Organizational Intelligence by Harold L. Wilensky

Organizational Intelligence by Harold L. Wilensky

Author:Harold L. Wilensky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61027-288-9
Publisher: Quid Pro, LLC
Published: 2015-04-01T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 6

Economic, Political, and Cultural Contexts

The remaining corner of the picture is the most impressionistic. Although my analysis has been cast in general terms applicable to complex organizations in every modern state, cultural-ideological contexts obviously condition the uses and influence of intellectuals and experts as well as the quality of intelligence. But no comparative studies show how. Moreover, some of these national “cultural” variations turn out to be themselves the structural variations already discussed. For instance, organizational defenses against information pathologies transcend culture. Stalin, like FDR, used overlapping delegation of functions to assure that issues would be brought into the open at the highest level; administrative leaders in every country employ the strategy of calculated competition for the purposes of both control and intelligence.

The main distinctions for our purposes are between command and market economies and between totalitarian and pluralist polities. First, economic and political contexts affect the balance among types of intelligence used. If organizations deeply involved with government in a market economy must rely on the ideological-political intelligence of contact men, major industrial firms in a command economy are even more dependent on such information. In a Soviet-type economy, “planners’ tension”—the pressure generated when administratively ordered output exceeds capacity output—necessitates an immense apparatus for communicating and enforcing orders and a complicated system of unofficial expediters and fixers who try to circumvent the orders so that goals may be met (which creates a demand for more planners to keep track of what’s going on). In a brilliant dissection of the command economy Wiles describes pro-plan fixers in action: “As the output targets are always the most important part of the plan, and the director’s bonus depends mainly on his fulfillment of them, he is always violating the rest of the plan for their sake. Black markets, or rather black bilateral transactions, occur in raw materials and labour, and firms secretly barter services among each other (you repair my furnace, I’ll lend you some aluminium until next quarter).” Since all expenditures are tightly controlled, “these activities mean squaring the accountant and probably also the auditors, and in reply the authorities constantly reshuffle directors and accountants before they get to know each other.” Directors also hire permanent agents, “tolkachi” who are supposed to know whom to talk to, which forms to use, etc., to reduce the plan targets and expedite or increase supplies.1 In such an economy, there are numerous agencies engaged in negotiating standards of value and performance which in market economies are determined by fewer, private parties or by the test of the market.

That planners’ tension is not primarily a cultural or political phenomenon, but a matter of economic organization, is evident in wartime planning in areas where the government is the only consumer—even in pluralist societies. A penetrating study of the British Ministry of Aircraft Production (M.A.P.) in World War II suggests that a prime root of this tension is the flow of information to producers about what is really going on. Rather than use realistic planning, the



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