existence of power struggle within organizations is acknowledged and put into veracious perspective, when power-seeking (even when the impulse is entirely ego-centered and not driven by organizational needs) is accepted as normal behavior, and when it is recognized that no existing organizational structure is entirely neutral, only then can one hope to clarify what kind of single-loop or double-loop learning is believably to occur.For example, Coopey (1995) argued, correctly in my view, that wh ere the distribution of power within an organization is hierarchical and asymmetrical, the type of organizational learning that proceeds in such contexts will tend to buttress the consideration quo. Their reasoning makes sense not just because, for example, the learning process tends to troupe favour senior managers but also because the kind and quality of information to which those managers have access becomes, in itself, an instrument for exercising and preserving ones kind position in the power pecking order.In the public sector, double-loop learning is even more impeded and therefore rarer than in the private sphere. The reason is that politics, in both the organizational environment and political organizations, actually infuses every aspect of what public-sector organizations are and what they do. The more important the sphere of action or the issues treated by these bodies and the more public attention they draw, the more difficult it will be to reach consensus.And once c onsensus is reached, the more improbable it will be that anyone will either want to modify it or succeed in doing sono matter what the feedback about the policies and their efficacy may turn out to be (Smith and Deering 1984 26370). Double-loop learning in the public sphere is impeded also by the formal separation of policy-making and policy implementation, as for example between legislative and administrative bodies. As noted earlier, policies are infrequently the choices of the organizations called on to implement them.In this setting, endemic to governmental systems, certain types of impediments to organizational learning tend to materialize. On the principals side, there may not be sufficient time, or technical competence, or interest to learn what is actually going on with policy implementation. The probability is low, therefore, that those who make policy and set organizational goals will ever get information that might encourage a realistic articulation of goals and a rationa l judicial admission of the means to be used in goal achievement.Organized interest groups are well aware of this gap. As a consequence, their typical strategy is to keep fighting for what they want, not only when alternative policies are up for consideration but also (sometimes particularly) after an unwanted policy has formally been adopted but must still face the vagaries of being carried out. On the agents side, whatever is learned about policy implementation that might urge a change of methods or of the policy itself may never be articulated at all, for to do so might discomfit an existing political equilibrium.Not only are these equilibria difficult to obtain in the first place, they often also involve an unspoken, symbiotic relationshipoften dubbed the Iron Triangle (e. g. Heclo 1978 102)between a specialized legislative committee, a bureaucratic agency responsible for administering the specialized policies, and the organized interests that benefit from particular policies , particular ways of implementing these policies, or both. Potential learning that would upset this balance of forces finds very rough sledding.The treatment of whistle-blowers, who sometimes go public with revelations of misdirect or distorted policies or of bad methods used in their administration, is silver-tongued evidence of this problem. One way to overcome the stasis implied by these tendencies is to encourage power struggles, not to obscure them (Lindblom 1971 2142, 647). Nothing will jump the attention of politicians and bureaucrats more than learning that organized groups with a vested interest in a given policy and large numbers of faithful voters are unhappy about a particular aspect of public policy.When these groups lie outside the Iron Triangle, they are far less inhibited by considerations of equilibria then when they are inside it. This single-issue focus is indeed one of the reasons why even small and not well-financed public advocacy groups can sometimes be ver y effective in bringing about change (Heclo 1978). The trick is to maximize transparency, to encourage more group intervention as well as prompt the media to provide more, and more responsible, investigative report than they usually offer.Today it appears that the Internet is quickly becoming an important instrument for the timely, accurate, and lucubrate exposure, now on a global scale, of conditions that require correction. The organizational learning implications of this development are potentially enormous. Increased transparency implies, if nothing else, a more democratic, capillary diffusion and sharing of information (see also Friedman, Lipshitz, and Overmeer in this volume).In an organizational context, whether in the private or the public sphere, this fact only modifies the form, quality, and spread of learning it also brings about a modification of the organizational power structure itself. Such modifications also mean that the structure and human body of conflict will change. In political science this kind of transformation, which widens and deepens competition, is considered to have healthy implications for the overall political system in which competition takes place.That is, benefits are expected to derive from the fact that the market becomes, in comparison to the more dirigiste state, more Smithian, less concentrated, and less dominated by a handful of competitors who, rhetoric aside, rarely pursue the general welfare but rather much narrower considerations. At the very least, increased transparency and the broadening of the hawkish sphere clearly require that political managers develop a set of skills that permit them to meet such challenges and function well within these constraints.New Signals from the Private Sector Something similar to this attitude about encouraging conflict may be developing in the private sector. Gortner et al. (1987) lamented that theories of the organization simply do not deal with the issue of politics, and . . . that these theories interpret power as an internal phenomenon usually related to the area of leadership (p. 76). But change may be afoot in this respect for at least two reasons.Contributors to this volume as well as writers such as Pfeffer (1981, 1997), Coopey (1995) and Hardy and Clegg (1996) may well succeed in their efforts to raise queasiness and broaden and refine theories of the organization and organizational learning to include attention to power and politics. Second, variations and abrupt changes in the environment of business are ubiquitous today and likely to intensify tomorrow. It could not be otherwise in an era of globalization of the firm, in which, more than ever before, firms venture into a wide variety of cultural settings.In addition, managers increasingly come from a wide variety of cultures and professional backgrounds where values and norms are not necessarily coulomb copies of each other. An organizations capacity to read signals about politics and power distributions, outside as well as inside the firm, and to make quick, constructive adaptations to them will represent not just a luxury but also a necessary condition for establishing a emulous advantage in the global marketplace.In limiting cases, this capacity may actually become a necessary condition for survival. Power-driven behavior within the firm not only is endemic to such organizations but remains salient irrespective of the degree to which the firm succeeds in creating an internal environment that is homogeneous, harmonious, and collaborativean environment peopled by those who share corporate values and a corporate culture and who stress collective over individual goals (Handy 1993 12349).By definition, the firm is typically an organization that places high value on the free-enterprise(a) spirit. That spirit is an aspect of human behavior everywhere and that can only be divorced from the impulse to obtain and hang on to disproportional shares of power. Improved under standing of the structure of such internal competition also illuminates the relationship between these kinds of patterns and corporate learning (Coopey 1995 1978 Hardy and Clegg 1996 6335 Kotter 1979 939).Increased attention to power (even if the term itself is not used) is covert in the corporate communitys recent encouragement of internal open expression of objections to existing policies and of open competition between units of the follow and between its members. Bringing these universal underlying conditions to the surface may be inevitable, given how much more variegated todays big companies are from those in the past, not just in technology, product lines, and force-out but above all in the great revolution of markets and cultures in which they now operate.The less homogeneous the international firm becomes, the more difficult it will be to mask the fact that corporate life, like political life, involves a good deal of organizational and individual struggle over power. Po wer Linkages and Networks Because conflict and power struggle in public-sector organizations are both internal and external, their managers are impelled to search the environment for opportunities to form alliances. sometimes such alliances are of the Iron Triangle variety, but they are certainly not limited to this form. The idea is to create structural linkages that will improve ones chances of prevailing.As public policies become more salient for the firm, the firm too, will experience increased need to expand its own networks beyond those that already exist in the marketplace. Linkages with public bodies, for example, cannot be perfectd (as once may have been the case) through the use of chit-chatants and lobbyists. Structures and capabilities consonant with the establishment of direct networks come to replace or supplement these older approaches. Multinational corporations that operate abroad, where public policies represent bare-ass risks for the firm as well as new opportu nities as well, have often moved in exactly this networking direction.One forefinger of this change is the proliferation not just of equity joint ventures (as opposed to the once-dominant fetish of the wholly owned subsidiary) but also all manner of other interfirm alliance, knowing to optimize, in overseas local markets, the use of firms and their managers who have immense experience there. In the case of U. S. companies, this type of change was also spurred by the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act a generation ago. At home, one immediate consequence of this legislation was a sharp increase in the number of in-house attorneys employed by American firms.Overseas, it led to a much more intense search for the ways and means of finding arrangements that can somehow enable overseas U. S. firms to engage in corporate behavior that was unexceptional abroad but suspect or even outright unacceptable at home. The globalization of enterprise, the growth of networks in which the firm becomes involved at home and abroad, also brings about a considerable extension of learning methods and horizons, if not a new type of organizational learning in the private sector. The international firm becomes more sensibilise to power configurations and power equilibria.The search is broadened as well as increase in order to identify aspects of the environment that might impinge on corporate success. The quality of intelligence relevant to business operations at home and abroad is improved, as is the knowledge about the location and means of access to points in the decision-making process that relate to public policies affecting the contrasted investor. A keen sense that each environment has its unique aspects as well as dimensions that are general to any environment impels the firm to sharpen its analytical instruments and thereby try to improve its learning.Efforts to create a total quality system come to include not just the production, distribution, and servicing of a firms products but also the firms ability to recognize power and power struggles for what they are and to attune its learning methods to profit from this new capability. Types of Power Distributions and Equilibria Although power equilibria are never permanent, they tend to last for a long time. The reform of governmental bodies tends to be greatly resisted because, even when reforms are relatively mild, they threaten existing equilibria (Seidman 1977).As a rule, unless quick and deep change is the goal, it is better for an organization (inside or outside the public/political sphere) to learn how to operate within an existing equilibrium than to make efforts to change it. Indeed, it is almost axiomatic that, where a radical qualifying in public policy is intended, creating a new organization is far preferable to seeking achievement of these new goals through the existing system (Levin and Sanger 1994 1723).Events of this kind, though rare, provide highly fluid opportunities to ac hieve first-mover advantages as new networks and a new equilibrium are established. In this regard, it makes a difference whether the overall configuration of the political system is monocratic or pluralist, one(a) or federal, highly centralize or characterized by broad delegation or devolution of powers. That is, power equilibria at the microlevels will be influenced in no small measure by the configuration of the larger system in which these equilibria are embedded.Pluralism Pluralist systems tend to maximize not only the number of individuals and organizations able to intervene in the policy-making and policy implementation processes but also the number of channels through which the interventions occur. Pluralism implies minute and fragmented representation of interests. The underlying assumption is that equality of opportunity, central to democratic theory, should also apply to the policy-making process. It will obviously make a difference which groups prevail in these efforts to exercise influence.It is equally important whether and what kinds of groups can bring some order to the process by aggregating a number of small groups under a single organizational umbrella. Pluralism also invites much debate. In theory, when consensus is achieved, it is expected to be very strong, precisely because of widespread opportunities that interested parties have for being consulted and auditory sense the views of others. Again in theory, this system of broad betrothal should also optimize the discovery both of ruff solutions and of innovative ideas about public policies and how best to achieve them.It is behind such policies, according to pluralist democratic theory, that one can expect the strongest collective effort to emerge. And given all of these assumptions, consensual policies are likely to be well administered and widely accepted as long as they achieve expected aims. Within this rich mosaic of interactional participation, organizational learning is presuma bly optimized, as are the efficacious making and implementation of public policies. There are also negative sides to pluralism, and they are well known to organizational theorists.A plethora of communication channels easily degenerates into information overload. This overload in turn can lead to changeless debates that wind up in stalemates or paralysis. There may be too much talk, too many options raised(a), and little inclination, or indeed ability, to reach closure. An even more notable objection to this mode of decision-making is the raised probability that it will produce only lowest-common-denominator outcomes. The need to balance competing forces and to find acceptable compromises implies that only in extreme emergencies can pluralist systems adopt radical measures.Pluralism and the forceful, timely management of issues do not sit easily side by side. Hence, it seems valid to presume that such systems will not work well within a corporate structure that, almost by definitio n, is expected to be hierarchical and unitary (Hardy and Clegg 1996 6226). Monocratic and Unitary Systems Monocratic and unitary systems are highly centralized. If they permit a broad representation of interests, it is likely to be within a framework that is much more check than that of pluralist systems.Monocratic and unitary systems are able to act even when broad consensus may be wanting or impossible to bring about. Participation from the ground up, so to speak, is not so loose or permissive as to actually tie the hands of or paralyze those at the center. Compared to pluralist systems, monocratic arrangements tend to be less democratic (not to be confused with undemocratic). They may involve broad, well-articulated participation in policy-making and implementation, but within limits.They tend to be more intolerant of inputs that are judged to be dysfunctional. They are immensely more suspicious of interventions in the formal decision-making and policy implementation process by groups and organizations that are not official, or not officially approved by the government. The tensions between pluralistic/democratic and unitary/monocratic arrangements are not distant those found within corporations that move in the direction of authorization of those fit(p) toward the bottom of the pyramidal hierarchy.As I have suggested, this pyramid is not just one of positions and authority but also of command and control. That is, as long as the pyramid remains a pyramid, even slightly, it is a power arrangement governed by rules that, with rare exceptions, are themselves the outcome of a power struggle. Serious efforts to empower persons who have not had very much power, or who through empowerment will come to exercise more of it than in the past, clearly imply a widening and deepening of participation in decision-making both in the making of corporate policies and in their implementation.It is no wonder that changes of this kind, as well as those designed to bring s takeholders meaningfully into such processes, are fraught with complications and that they usually degenerate into not much more than lip-service platitudes (Coopey 1995). Monocratic and unitary political systems, such as those typically found in Europe and elsewhere outside the unify States (and to some extent outside Great Britain), accord very high status to the state writ large. Those who manage the state are more inclined to redirect, minimize, and, if necessary, override interference from civil society when this interference threatens to paralyze government.Reasons of state, as the justification is often called, will lead to closure of debate and then to public action, presumably in favor of the community as a whole. In monocratic systems, popular sovereignty and broad participation by the masses or by organized groups will not be permitted to place the state and its rife welfare at risk. This attitude is similar to the posture of senior corporate managers who are scarcely ab out to tolerate modes of empowerment or participation that might cast serious doubt on the companys mission, the rationality of its basic long-term strategy, or the companys very survival.Nevertheless, in the corporate sphere, as in the sphere of the state, the powers available to managers must be and often are used to end an aura of legitimacy not just to existing rules and policies but also to the outcomes that derive from them (Hardy and Clegg 1996 630). Federalism Federalism adds another facet to this discussion. As a political concept that stands in opposition to that of unitary structures, federalism implies a division of power on the basis of territory.A much-touted advantage of federalism is that it permits the bringing together, under one central authority, of territorial units that differ quite markedly from each other in many ways. This would include, say, the sizing of their population or territory their racial or linguistic compensate and a wide range of social, econom ic, and even political conditions. Federal systems represent ways of organizing and managing diversity. In the realm of politics, experience has shown that these systems are therefore much more viable means of managing large nations than are highly centralized unitary systems.In fact, most of these nations are of the federal, not the unitary, varietyeven the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China in their so-called totalitarian heyday. Federalism also maximizes the amount of experimentation (with different laws, institutions, electoral arrangements, administrative organizations, and the like) that can take place under a common political roof. This umbrella-like structure permits, indeed encourages, the search for best practice in institutional form and relationships and in policy-making and implementation. This feature of federalism encourages, permits, and, indeed encourages self-conscious learning.In the United States, for example, there are formal organizations designed t o provide the individual states and major cities with information about the potentially innovative or effective approaches that each may be taking to, organizational procedures or public policy. connatural information-sharing institutions also exist at the international level. This institutionalized learning is designed in the broadest sense to raise the quality and lower the cost of governmental services. In a federal setting the political center shares a number of powers with other territorial units. Except in estricted areas, it cannot pretend to be the exclusive holder or exerciser of power and authority. Even where in formal terms the political centers authority may be exclusive and where policies are expected to be uniformly administered passim the systems territories and subunits, considerable local variation must be permitted. Unitary systems, by contrast, permit much less flexibility of this type. The central authority within such systems exercises nearly exclusive author ity to make system-wide policies, and it is also expected that these policies will be uniformly administered everywhere.Any deviation from centrally established policies, indeed any policy-making within subnational units, proceeds only with some sort of authorization by the center. As often state in France, if one wishes to know exactly what children might be doing at a certain hour of any school day, it is sufficient to consult the manual issued by the appropriate ministry in Paris. The unitary form is highly analogous to the world-wide business firm, including firms organized by product group or division, in which authority and control are concentrated in a single, central organization.The preceding, post-war development of the multinational corporation, at least in the United States, proceeded for the most part on the basis of this model. It was thought that the revolutions in small fry travel and electronics made such centralized control both desirable and feasible. That is, th ese changes in the speed and facility of travel and communication were said to make possible the global extension of the so-called Sloan model of the corporation, a model that had worked so well within the United States.Feedback and Learning No matter whether the basic structure is pluralistic or monocratic, federal or unitary, the need for feedback from which the center can presumably learn is universal. Federal systems, because they produce many streams of information, may be more open but less efficient than unitary systems. Unitary systems, although in theory narrower and easier to control than federal systems are in terms of information-producing channels, are at high risk of having information delayed, distorted, or misdirected.It is apparent, however, that the center often deludes itself into believing that, with a highly check and centralized organizational weapon at its disposal (like the Communist party under Stalin in the USSR or the Chinese Communist party under Mao), i t can both learn and control what transpires at the periphery (Hough 1969). The deceitful assumption in this instance is that a centralized and highly develop organizational instrument, such as the Communist party, can prevail irrespective of whether the overall system is of the federal or unitary configuration.Pluralism and Federalism in the Firm? A pluralist and federal model of the polity ill fits the generally held photograph of the firm and of other private-sector organizations. Decision-making of the kind represented by the typical firm can scarcely follow a pluralist model to the letter, at least not without a rethinking of a great many well-established notions of what a world-scale company should be and how it should be run. Within the firm great emphasis is placed on clear lines of authority, both horizontal and vertical.The global firm still tries to instill a single corporate culture so that the hierarchy of values, the operational norms, and the modus operandi will be essentially the same wherever its branches and units may be located. This model leaves little room for pluralist inputs and local diversity. Pluralist democracies and federal systems thunder (most of the time) on their multicultural dimensions. Rather than eliminate diversity, it is honored and encouraged. In the corporate world, much of what is claimed about decentralization, planning from the bottom up, and individual empowerment often is spurious.Senior managers in the corporate world are rarely able or inclined to practice the decentralization or the broad and deep participation that they may preach. More often than not they use the considerable powers at their disposal not to encourage debate that leads to consent but rather to mobilize consent itself (Hardy and Clegg 1996 626). In the public/political sector, a key test of how seriously the center wishes to encourage diversity and favor empowerment lies in the practice of devolution, as opposed to decentralization.Devolution , typically practiced on a territorial basis, substantially reduces the powers of the center over the periphery, sometimes drastically. The strongest indicator of this reduction is the empowerment of the periphery not only to make policies but also to tax or otherwise raise capital in connection with these policies. Such transfers, in turn, encourage high levels of competition between the subnational units of federal systems, sometimes creating very difficult problems at the center.Devolution increases pluralism. When hierarchy is replaced by something composed of rather free-acting units, managers need to develop skills that are germane to these changed circumstances. It is one thing when a persons position makes it possible to mobilize consent and conforming behavior it is quite another story when both of these things must be generated within the context of a relatively open, participatory, and fluid system of reaching consensus on what should be do and how best to do it.It is po ssible that the globalization of enterprise will force an increase in genuinely federal arrangements on the firm, a shift that would certainly imply moving away from a strict unitary, hierarchical model and award one that is genuinely more participatory, even if more difficult to manage. Charles Handy (1996) stated that such a change may be taking place (pp. 3356), although even he suggested that the action of federal principles to the corporate world will, perhaps inevitably, be imperfect (pp. 10912).The knowledgeableness of similar federal structures, even ones remaining distant from devolution, requires a new look at many of the most canonical ideas about how best to organize and manage the profit-seeking enterprise. On close inspection, the sometimes spectacular curtailment and other changes in corporate structures since about 1990 do not appear to have brought about radical operational changes in hierarchical structure. In both the public and the private sectors, centralized control of organizations dies hard.Nevertheless, the federal thrust in many of todays global firms should not be underestimated. In the truly global firm, where multinationality is not just a label, traditionalistic arrangements for strategic plans, corporate finance, and capital budgetingwhich are still basically monocratic and unitary in naturewill gradually be revised. It is misleading to think, as so many corporate managers still do, that the continuing electronic and information technology revolutions will permit efficient global control from a single, geographically dis