Bureaucratic Hierarchy Research Articles

The Development of a Corps of Public School Teachers in Canada, 1870-1980

The teacher rightly holds a prominent place in the educational, political, and social history of Canada. During the nineteenth century, provincial politicians, town councils, school administrators, and parents worried about what kind of people would make up the growing cadre of public school teachers and whether there would be enough of them to staff burgeoning schools. As for the spread of schools, few doubt that the establishment of universal public schooling was one of modern history's major social changes. Not only did schooling expand and illiteracy turn from the social norm into a social disability within a century but learning itself was transformed from an informal process, conducted in the home or as part of everyday activity, into a formal institutional setting which occurred outside the home and became the main occupation of childhood. Teaching changed from an itinerant, entrepreneurial, part-time activity to a spatially confined, hired, primary activity with a guaranteed income. Public schooling with hiring, certification, and a common curriculum necessitated a new relation between teacher and state. The teacher was a government employee who could aspire to a place in the bureaucratic hierarchy but who would also claim independent professional status, establishing associations to regulate that status and also mediate with the employer (the government) about wages, working conditions, and professional standing. Expansion of schooling, at first horizontally, bringing more and more children into school, and then vertically, extending years of schooling, meant that teaching was a growth industry offering secure, respectable employment and social mobility for educated sons and daughters of lower-middle status. It offered young women a way station between school and marriage or a respectable career for unmarried women.

DECENTRALIZED PLANNING FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: The Case of Indonesia*

The government of Indonesia frequently has stressed the need for decentralization to achieve effective regional development, but yet has hesitated to proceed because of fears that such action would undermine national unity and disrupt centrally defined national priorities. Furthermore, the entrenched bureaucratic hierarchy, reinforced by the persistence of patrimonialism, would have to surrender its planning and decision making authority to popularly constituted bodies. This paper examines this dilemma and argues that deconcentration of planning and implementation functions to lower administrative levels does not constitute decentralization. The analysis concludes by suggesting that collaboration between government and non‐governmental organizations might be the appropriate means for encouraging popular participation for sustainable development.

Lessons from the Field: An Essay on the Crisis of Leadership in Contemporary Organizations

A consensus is emerging that contemporary organizations are in critical need of leadership with compelling vision. Often this leads to an overemphasis on the personality or character of the leader. Although people clearly need to coalesce around a shared purpose in today's organizations, the same conditions that make "vision" so prominent also make the huge emphasis on the leader inappropriate. Increasingly complex, turbulent environments have made highly centralized, bureaucratic hierarchies obsolete, and require our understanding of effective leadership to shift from the leader alone to the context in which leadership can be exercised. People's heightened interdependence and need to exert authority and leadership at all levels call for a focus on systemic leadership capacity, for focusing only on top executives as the sole source of organizational leadership hinders the confrontation of the more troubling, deeper problems contributing to the contemporary crisis in leadership. This article explores common themes in the organizational literature and discusses three books in depth (by Bennis, Gilmore, and Vaill) that point to the emerging understanding of the crisis of leadership among organizational scholars.

Technocratic Organization and Control

Technocracy, a new type of organizational control structure, is defined and analyzed. The culmination of a dialectical process of organizational rationalization, technocracy transcends and integrates earlier forms of organizational control, particularly technical control, bureaucratic control, and professional control. Technocratic organizations are characterized by a flattening of bureaucratic hierarchies, a polarization into 'expert' and 'non-expert' sectors, a substitution of expertise for rank position as the primary basis of authority, a de-emphasis on internal job ladders in favour of external credentialing and credential barriers, flexible configurations of centralization/decentralization, and other related organizational changes. Technocracy is analyzed with regard to its theoretical background, historical development, contemporary manifestations, and socio-political implications.

Decision Rules, Gatekeepers, and the Delivery of Municipal Services

For decades, a critical issue among urban scholars and public managers has been who decides where municipal services will be allocated. Conventional wisdom holds that one will have a clear understanding of the city's priorities merely by focusing on the agenda-setting process of the municipal budget. Or, as Wildavsky (1964, p. 4) writes, If one looks at politics as a process by which the government mobilizes resources to meet pressing problems, then the budget is the focus of these efforts. Much of the early research on urban service delivery focused on how municipal service priorities were made and who was dominant in the policy agenda setting process. Although this research has helped us to understand how the urban policy process operates, especially in regard to coalition building, it has its limitations. In the 1970s, a different research focus emerged. Its premise was that a city's budget document may not truly represent the city's values or priorities, since budgets rarely specify which clients or ethnic groups are to receive allocation benefits. Instead, this body of literature believed that bureaucratic service delivery rules should be the area of inquiry, because these rules have distributional consequences as a result of which some groups gain and others lose. While decision rules may reduce uncertainty by ensuring compliance with the goals that have been agreed upon, urban service delivery rules are not devoid of political considerations. Indeed, there is evidence that bureaucracies are frequently motivated to devise rules that support their own maintenance objectives and enhance their own ability to expand their boundaries of discretion. Or, as Lineberry (1977, p. 154) comments, There are two remarkable things about decision rules in bureaucratic allocation of public services. The first is how low in the bureaucratic hierarchy decision rules are formulated and implemented. The second is how insulated the rule makers are from external constraints.

Ethnographic Museums and the Art Trade

'Those who are above', the wangeregi, were one of the moieties into which the Winnegabo of the Great Lakes were divided, according to their famous ethnographer Paul Radin. The other moiety was 'those who are on earth', the manegi. It may be that in Britain a similar relationship of dual organization or complementary opposition obtains between the phratry of the museum profession and that of art dealing, particularly the world of the auction houses which have grown in recent years into bureaucratic multi-departmental hierarchies. (I shall leave out of my analysis the phratry of private art-dealers, who are for the most part specialist entrepreneurs and whose counterpart is the individual collectors though obviously the whole system is interconnected.) Clearly the analogy is metaphorical rather than literal, for the phratries are not recruited by descent. But they do draw on a pool of recruits who are for the most part educated at the major universities in the arts and humanities and have decided to stay within that field; there is some exchange between the phratries in the course of individual careers; and each has its own key rituals, respectively the exhibition opening and the auction preview and sale. One leading London auction-house recently described their role as being that of 'temporary curators'. The most salient difference is that money values attached to objects are publicly mentioned as little as possible by the Curators, and then most guardedly, though money is of great importance behind the scenes: for instance, they have to keep up-to-date with saleroom prices in order to advise on tax-deductible donations or on export licences. By contrast, the Auctioneers are uninhibited in talking of money. The Curators earn more frugal financial rewards than do the Auctioneers, except that junior staff in the auction houses are paid low wages in return for the privilege of gaining hands-on experience. The Auctioneers are on friendly terms with the rich and powerful people who are often their clients, but their academic prestige is less than that of the Curators though (like the private dealers) they may gain enviable practical knowledge through a fortunate apprenticeship, experience in handling objects and visual flair: a few very successful experts in the trade have had no formal tertiary education. Hence the Auctioneers seek to acquire academic credibility through publishing detailed catalogues with quotations from scholarly writings, and also through carrying on ancillary museum-type activities such as book-publishing and adult education (though all of these activities of course have a commercial justification too). The Curators seek to keep the Auctioneers 'at arm's length', and if they could not do so successfully they would not be able to maintain the high ethical standing of their profession. My field of informants is almost exclusively Britishbased but not confined to those working in the ethnographic field. The ethnographic specialty, however Scene at a 'good' i.e. highly valued auction in the West End recently. A piece of Chinese ceramics is being sold. The auctioneer is supported by (right to left) the departmental director, two sales clerks who note successful bids and also pass on postal and telephoned bids, and a press office lady ready to announce any outstanding price that is reached. In the background, experts from the department. On the walls are oil-paintings about to be sold shortly in a separate sale. Seen from the back in the front rows are some leading specialist dealers. (Photo courtesy of Sotheby's.) All except a few exceptionally expensive and heavily publicized auction sales are open to the public, and it is possible to enter a binding contract by means of a barely perceptible gestural sign to the auctioneer. The auction houses have various procedures to protect themselves not always successfully against mischievous abuse of the bidding rules, but the grave demeanour of the officiants would seem to be one deterrent. I:l=l=a~~

MOTIVATION TO MANAGE AT THE TOP EXECUTIVE LEVEL: A TEST OF THE HIERARCHIC ROLE‐MOTIVATION THEORY

Measures of managerial motivation (the Miner Sentence Completion Scale ‐ Form H) were obtained from a sample composed of 75 chief executive and operating officers, executive vice presidents, and group vice presidents. Within this sample, 49 individuals had clearly worked their way up a bureaucratic hierarchy, and thus were congruent with managerial role motivation theory, while 26 were either the original entrepreneur or relatives of the entrepreneur. Comparisons were made with a sample of 65 managers in the same companies who, although of similar ages, had not reached the same high levels. The theory congruent top executives proved to have higher managerial motivation than either of the other two groups. These results support the hierarchic role‐motivation theory and reinforce one of its most central propositions; they also support the use of the MSCS‐Form H in the selection of managerial talent and in executive assessment.

Military Force in the Foreign Policy of the Eisenhower Presidency

Politicians, scholars, and much of the American public see the use of military force in international politics as an extremely complex and controversial issue. There are very few who hold with Karl von Clausewitz that force is only one more component of an admixture of means that the prudent statesman is justified in using safeguard national interests. More prevalent is the view that force is an instrument be used only in the most extreme circumstances and that its use in situations short of struggles for national survival brings forth serious moral questions. Samuel P. Huntington points out a strong undercurrent in the American political culture that fundamentally opposes government power and the concentration of authority. This leads, he argues, to efforts minimize and restrict the resources of power (such as arms), restrict the effectiveness of the specialized bureaucratic hierarchies, and limit the authority of the executive in the conduct of foreign policy.' American unease about force as a foreign policy instrument has been particularly evident since the mid-1960s. War in Vietnam and Cambodia, the temporary demise of the Cold War world view, the excesses of the imperial presidency, and events in Iran, Lebanon, Grenada, and elsewhere have led continual debate over the efficacy of force and reassessments of presidential powers and decision-making processes. The War Powers Resolution, passed by Congress in 1973 limit the president's ability employ military forces in hostile environ-

Bureaucracyand Public Life

The increasing bureaucratization of politics and work has significant implications for the possibilities of meaningful citizen participation in public life. The requirements of survival in bureaucracies, either as a bureaucrat or as a client, require one to develop sets of skills and traits that perpetuate dependency and undermine autonomous political action. These traits are traditionally associated with the feminine role, but are in fact a manifestation of subordination and thus likely to be found in any dependent population. This process ought to be of particular concern to those interested in feminism, because the expansion of bureaucratic hierarchies undermines the possibilities of liberation for both women and men.

Implementation Beyond Hierarchy: Swedish Energy Research Policy

ABSTRACTImplementation analyses have increasingly gone beyond the study of the working of well‐defined bureaucratic hierarchies. The key role played by informally coordinated clusters or complexes of different organizations, so‐called implementation structures, has instead been emphasized. This article on a major programme for energy research and development in Sweden agrees with the thrust of this latter approach. However, three substantial reformulations of the basic thesis about non‐hierarchical implementation arc advanced. First, it is argued that the role of implementation structures is by no means limited to the implementation process proper but may involve a crucial contribution to the definition and setting of a policy problem. Second, the article rejects the thesis that a purposive commitment to some common programme objective or rationale is a prerequisite for the successful implementation of a programme. Third, it underscores the importance of understanding linkages between public and private sectors in different bargaining arenas. But analysis cannot focus only on the uses of existing linkages and arenas. Programmes may well involve policies for affecting distant transactions. They will then have to cope with uncertainties about the future nature of such arenas as well as the conditions for shaping, or even creating, them.

Salary Restraint in a Bureaucratic Hierarchy—The Case of the Australian Public Service Under Wage Indexation

The current Australian Public Service (APS) wage structure is an outcome of Public Service Board (PSB) wage policies developed in the 1960s, and the cumulative wage inflation of the years to 1974. Since 1975 the strict application of the wage indexation guidelines within the APS appears initially to have retarded the rate of growth of average APS salaries compared with those paid elsewhere. However, in a hierarchical salary structure (such as that of the APS) staff turnover and consequent promotions can result in individuals experiencing greater earnings increases than the rate of growth of average salaries. This may temper resentment of wage restraint, at least temporarily. The paper is in four main parts. The first surveys the history of PSB wage fixation policies and the effects on the APS salary structure of the application of the National Wage decisions since 1975. The second part discusses the accompanying tables, which examine the effects of these wage policies on the aggregate wage bill per person employed in the APS, and on a particular but important group within the APS: those in the third division clerical/administrative structure. In the third part, the effect of the hierarchical nature of the APS salary structure is analysed. The final concluding part briefly discusses some issues which seem likely to arise in the near future concerning the relation between public and private sector wage structures.

The Changing Roles of Priests in the Politics of Northeast Brazil, 1889-1964

Northeast Brazil had traditionally maintained two functionally separate but structurally related Catholic Churches: on the coast, usually in the state capitals, the “ official church ” has been manned and officiated by a well-trained bureaucratic hierarchy; and in the hinterlands, the backlanders have often practiced a variety of “ folk Catholicism.” In a social and economic context, the Brazilian Northeast can also be divided into the “ far Northeast” of Gilberto Freyre and Jorge Amado, the world of opulent sugar and cacao planters on the one hand, and on the other the Northeast of drought, poverty, hunger, and superstition described by Rachel de Queiroz and Graciliano Ramos. In this divergent Northeast, religion has played an important role in the lives of the backlanders, and often priests, both the practitioners of the folk Catholicism and the ordained of the official church have managed to influence the politics of the region.

Police Reform in the Russian Province of Iaroslavl, 1856-1876

In the two decades that followed the Crimean War the local police, always crucial elements of the tsarist system, assumed a new importance. Vested with special responsibility for maintaining law and order and occupying a key position in the bureaucratic hierarchy, they were cast in a major role in carrying out the Great Reforms of Alexander II. The task of fitting the police to assume this role was one of great concern to Russia's leaders and occupied their attention throughout the reign. This essay is a study of police reform in the area of Iaroslavl Province. It examines the background, nature, and success of government efforts to revitalize an essential branch of the Russian state system.On the eve of the period of reforms the local police in Iaroslavl as in other Russian provinces were officials of enormous influence. They were the foundation stones of a giant bureaucratic pyramid, for in addition to their special superior—the Ministry of Internal Affairs—a host of ministries, councils, and other government agencies depended on them. Matters of finance and justice, the supervision of industry and commerce, the protection of life and property—all were the concern of the police.

Piotr Khristianovich von Schwanebach and the Dissolution of the First Two Dumas

bach. Schwanebach had occupied a number of important positions in the bureaucratic hierarchy in the 1890s and the first years of the twentieth century. He was, successively, Assistant Director of the Credit Chancellery, Deputy Director of the State Bank, member of the Council of the Ministry of Finance, Deputy Minister, and Minister of Agriculture.1 In all of these posts he violently opposed the financial policies of S. lu. Witte.2 When Witte returned to power as Russia's first premier, in the aftermath of a lost war and of revolution, Schwanebach and his good friend Baron Alois von Aehrenthal, the Austrian ambassador to Russia, mounted a fervent campaign in Russia, and especially abroad, to assist in the destruction of Witte's position.3 Schwanebach never hid his disdain for representative or parliamentary institutions. As Minister of Agriculture, he had participated in the deliberations on the Bulygin draft and in these sessions gave vent to his fears that concessions might be made to dangerous elements of the population. Once he realized that some sort of assembly was inevitable, he advocated a franchise law which would result in the largest possible representation of peasant elements in it. Such a peasant preponderance, he hoped, would constitute a valuable ballast. It would give the duma *The Central University Research Fund of the University of New Hampshire and the Social Science Research Council have given financial support to this study. All unpublished German Foreign Office documents cited below are on microfilm. Their citation is followed by their microfilm classification. Unpublished Austrian documents stem from the files of the Haus, Hofund Staatsarchiv in Vienna. 1 / Entsiklopedicheskii Slovaf (St. Petersburg, 1903), Lxxvn, p. 242; P. Kh. von Schwanebach, Zapiski sanovnika; politika P. A. Stolypina i vtoraia gosudarstvennaia duma, Golos Minuvshego, i-m (vi), (1918), 115, n. 1. 2 / V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past; Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II (Stanford/ London, 1939), pp. 169, 232. o i nans nenoronner, An Annwine uipiomatic conspiracy, iyU5-iyut>: ine Schwanebach Memorandum, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, XIV, 3 (Sept. 1966), 347-61.

Role Conflicts in the Position of a Military Education Adviser

The woman military education adviser must always remember that she is a woman employed by a highly specialized bureaucratic hierarchy and accept the fact that she is competing in a man's world. If she is to succeed, she must be satisfied to put her creative ideas into suggestions for men to present and learn to play the role of a “lady” in certain situations.