Large Bureaucracies Research Articles

The Social Worker as ‘Bad Object’

SUMMARY A 'bad object' has been defined as an 'object whom the subject hates or fears, who is experienced as malevolent. A bad object may be either an internal or an external object' (Rycroft, 1988, p. 100). This paper explores the circumstances in which public fears and anxieties over child abuse become projected into the social worker. It discusses how social workers introject these feelings, become a 'bad object', and how social services departments have developed a number of strategies which defend against feelings of blame and responsibility. The exploration is derived from my own experi ences and observations, and applies Kleinian psychoanalytic theory to studies of institutional defences. Twelve years ago I qualified as a social worker. At the time I was idealistic and thought that social workers helped people, people who were temporarily down on their luck. Though I had a certain ambival ence towards the public sector, and the large bureaucracies of social services departments, I was not aware then, as I am now, of how such organizations reproduce the nature of the social work task, and how, on a day-to-day level, social workers are obliged to contend not only with the anxiety, anger and hostility of the 'client' but also with that of the public, informed by the media's criticism of social work practice within the child abuse field.

Private bureaucracies, organizational efficiency, and Australia's manufacturing trade structure: a comparison with Japan

This study tests the hypothesis that use of in-house information services, which are approximated by the relative size of private bureaucracies or the ‘management sector’, is a statistically significant determinant of Australia's manufacturing trade structure. Large private bureaucracies are a feature of industrialized economies. Their growth, and concomitantly huge resource use, suggest that informational and organizational efficiency have become of paramount importance for economic development. However, variables trying to capture these phenomena are neglected in mainstream trade analysis. The study is conducted for a cross-section of Australian industries and the results are compared with those obtained from a similar study for Japan. The empirical results confirm the importance of private bureaucracies as a trade determinant. Moreover, they seem to dominate some major conventional factors. In the Australian case, the new variables capture an increasingly important aspect of ‘human capital’, i.e., its ...

Information Services, Private Bureaucracies, and Japan's Comparative Advantage

This note investigates the determinants of Japan's manufacturing trade structure in 1980. They include variables derived from an information economy perspective as well as traditional trade variables. Estimates for variables approximating organizational inefficiency indicate that even in Japan, which is reported to often have smaller private bureaucracies than the United States, relatively large bureaucracies have a negative effect on trade performance. Human capital intensity is found to have a positive effect on Japan's comparative advantage and exports. The importance of R&D expenditure is confirmed. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

Provision of Pharmacy Services to Psychiatric Patients: A Perspective

This article describes New York State's experience in advancing its mental health pharmacy programs. Implementation in a systematic fashion of accountable drug distribution services and basic clinical services is described. The approach used builds upon a firm foundation using a unit-dose system, a prerequisite before progressing with clinical initiatives. This base of activity is then improved by implementing computerization, clinical prescribing guidelines for drug use evaluation, and direct patient involvement with medication education. The planning necessary in order to prepare a unit-dose system is described. Issues considered include staffing estimates, recruitment of a work force, and training of new and existing staff. The problems encountered in implementing change within a large state bureaucracy, as well as the rewards and frustrations of working in this challenging environment, are discussed.

The Politics of Peace and Conflict Studies: Social work skills affecting organisations' processes, priorities and project outcomes

The creation of a Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in a large bureaucracy depended on social work skills to combine divergent interests for a common purpose, manage conflict and link personal considerations to global issues. These skills are seen as crucial, not only in negotiations for nuclear disarmament, but also in facilitating personal development and creativity within any organisation.

A Two-Tiered Theory of Consolidation and Separation of Powers

Not only did the New Deal expand the permissible areas of governmental activity, it also transformed the structure of the Federal Government. President Roosevelt's innovations centralized within large bureaucracies power that previously had been dispersed among the three governmental branches. This of power fits uneasily into the constitutional framework established by the Founders. This Note explores the jurisprudential implications of the New Deal watershed and elaborates a post-New Deal theory of allocation of governmental power. Part I begins with a discussion of the Federalist theory of separation of powers.1 For the Federalists, two conditions ensured an effective separation. First, governmental branches must be institutionally independent; each must be free from control by the others. Second, the branches must be functionally specialized; each must wield a distinct component of governmental power, so that the assent of all three is required for government action. Until the New Deal, the Supreme Court incorporated this theory into its jurisprudence through the nondelegation doctrine, which limited the discretionary authority of administrative agencies. The Court displaced this limitation in the late 1930's and early 1940's with a series of decisions approving massive delegations of authority to the executive branch. Contemporary separation of powers analysts dispute the meaning of the Court's repudiation of the nondelegation doctrine. Separation of powers purists insist on maintaining strict boundaries among the legislative, executive, and judicial functions, while partialists emphasize the balance of power among institutionally independent branches. Part II presents an alternative, two-tiered theory. According to this theory, the nondelegation doctrine's demise was accompanied by the birth of a consolidation principle requiring concentration of the government's operational power within administrative agencies. Such must

Disabled workers are largely ignored.

Large bureaucracies such as the NHS are the worst employees of disabled people, a conference of Work Injured Nurses heard.

Organization Size, Effectiveness, and Human Values

A number of recent studies suggest that large private bureaucracies have not been the highly efficient mechanisms for producing goods and services presumed by the profit motive in industry. A number of reasons for the inherent inefficiencies of large systems are contrasted with the advantages of small size. Smallness has a number of advantages for the simultaneous achievement of human values at work and productivity.

Sex Differences in Support for Organizational Advancement

While women workers have often been thought to receive less support than men to advance in organizations, these sex differences have not been systematically explored. Using a sample of 486 male and 356 female employees of a large federal bureaucracy, this article examines differences between men and women in their reports of social support from four potential sources: male peers, female peers, male supervisors, and female supervisors. Our findings indicate that, in general, (1) employees receive the most support from coworkers of the same sex, but supervisors support their male and female subordinates about equally, (2) when other variables are held constant, female employees give equal support to their male and female coworkers, while men continue to favor male coworkers, (3) youth and high-level position increase the amount of support men receive from each other, but diminish or have no effect on the amount of support women receive from men, and (4) workers receive more support from opposite-sex colleagues when members of their sex constitute a relatively small proportion of the total group.

The Role of Counselling in the Training of Middle Managers

The contribution of elements of counselling to the management portfolio of large bureaucracies has become increasingly recognized over recent years. But critical examination of ‘recognized’ in this context indicates that this means on the one hand an acknowledgement of the part which interpersonal skills have to play in effective management; and on the other hand, that a disjunction of ‘theory’ and practice exists. All too often that set of skills which we attribute to the tool-bag of the counsellor would be identified and assimilated at an intellectual level by the middle management student on a training course, but not effectively practised in the workplace, thus negating any real meaning for ‘counselling’ as part of the work role.

The business of library acquisitions: A consumer action model

Librarians'concerns for ethics, management, standards, and evaluation of service performance reflect a concern for the business operations of a library. While libraries serve social, educational, and cultural needs in society, they are also non-profit business organizations. It is, therefore, necessary that a library be managed as a professional business. We are large bureaucracies and major consumers, but we find ourselves striving for recognition as professional organizations by the public and the book industry. In Acquisitions, as conscientious consumers of the publishing industry, we have a responsibility to evaluate the trade standards of the products we purchase and the performance of the service for which we have contracted. This paper presents a model of trade standard guidelines for a specialized area of the publishing industry and advocates a broader application towards trade standards for the entire publishing industry.

The Bureaucracy of Murder Revisited

The paper reexamines the question of the guilt of subordinates in large organizations, a question posed with special force by Hannah Arendt in her book on Adolf Eichmann. He consistently claimed innocence on the ground that he was only following orders. Arendt accepted this picture of the regime but nevertheless indicted him for crimes against humanity. The paper suggests that this model of the Nazi bureaucracy is false: in the Nazi bureaucracy of murder, as in other large bureaucracies, subordinates competed with each other to advance the goals of superiors they trusted. In this context, their guilt is easily established.

Examining Organizational Goals of Educators in the Cooperative Extension Service

Identification and measurement of organizational goals, vigorously pursued in earlier years, has not received much attention lately. This disinterest is attributable to a lack of testable theory and problems associated with identifying particular goals, especially those found in large bureaucracies. These problems are addressed here by examining the goals of Cooperative Extension in one western state. A method of identifying goals in Extension is described. The goals of separate program areas are also reported. Five hypotheses concerning organizational goals of Extension are tested. One unexpected result was the discovery of a significant relationship between employee evaluations of administrators and administrator goals.

Meeting the Writing Needs of Advanced ESL Learners

This article describes a multi-faceted approach to meeting the writing needs of advanced ESL learners enrolled in an intensive, full-time ESL program lasting sixteen weeks. The students are highly-motivated francophone managers and professionals who need to write memos, letters, reports, and other specialized material in English at work. Their writing is directed to employees, colleagues and superiors within a large bureaucracy, and to the public. The article examines the theoretical and practical principles on which the writing course was based. In addition, it describes how learners' needs are met through the use of authentic documents and through individual teacher-student consultations.

Imperialism within Complex Organizations

This paper is concerned with a recent empirical trend observed in large, computerized formal organizations, and with a theoretical problem or lacuna in organizational sociology which is highlighted by this empirical development. With the widespread introduction of computers into complex organizations, there has been a growth and elaboration of certain kinds of organizational statistics. Specifically, in large bureaucracies or enterprises which have multiple sub-units (such as departments, divisions, or branches), databases are increasingly used which contain detailed statistical information

Medicaid myths: trends in Medicaid expenditures and the prospects for reform.

Medicaid expenditures, which had reached more than +32 billion by 1981, have grown substantially throughout the program's history. As a result, the conventional wisdom is that Medicaid expenditures represent a significant public-policy problem. Using other measures, however, it can be shown that the program is much less of a problem than it appears to be. By 1981, spending for Medicaid represented only 12.7 percent of total state spending and had contributed only 14.2 percent to the overall growth in state expenditures since 1965. Moreover, considering only the funds which states raise from in-state sources, the median share of state budgets accounted for by Medicaid was just 5.6 percent, and only 7 states spent as much as 9 percent of their own money on the program. These figures suggest that the marginal reductions in Medicaid expenditures which would result from typical program changes are likely to be so small that rational state officials might be unwilling to incur the political opposition of powerful provider groups or the resistance of large state bureaucracies by proposing substantial reforms. The major exceptions are the few states with very large programs where even small proportional savings would amount to millions of dollars. We conclude that, given its present federal-state form and the current distribution of expenditures, it is unlikely that major reforms will be enacted because the stakes are too small for most states and the federal interest is too diffused.

Interest Groups in American Public Law

The bicentennial of the Constitution is approaching in a time of considerable dissatisfaction with the American scheme of governance. The dissatisfaction takes various forms, but many of the concerns have a common root in the problems produced by the existence of interest groups, or factions, and their influence over the political process. The scheme is challenged on the grounds that it allows powerful private organizations to block necessary government action;1 that the lawmaking process has been transformed into a series of accommodations among competing elites;2 and that the rise of a large bureaucracy exercising broad discretionary power has undermined original constitutional goals by circumventing the safeguards of separation of powers and electoral accountability.3 The problem of faction has been a central concern of constitutional law and theory since the time of the American Revolution. Madison made control of factions the centerpiece of his defense of the proposed Constitution. His antifederalist opponents objected on the ground that his solution was a false one, addressing only a symptom of the underlying problem. This de-

The Non-State Sector in Education in Europe: A Conceptual and Historical Analysis

Private education, Enseignement libre, and Friskolan-these are the terms used to describe that part of a country's total educational provision which is not provided, completely financed and controlled by public authorities. There is, to be sure, a certain similarity in that such a sector is to be found in virtually all Western European countries. But this apparent nominal similarity hides vast differences both in the relationship between official 'state schooling' and its 'free' or 'private' counterpart. It also is apt to forget the considerable differences in historical background which, in turn, not merely have given rise to the 'non-state' sector, but also today still influence both its character and its place in the nation. For these reasons the concept of education-often used in Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany-is insufficient to describe the complexity of the relationship, whether legal, financial or supervisory, that exists between it and a country's governmental administration. Originally, the concept of denoted those establishments run by corporations, merchant guilds, religious orders or groups of individuals, independent of the public purse and control. Though doubtless true in the past, this definition today is no longer adequate, nor does it describe all those institutions in the non-state sector. Certainly, one may still find schools that are self-financing from student fees and donations from individuals. But they are extremely rare. In Ireland, for instance, less than 2% of pupils attend schools that may be said to be in the original meaning of the term. It is a fact that without substantial support from public authorities-either direct in the form of per capita subsidies, or indirect in the form of special taxation concessions granted to certain categories of schools in the 'non-state' sector-private schools would not exist to so great an extent if financed from private sources only. Recently, interest has revived in the role and place of the 'non-state' sector in a country's overall educational provision. There are several reasons for this. Amongst them, it is suggested, is the waning public confidence in the ability of education to achieve some of the goals which expansionist policies of the 1960s and 1970s laid down. No less important has been the change in thinking that has emerged as a result of the current economic situation. Amongst the more significant changes in the field of political and economic theory has been the dual concept on the one hand of the 'overloaded state' and, on the other, the so-called crisis in the Welfare State. The former poses the question whether large bureaucracies lend themselves easily to the more complex tasks of both strategic and everyday administration. It has led to the notion that certain areas of responsibility ought perhaps to be hived off or devolved to local or regional administrations. The second, which may in part be seen

Women's Roles in Nineteenth-Century Chile: Public Education Records, 1843-1883

In 1877 Miguel Luis Amunátegui, noted historian and Chile's Minister of Education, observed aptly that while the Chinese bound their daughters' feet, his countrymen bound their daughters' minds. Amunátegui's dictum reveals an official concern for women's education that was unique in nineteenth-century Latin America. Chile's efforts to remove the “bindings” from the minds of its young women are important in several respects. Education was in fact the linchpin of an ambitious strategy to revamp and modernize every aspect of Chilean society. Because of the centrality of formal education in this experiment and the intensity of thinking on the subject, when women's education was addressed in official circles, female roles were being defined as part of a coherent national ideology. The Chilean experiments in education thus provide a rare opportunity to observe explicit, detailed reflection on women's roles. Unequivocal official commitment to public education in Chile also resulted in the creation of a large bureaucracy that in turn collected immense quantities of data on household size, family income, occupation, and related subjects. Much of this data concerns women and insofar as it documents the “social bedrock” so often obscured to scholars, it is immensely useful for women's history.

Employee counseling services evaluation system: Design, issues and conclusions

Employee Counseling Services (ECS) programs have emerged as an effective method for dealing with employees whose job performance has deteriorated due to personal problems such as alcoholism or drug abuse. It is estimated that 18% of any workforce is effected by such problems at any given time and that these employees cost industry billions of dollars annually in lost productivity, abuse of sick leave, etc. One of the critical concerns of this emerging field is the need for comprehensive evaluation that can demonstrate the cost-effectiveness and costbenefits of ECS programs. This paper will describe the model Federal ECS developed at the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services as well as the components of the evaluation system designed to determine its effectiveness. The system is the first of its kind and will be a valuable contribution to the field. The paper then raises issues and develops conclusions about designing such an evaluation within the context of a large bureaucracy.