David J. Hickson in association with Richard J. Butler, David Cray, Geoffrey R. Making in Organizations in the Private and Public Sectors in Britain’, in Rolf pp. 107-16

Abstract

The 20th century is remarkable for many things, not the least among them being the attempts by governments from East and West, from North and South, to control economies. Some succeed sometimes, some succeed hardly at all. In Europe, the sharpest divide is between the varieties of direct control practised in the East, and the varieties of indirect control practised in the West. But the aim of governments on both sides of this sad divide is to influence the managements of organizations. Usually this is discussed in the West in terms of generalized policies such as taxation policy or export subsidies or market protectionism, and of generalized indicators such as inflation rates or balances of payments or government borrowing. Much less is known, often nothing is known, of how government influence - if any - is brought to bear. How is it done? To go to the heart of the matter requires investigating whether or not managements are affected in what they do by government and its agencies. That means getting beneath the abstractions about state and economy to ask whether or not major strategic decisions by managers and administrators are influenced. And are these decisions influenced more in some organizations than in others, notably in the government’s own public sector organizations as compared to the “free” enterprise private sector organizations? It is these critical decisions which in the aggregate determine what the condition of the economy shall be. The Bradford studies of strategic decision-making in organizations were designed on a large scale to analyse types of decision process, and explain the differences between types by features of the decision and the organization. They include information on the influence exerted by all interests on each decision studied. These interests are both internal, such as the sales (and equivalent), finance, and research departments; and external such as suppliersor trade associations or trades unions (the influence of unions is analysed in detail in Wilson et al., 1982). A quite unanticipated by-product of the research was information on the influence exerted on strategic decisions by government departments and agencies, as reported by the top managers and administrators who had experienced it. This paper examines that influence, based on extracts from the full accounts of the Bradford studies published elsewhere (Hickson et al., 1984, 1986).