An Heretical Heir of the Enlightenment: Politics, Policy and Science in the Work of Charles E. Lindblom by Harry Redner

Author:Harry Redner [Redner, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429739842
Goodreads: 44598504
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

(d) Productivity and Satisfaction

Because the authority relation is a mechanism for achieving values, a political theory of authority opens the prospect of a broadening of our understanding of the productivity of social systems in terms of their capacity to realise values and utilise information -- a wider concept of productivity than that measured by quantitative economic statistics. Under certain conditions co-ordination by authority can be highly efficient in realising values, provided that identity can be maintained. Authority provides one solution to the problem identified by Mancur Olson in his analysis of collective action: that the "typical individual does not have an incentive to spend much time studying many of his choices concerning collective goods", even though the provision of collective goods would be improved if individuals took an interest in how they might best be provided; otherwise investment in such goods will be sub-optimal (Olson, 1984:28). Authority deals with this problem partly by abolishing it. It transfers decision-making about collective goods away from individuals to those in authority (who generally gain significant private selective incentives for exercising authority in terms of status and often income). It confers on those in authority the capacity to enlist the energies of other individuals in the pursuit of collective purposes, both by the provision of incentives but also by the compulsive power of the authority relationship itself. What it does not do, however, is to ensure that the analytical resources, the resources of experience, and their judgement of value priorities, of the typical individual is made available for decision-making about collective purposes. It achieves its objective by obviating the need for the typical individual to personally decide on collective purposes before his energies and resources can be enlisted in their pursuit.

The relationship between the values pursued by authority and the values of those subordinate to it is likely to be firmest where superiors and subordinates are linked by a shared strongly held and detailed ideology which successfully defines value priorities for participants in the authority system. Such a situation would approximate Rousseau's conception of a government based on the general will. As Rousseau himself concluded, however, such a situation is likely to arise and be maintained only in small communities of which modern examples are small religious communities, extreme political movements, and ideological agencies and groups, such as those promoting free enterprise or socialism. Most structures of authority are not based on such an ideological commitment, and consequently the possibility of a discrepancy between the values pursued by authority and those subject to it increases. The maintenance of an ideologically-based identity may be achieved more readily in societies where there is a greater cultural (and hence ideological) homogeneity, combined with a significant skewing in the distribution of power towards a few dominant authorities. The efficient use of authority is more difficult in societies with great cultural diversity, and cultural diversity is likely to produce even more diversity in the absence of a powerful authority working for cultural homogeneity. The extensive and effective use of

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