Can Organizations Change? Environmental Protection, Citizen Participation, and the Corps of Engineers.

Abstract

As the title suggests, this work concerns itself with our assessment of the environmental movement's impact upon the procedures, organizational structure, and objectives of the Corps of Engineers. The authors have selected four measures of organizational change-setting new goals, reorganization, changes in output, and open decisionmaking-as important factors in the assessment of bureaucratic change in the 1970s. With these factors in mind, the authors provide five case studies of the Corps of Engineers project planning process, and a survey data analysis of the attitudes of citizens who took part in Corps public involvement activities. The methodology is innovative and sophisticated. The reader is allowed the richness of detail and insight that only case studies provide, and empirical generalizations derived from survey data analysis, upon which conclusions about the overall effectiveness of Corps planning strategies on citizen attitudes can be based. The conclusion? Not much change, either in citizen attitudes about the Corps, or the Agency's organizational accommodation to citizen demands through citizen participation. The book, therefore, represents a missed opportunity. Instead of considering a wide scope of decision making in order to define the changing constellation of political support, opposition, and the Corps' organizational responses, the authors chose to focus on a rather minor component of decision making and public relations, the public involvement process. Thus, the work stands primarily as a technical analysis of citizen participation strategies, rather than a political study of the Corps of Engineers. However, the book may be testimony enough to this agency's political strength. The environmental movement of the last decade gave us sweeping anti-pollution legislation, unprecedented federal authority to regulate many sectors of society, wholesale governmental reorganization, and billions for anti-pollution control technology. The authors admit that this social movement led only to what amounted to organizational fine tuning within the Corps: brief experimentation with open planning and decision making, a small increase in environmentally-oriented personnel, and the creation of environmental units in District Planning and Engineering Divisions. These modifications