Some Structural Features of Relations Between The Department of Defense, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Their Principal Contractors

Abstract

From a social-psychological viewpoint comparative temporal trends in contracting relations between private industrial organizations and NASA and the Defense Department are examined. Evidence is presented of stable and strongly convergent tendencies in the working relations among these parties, but accompanied by noteworthy variations in pattern as between NASA and Defense Department relations with their industrial contractors. The former exhibits more concentration but less stability than the latter, but gives evidence of moving in the direction of increased stability whereas the latter shows opposite tendencies. The findings are analyzed in terms of Galbraith-Weidenbaum convergence hypotheses and it is concluded that they are suggestive of the operation of a mastery motive working, under specified conditions, to both sustain and dissipate exchange relations. The term military-industrial complex (MIC) is a modern-day catchphrase and slogan. Nevertheless it points to a substantial reality in the form of an integrated pattern of interorganizational relations developed to serve and preserve a set of special interests. Specifically, in the simple, direct language of Newsweek magazine (1969:74), the MIC . . consists of the sprawling Pentagon and its network of defense suppliers and research facilities that together produce America's armed might. As a public manifestation the gross features of the MIC are familiar enough. Its magnitude, its participants, some of its history, its growth (at least in total dollar volume), its comparative status relative to competing federal programs, some of its operational facts and foibles (e.g., modes of contracting, cost-overruns), etc., all have been well reviewed in the popular press, probably nowhere more effectively than in Newsweek's balanced presentation or in the more searching if somewhat exhortative offerings by Galbraith in Harpers (1969) and Kaufman in the New York Times Magazine (1969). Futhermore, as a market, some of the structural and behavioral features of the MIC, broadly conceived, have received careful analytic review (cf. Baldwin, 1967; Stekler, 1965). Yet we have been left with something distinctly less than full understanding of the MIC despite the welter of words written and spoken on the subject and despite the fact that as a societal and organizational phenomenon, the MIC is unusually significant both in its own right and for the lessons it can teach regarding resource management; it is, moreover, an attractive setting for analysis of organizational behavior and especially of interorganizational exchange pro-