|
ν θ
|
governmental behavior
|
For some purposes, governmental behavior can usefully be summarized as action chosen by a unitary, rational decision maker: centrally controlled, completely informed, and value maximizing.
|
|
δ γ
|
vast conglomerate
|
But a government is not an individual. It is not just the president and his entourage nor even just the presidency and Congress. It is a vast conglomerate of loosely allied organizations, each with a substantial life of its own.
|
|
δ γ
|
standard outputs
|
Governmental behavior can therefore be understood, according to a second conceptual model, less as deliberate choices and more as outputs of large organizations functioning according to standard patterns of behavior.
|
|
π ω
|
quasi-independence
|
Each organization attends to a special set of problems and acts in quasi-independence on these problems. But few important issues fall exclusively within the domain of a single organization.
|
|
η σ
|
disturbing leaders
|
Government leaders can substantially disturb, but rarely precisely control, the specific behavior of these organizations. To perform complex tasks, the behavior of large numbers of individuals must be coordinated. Coordination requires standard operating procedures: rules according to which things are done. Reliable performance of action that depends upon the behavior of hundreds of persons requires established “programs”.
|
|
ζ ν
|
gradual change
|
organizations do change. Learning occurs gradually, over time. Dramatic organizational change occurs in response to major disasters. Both learning and change are influenced by existing organizational capabilities and procedures.
|
|
κ ψ
|
anthropomorphized
|
About the missile crisis, the Model I analyst asks why “Khrushchev”" deployed missiles to Cuba, or the “United States” responded with a blockade and ultimatum. Governments are anthropomorphized as if they were an individual person, animated by particular purposes.
|
|
υ ζ
|
organizations
|
In Model II explanations, the subjects are never named individuals or entire governments. Rather, the subjects in Model II explanations are organizations, and their behavior is explained in terms of organizational purposes and practices common to the members of the organization, not those peculiar to one or another individual.
|
|
κ ω
|
why organize?
|
First, why organization? Why organize? To paraphrase a dictionary, organizations are collections of human beings arranged systematically for harmonious or united action.
|
|
β ο
|
mission accomplished
|
formal organizations are groups of individual human members assembled in regular ways, and established structures and procedures dividing and specializing labor, to perform a mission or achieve an objective. 1 This definition of organization thus does not include people brought together temporarily for a transient purpose.
|
|
π θ
|
impossible tasks
|
Second, and most importantly, organizations create capabilities for achieving humanly-chosen purposes and performing tasks that would otherwise be impossible.
|
|
β ε
|
you do you
|
Third, existing organizations and their existing programs and routines constrain behavior in the next case: namely, they address it already oriented toward doing whatever they do.
|
|
η χ
|
culture
|
Fourth, organizational culture emerges to shape the behavior of individuals within the organization in ways that conform with informal as well as formal norms. The result becomes a distinctive entity with its own identity and momentum.
|
|
α ι
|
tech bundle
|
Fifth and finally, organizations are thus less analogous to individuals than to a technology or bundle of technologies.
|
|
δ β
|
SOPs
|
The standard operating procedures followed by chefs in preparing specific dishes, or by pilots, mechanics, air controllers, and others in operating an airline, constitute softer technologies critical to performance. Like the hardware and software of computers, they both create capabilities otherwise not imaginable, and simultaneously constrain performance that one may desire in the next case, or in the next year-for example the year 2000-for which they were not developed or organized.
|
|
τ φ
|
logic of consequences
|
The first, an analytic rationality, is a logic of consequences. Actions are chosen by evaluating their probable consequences for the preferences of the actor. The logic of consequences is linked to conceptions of anticipations, analysis, and calculation. It operates principally through selective, heuristic search among alternatives, evaluating them for their satisfactoriness as they are found.
|
|
ε δ
|
logic of appropriateness
|
The second logic of action, a matching of rules to situations, rests on a logic of appropriateness. Actions are chosen by recognizing a situation as being of a familiar, frequently encountered, type, and matching the recognized situation to a set of rules. . .. The logic of appropriateness is linked to conceptions of experience, roles, intuition, and expert knowledge. It deals with calculation mainly as a means of retrieving experience preserved in the organization’s files or individual memories.
|
|
ρ ζ
|
fungibility
|
A major purpose of organizing is to ensure that any of the operators, whatever their unique preferences and gifts, can interchangeably and successfully perform normal tasks on any given day.
|
|
α ν
|
complexity
|
Modern society is accompanied by the creation of more and more complex organizations. Routines interact within the same organization. Or they interact between different organizations operating in a more crowded environment for providing services, sometimes redundantly, sometimes in different jurisdictions.
|
|
ρ γ
|
organizational advantage
|
Such triumphs of organized purposiveness vastly increase the number, quality, and availability of products and the performance of both products and providers over any unorganized collection of individual amateurs.
|
|
ρ ξ
|
central purpose
|
can we not explain the behavior of organizations and their members just by discovering the central purposes they were created to serve? Not quite.
|
|
β δ
|
constrained choice
|
societies and their organizations may become so dependent on a particular path toward prosperity, the inertia and transaction costs of change becoming so high, that choices for future development become quite constrained. Having chosen their instruments in the circumstances of the past, they are confined by them as they encounter new circumstances in the future.
|
|
γ μ
|
unique constraints
|
Government organizations are especially burdened by unique constraints; they cannot keep their profits; they have limited control over organization of production; they have limited control over their goals; they have external (as well as internal) rules governing their administrative procedures; and their outputs take a form that often defy easy evaluation of success or failure.
|
|
ο δ
|
expertise
|
A dominant political group that can impose its will on everyone may have a strategy for action but “almost surely lacks the knowledge to do it well. It does not know what to tell people to do. In part this is an expertise problem… . These knowledge problems are compounded by uncertainty about the future.”
|
|
π ν
|
critical task
|
The drive toward efficiency, toward the optimal accomplishment of the mission, also obliges organizations to develop the special capacities for performance of what James Q. Wilson has called their “critical task” a task that forces the organization to formulate distinctive operational objectives.
|
|
θ ψ
|
concrete operations
|
The organizations influence the prioritization of purposes into a definition of their “mission” and are especially influential when the mission is translated, for a specific task, into more concrete, operational objectives. In that context, the organization may seek congruence between the operational objectives and its special capacities for efficient performance.
|
|
φ π
|
sorted search
|
To perform and to make regular judgments, organizations adopt rules, norms, or routines. Where satisficing is the rule-stopping with the first alternative that is good enough-the order in which alternatives are approached is critical. Organizations generate alternatives by relatively stable, sequential search processes. As a result, the menu of choice is severely limited and success is more likely to be defined simply as compliance with relevant rules.
|
|
ω θ
|
programs
|
programs constitute the range of effective choice in recurring situations. “As new situations arise, the construction of an entirely new program is rarely contemplated. In most cases, adaptation takes place through a recombination of lower-level programs that are already in existence.”
|
|
κ β
|
easy to criticize
|
Set programs and rigid routines are easy to criticize, yet they are indispensable to efficient organizations.
|
|
θ ι
|
organizational culture
|
Organizational culture is thus the set of beliefs the members of an organization hold about their organization, beliefs they have inherited and pass on to their successors. This approach to understanding organizational behavior sees organizations and bureaucrats as more autonomous, with great scope to define their critical tasks in a way that serves preferences that arise out of the organization itself and its managers.
|
|
β τ
|
bounded rationality
|
problem-solving under conditions of bounded rationality. Following Barnard, Cyert and March view the organization as a coalition of participants (some of whom are not necessarily on its payroll, e.g., suppliers and customers) with disparate demands, changing focuses of attention, and limited ability to attend to all problems simultaneously. Bargaining among potential coalition members produces a series of de facto agreements that impose constraints on the organization but construct a unique identity.
|
|
σ δ
|
self identity
|
The development of operational objectives to perform a specific task also influences the organization’s culture. Later March, working with Johan Olsen, argues that organizations actually define themselves in taking action. Inchoate circumstances are crystallized in a way that galvanizes the participants and clarifies how they see themselves.
|
|
χ δ
|
cultural occasion
|
decision-making “provides an occasion for other things: an occasion for executing SOPs and fulfilling role expectations, duties or earlier commitments; an occasion for defining virtue and truth, during which the organization discovers or interprets what has happened to it, what it has been doing, and what it is doing; an occasion for glory or blame; for discovering self and group interests; and a good time.”
|
|
ψ ι
|
ceremonial power
|
Operational experiences in the field reinforce certain capacities and routines, even endow the capacities and routines with a ceremonial power that provides legitimation internally or in dealings with the outside world.
|
|
ο μ
|
culture clash
|
Sometimes the cultural routines clash with criteria of efficiency. Efficiency often loses. 35 While individuals can also rely on a “logic of appropriateness,” organizations reinforce this tendency. They provide models for defining identity, classifying a situation, and applying the appropriate rule. They provide cues and prompts by assigning labels and casting people into prescribed roles. They provide experiences that reinforce behavior or produce learning, adaptation, and the development of new rules.
|
|
δ μ
|
preferences
|
1. Where do organizations derive their preferences?
|
|
ν κ
|
constraint
|
2. Why does organizational behavior constrain “rationality”?
|
|
ω λ
|
peculiar
|
3. Why are organizational structures sometimes so peculiar?
|
|
σ ι
|
environment
|
4. How do organizations relate to their environment?
|
|
λ π
|
routine mission
|
both approaches agree on certain basics: a mission, the creation of special capacities linked to operational objectives oriented toward performance of specific tasks, and reliance on associated routines. Both acknowledge in different ways that organizational behavior has a distinctive pattern of its own, with considerable autonomy not only in defining specific objectives but in defining how to measure performance.
|
|
κ ξ
|
interacting routines
|
Organizations develop special capacities and routines for implementation. Once these are recognized, the next step is to notice how they interact with each other. The interactions of programs or routines occur in several different ways.
|
|
θ σ
|
hero
|
Apollo 13 was the first movie to win an Academy Award for best picture in which the hero was an organization.
|
|
τ σ
|
Apollo 13
|
The explosion on Apollo 13 was the product of three events: the mistaken installation of a 28-volt thermostat rather than a 65-volt thermostat when an oxygen tank was built in Colorado in 1968; the misalignment of a drain tube in the tank when it was dropped two inches in a factory in early 1970; and the judgment, less than two days before launch, to heat the tanks to force oxygen out of them after discovery of the misaligned drain tube.
|
|
γ ζ
|
tiger team
|
engineers plotted a way to fire the spacecraft’s main engine so that it would propel the craft on a perfect trajectory back to Earth. There were no routines for this, but a 15-person team of top-notch controllers from each major specialty was collected, called the “Tiger team,” and tackled the various problems. They had experience, special training, established analytical methods, technical support, and routines for implementing their plans.
|
|
θ α
|
can do ethos
|
The Apollo 13 story is, in many ways, a supreme tribute to a “pure” technical culture imbued with a “can do” ethos.
|
|
ε υ
|
who to blame
|
No single person’s calculation can be blamed for the Challenger launch decision. The event can only be comprehended as an organizational output.
|
|
ζ ξ
|
unprecedented conformity
|
the conditions of the Challenger launch decision were unprecedented. But no one recognized that, in an organizational sense. Confronting uncertainty, they followed the usual rules and routines of their engineering culture. Instead of innovating they conformed. Conformity, not deviance, was responsible for the outcome.
|
|
ι ψ
|
unit of analysis
|
I. Basic Unit of Analysis: Governmental Action as Organizational Output.
|
|
α β
|
outputs
|
actual occurrences are organizational outputs.
|
|
φ ο
|
leaders
|
Government leaders can trim the edges of this output and can exercise some choice in combining outputs. But most of the behavior is determined by previously established procedures.
|
|
δ ψ
|
capacities
|
Second, existing organizational capacities for employing present physical assets constitute the range of effective choice open to government leaders confronted with any problem.
|
|
φ κ
|
structured situation
|
organizational outputs structure the situation within the narrow constraints of which leaders must make their decisions about an issue. Outputs raise the problem, provide the information, and take the initial steps that color the face of the issue that is turned to the leaders.
|
|
ε ζ
|
anticlimax
|
To one who understands the structure of the situation and the face of the issue-both shaped by the organizational outputs-the formal choice of the leaders is frequently anticlimactic.
|
|
χ ρ
|
innovation
|
Leaders may try to undertake a new activity, where there is no established organizational capacity or set routines. If they comprehend the effort required to create the preconditions for effective organizational output, they will understand that the payoffs will be for a future crisis rather than for the one at hand.
|
|
η π
|
chess board
|
If the unit of analysis is governmental action as organizational output, then analysis of formal governmental choice centers on the information provided and the options defined by organizations, the existing organizational capabilities that constitute the effective choices open to the leaders, and the outputs of relevant organizations that fix the location of pieces on the chess board and shade the appearance of the issue.
|
|
φ ρ
|
execution
|
Analysis of actual government behavior focuses on executable outputs of individual organizations as well as on organizational capabilities and organizational positioning of the pieces on the chess board.
|
|
α η
|
actors
|
A. Organizational Actors. The actor is not a monolithic nation or government but rather a constellation of loosely allied organizations on top of which government leaders sit. This constellation acts only when component organizations perform routines.
|
|
φ σ
|
fractions
|
B. Factored Problems and Fractionated Power. Surveillance of the multiple facets of foreign affairs requires that problems be cut up and parceled out to various organizations.
|
|
ο ψ
|
missions
|
C. Organizational Missions. Whether missions are stated more formally or more vaguely, many organizations, especially businesses, have an explicit, brief mission statement that seeks to define for their members and customers what businesses they are in and what they seek to accomplish.
|
|
κ ν
|
interpretation
|
Organizations interpret mandates into their own terms. This is especially true when the broad goals conflict or offer little operational guidance.
|
|
κ ο
|
everyday grit
|
D. Operational Objectives, Special Capacities, and Culture. Primary responsibility for a narrow set of problems combines with the gritty, everyday requirements for action to produce distinctive sets of beliefs about how a mission should be implemented and what capacities are needed or wanted to perform it.
|
|
τ α
|
beliefs
|
The beliefs create an organizational culture, marked and accentuated by: (1) the way the organization has defined success in operational terms; (2) selective information available to the organization; (3) special systems or technologies operated by the organization in performing its task; (4) professional norms for recruitment and tenure of personnel in the organization; (5) the experience of making “street-level” decisions; and (6) distribution of rewards by the organization.
|
|
ψ λ
|
stability
|
organizations develop relatively stable propensities concerning priorities, operational objectives, perceptions, and issues.
|
|
η μ
|
preestablished
|
E. Action as Organizational Output. The preeminent feature of organizational activity is its programmed character: the extent to which behavior in any particular case is an enactment of preestablished routines.
|
|
λ φ
|
performance is compliance
|
I. Objectives: Compliance Defining Acceptable Performance. The operational objectives of an organization are seldom revealed by formal mandates. Rather, each organization’s operational objectives emerge as a set of targets, flanked by constraints, that define performance of the critical task. Operators then are obliged to comply with the targets and constraints. For them, successful compliance is successful performance.
|
|
β μ
|
discomfort & disaster
|
constraints are formulated as imperatives to avoid roughly specified discomforts and disasters.
|
|
γ χ
|
sequential attention
|
2. Sequential Attention to Objectives. The existence of conflict among operational targets and constraints is resolved by the device of sequential attention. As a problem arises, the subunits of the organization most concerned with that problem deal with it in terms of the targets and constraints they take to be most important.
|
|
λ ω
|
SOPs, again!
|
3. Standard Operating Procedures. Reliable performance of critical tasks, and associated compliance with targets and constraints, requires standard operating procedures (SOPs). Rules of thumb permit concerted action by large numbers of individuals, each responding to basic cues. The rules are usually simple enough to facilitate easy learning and unambiguous application.
|
|
ρ θ
|
repertoires
|
4. Programs and Repertoires. Organizations must be capable of performing actions in which the behavior of hundreds of individuals is precisely coordinated. Special capacities require sets of rehearsed SOPs for producing specific actions, e.g., fighting enemy units or answering an embassy’s cable. Each cluster comprises a “program” (in the language of drama and computers) that the organization has available for dealing with a situation.
|
|
π σ
|
uncertainty avoidance
|
Organizations do not attempt to estimate the probability distribution of future occurrences. Rather, organizations avoid uncertainty.
|
|
υ χ
|
problem-directed search
|
Where situations cannot be construed as standard, organizations engage in search. The style of search and its stopping point are largely determined by existing routines.
|
|
δ ε
|
biases
|
Patterns of search reveal biases that reflect factors such as specialized training, experience of various parts of the organization, and patterns of communication within the organization.
|
|
θ ρ
|
learning
|
The parameters of organizational behavior mostly persist. In response to nonstandard problems, organizations search and routines evolve, assimilating new situations with considerable skill but within the world view of the organization’s culture.
|
|
υ ξ
|
budgetary feast
|
Typically, organizations devour budgetary feasts by proceeding down the existing shopping list. Nevertheless, government leaders who control the budget and are committed to change can use extra funds to buy new organizational capacities that can perform a radically redefined critical task.
|
|
ι μ
|
budgetary famine
|
Though a single year’s famine typically results in few fundamental changes in organizational structure and procedures, it often causes a loss of effectiveness in performing certain programs. Prolonged famine, however, forces major retrenchment.
|
|
ε ξ
|
dramatic failure
|
Dramatic change occurs usually in response to major disasters. In these circumstances the organization’s culture can be so shocked or discredited that mission, operational objectives, special capacities are all redefined, creating a new culture.
|
|
ε γ
|
loosening up
|
Confronted with an undeniable failure of procedures and repertoires, authorities outside the organization may demand change; existing personnel are less resistant to change; and key members of the organization are replaced by individuals committed to change.
|
|
τ θ
|
coordination and control
|
Governmental action requires decentralization of responsibility and power. But problems do not fit neatly into separable domains. Each organization’s performance of its job has major consequences for other departments. Important problems lap over the jurisdictions of several organizations. Thus the necessity for decentralization runs headlong into the requirement for coordination.
|
|
χ γ
|
intervention
|
Intervention by government leaders does sometimes change the activity of an organization in an intended direction, but instances are fewer than might be expected. These machines are not turned on or off just by pulling a switch.
|
|
ψ ι
|
frustration
|
Politicians are also usually frustrated if they burrow into an organization and try to change its basic programs or SOPs.
|
|
ξ μ
|
feather bed
|
To change anything in the Na-a-vy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.
|
|
κ ν
|
decision makers
|
Organizational persistence does not preclude shifts in governmental behavior. Government leaders sit atop the conglomerate of organizations. In spite of the limits of the leadership’s ability to control changes in a particular organization’s goals or SOPs, many important issues of governmental action require that these leaders decide what organizations will play out which programs where.
|
|
λ ψ
|
alternatives
|
Even in making these various choices, leaders rely for the most part on information provided by, estimates generated by, and alternatives specified by organizational programs.
|
|
ζ λ
|
Dominant Inference Pattern
|
If a nation performs an action of a certain type today, its organizational components must yesterday have been performing (or have had established routines for performing) an action only marginally different from today’s action.
|
|
υ χ
|
t plus 1
|
The best explanation of an organization’s behavior at t is t - 1; the best prediction of what will happen at t + 1 is t.
|
|
η μ
|
December 7
|
the Navy’s activity on December 7 was identical to its behavior on December 6, which differed imperceptibly from its behavior on December 5, and so on.
|
|
σ ζ
|
existing capabilities
|
A. Existing Organized Capabilities Influence Government Choice. The existence of an organization with special capacities for doing something increases the probability that its output/action/option will be chosen by the leadership of the organization and the government.
|
|
μ υ
|
political will
|
It is easier to find the political will to choose such an option since it exists as something that is realistic or feasible as opposed to hypothetical or imagined. The organizations created to provide an option also generate information and estimates that are tailored to make the exercise of that option more likely.
|
|
φ η
|
implementation
|
B. Organizational Priorities Shape Organizational Implementation. When confronted with conflicting goals or orders, organizations prioritize them and define the trade-off.
|
|
θ ζ
|
conflicting goals
|
2. If conflicting goals both accord with the organization’s capacities and culture, the incompatible constraints tend to be addressed sequentially, the organization satisfying one while deferring or neglecting another.
|
|
γ χ
|
SOPs otra vez
|
SOPs constitute routines for dealing with standard situations. Routines allow large numbers of ordinary individuals to deal with numerous instances, day after day, without much thought.
|
|
β σ
|
purchase price
|
regularized capacity for adequate performance is purchased at the price of standardization. If the SOPs are appropriate, average performance-performance averaged over the range of cases-is better than it would be if each instance were approached individually (given fixed talent, timing, and resource constraints). But specific instances, particularly critical instances that typically do not have “standard” characteristics, are often handled sluggishly or inappropriately.
|
|
δ τ
|
programs
|
A program, i.e., a complex cluster of SOPs, is rarely tailored to the specific situation in which it is executed. Rather, the program is (at best) the most appropriate of the programs in the existing repertoire.
|
|
ε α
|
repertoires
|
Since repertoires are developed by parochial organizations for standard scenarios that the organization has defined, programs available for dealing with a particular situation are often ill suited to it.
|
|
α β
|
feasibility
|
D. Leaders Neglect Calculations of Administrative Feasibility at their Peril. Blueprints for action provide one set of opportunities and constraints. Actual implementation of the blueprint provides yet another set. Adequate explanation, analysis, and prediction must address administrative feasibility as a major dimension. A considerable gap frequently separates what leaders choose and what organizations implement.
|
|
η π
|
incremental change
|
E. Limited Flexibility and Incremental Change. Major lines of organizational action are straight-i.e., behavior at one time, t, is marginally different from behavior at t - 1. Straightforward predictions are a good bet: behavior at t + 1 will be marginally different from behavior at the present time.
|
|
α φ
|
splits
|
1. Organizational budgets change incrementally-both with respect to totals and with respect to intra-organizational splits. Organizations could divide the money available each year by carving up the pie anew (in the light of objectives or changes in the environment), but, in fact, organizations take last year’s budget as a base and adjust incrementally.
|
|
χ ι
|
stable culture
|
2. Organizational culture, priorities, and perceptions are relatively stable.
|
|
χ ω
|
increments
|
3. Organizational procedures and repertoires change incrementally.
|
|
ω ν
|
margins
|
4. New activities typically consist of marginal adaptations of existing programs and activities.
|
|
ο λ
|
in the red
|
5. A program, once undertaken, is not dropped at the point where objective costs outweigh benefits. Organizational momentum carries it easily beyond the loss point.
|
|
ω λ
|
planning
|
Long-range planning tends to become institutionalized (in order to provide a proper gesture in that direction) and then disregarded.
|
|
ψ ν
|
prescient report
|
In March 1941, the top Army and Navy air officers in Hawaii prepared a superb and prescient report on planning to defend the island against attack. Washington admired the plan. The patrol aircraft to provide the protection called for in the plan were not in Hawaii, however, and they were not there nine months later though the plan was still in effect.
|
|
η ε
|
Imperialism
|
Most organizations define the central goal of “health” as synonymous with “autonomy.” They therefore seek growth in their budget, personnel, and appealing new territory. Thus issues that arise in areas where boundaries are ambiguous and changing, or issues that constitute profitable new territories, are dominated by colonizing activity.
|
|
α δ
|
Directed Change
|
Existing organizational orientations and routines are not impervious to directed change. Careful targeting of major factors that support routines-such as personnel, rewards, information, and budgets-can effect major changes over time. But the terms and conditions of most political leadership jobs-short tenure and responsiveness to hot issues-make effective, directed change uncommon.
|
|
α φ
|
deterrence
|
superiority or inferiority may affect the probability of a nuclear attack less than a number of organizational facts that may trigger various logics of appropriateness.
|
|
π ζ
|
control system
|
What is the enemy’s control system?
|
|
ι π
|
enemy behavior
|
Second, what patterns of regularized behavior has the enemy developed for bringing his strategic capabilities to alert status?
|
|
ζ κ
|
range of choices
|
Third, organizational processes fix the range of effective choices open to enemy leaders. What plans and procedures will the leaders face when the showdown comes?
|
|
κ ψ
|
training
|
Fourth, outputs of routine organizational procedures set the chessboard and the rules for moving pieces when government leaders confront problems of choice. How are the enemy troops trained, and how are nuclear weapons deployed?
|
|
ζ γ
|
accidents
|
Fifth, how likely are organizational processes to produce accidental firing?
|
|
ε δ
|
force posture
|
Force posture (i.e., the fact that certain weapons, rather than others, are produced and deployed) is determined by organizational factors such as the goals and procedures of existing military services and of research and design labs.
|
