Joseph LaPalombara

"Organizations in the 21st Century: Knowledge and Learning—the Basis for Growth" was held Nov. 16-17, 2001 at the Social Science Research Center (WZB) in Berlin, sponsored by the Gottlieb Daimler- and Karl Benz-Foundation.

Presentation

Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB)

November 17, 2001

The Politics of Learning and Learning in Politics

Joseph LaPalombara, Yale University

Introduction

It is for me a very special pleasure to be with you, in this place, and on this occasion. My association with Meinolf Dierkes goes back several years, and, among the several debts I owe him is included my association with this project on organizational learning and knowledge. That association began a few years back, when I had the extraordinary pleasure of spending a few weeks in residence at this center. This is a place that exudes the influence of Meinolf Dierkes, but also a center where there are so many highly competent and interesting persons associated with him. In my experience as a scholar, two locales other than my own university stand out as being unexcelled in the intellectual stimulation they provide. One is the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where I was in residence so many years ago, and where Neil Smelser has provided such outstanding leadership. The other is the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin.

Organizational Learning and Political Science

Meinolf and Ariane Berthoin Antal decided to call this session “The Politics of Learning and Learning in Politics,” which I find entirely appropriate. If the last part of that title is meant to refer to the discipline of political science, I need merely note here what I spell out at length in the first of my two chapters in the Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge. It is that only rarely have political scientists consciously asked whether the organizations they study learn and, if so, how they manage to do this, and with what consequences. How they do this, and with what results. Even rarer (actually close to non-existent) are cases where political scientists who do gather this kind of knowledge associate it with the conceptual and theoretical schemes one finds in the literature on organizational behavior and organizational learning.

This is a great pity. Because, as I show in that chapter, in several of the disciplines’ sub-fields one finds a rich literature that is entirely germane to organizational learning and knowledge. I argue that, much of this writing, were it systematically reviewed, would greatly broaden and deepen our knowledge of the subject of the Handbook and of this conference. In the second chapter that I contribute to the Handbook, I take up in some detail the specific issue of power, and the curious lack of attention to it that we find in the literature on management. I will say a bit more about this later.

I very much like the first part of the title that Meinolf and Ariane have given my presentation, because it points to what I consider a curious omission in the otherwise rich extant literature on organizational learning and knowledge.

To my mind, a phrase like “the politics of learning” implies, or should imply, that the organizational learning process is often, perhaps typically and fundamentally, political in its very nature. This suggests that the processes and the experiences that go into organizational learning, as well as those that pertain to what organizations actually do with what they learn are not unknown to political science. Indeed, regarding these phenomena, political scientists have developed highly sophisticated conceptual schemes, that include such items as the following:

• Preference orderings. These are sometimes called ideologies

• Choice situations. Institutional settings and times during which actors are invited or compelled to make choices among these rank-orderings.

• Conflict and struggle. These phenomena are ubiquitous wherever and whenever there are opportunities to steer choice outcomes in the direction of having one set of preferences prevail over the others.

• Uncertainty as to outcomes. This concept is of crucial importance, in that it refers to the probability that what is chosen (for example by way of strategy, policy, etc.) will ever be successfully implement. The question is, for example, whether something as abstract as what may appear in a directive or a law will ever be transformed into something (like human behavior, or the accumulation of resources, or changes in health or mortality rates) that can be empirically observed and measured.

Concepts such as these are at the very heart of political science research and discourse. They are germane to explorations of political processes of every conceivable variety. They are implicit in the functioning of political institutions, in the interactions among political actors and organizations. They recognize that politics is characterized not just by collective behavior of a collaborative kind but, even more frequently, by competition over control of those institutions and processes that make up what most observers would agree is the legitimate exercise of power.

Management Literature Lacunae

With a few, but of late increasing, exceptions, the literature on management, from which most of what is known about organizational derives, tends to pay scant attention to conceptual schemes and hypothetical formulations that derive from the view of things suggested by these remarks. That is, one finds in this literature very little recognition that private-sector organizations are also characterized by more or less open, more or less subtle, modes of competition, conflict and power seeking.

The literature on management, and by implication on organizational learning and knowledge as well, favors conceptual schemes that depict organizations as collections of highly rational individuals. These men and women are presumed to be highly rational in their behavior, highly committed to the maintenance of organizational harmony, highly oriented to collaborative approaches to policy making and problem solving. Far from pursuing primarily their own expediency or selfish interests, they strive, often as members of “teams” to maximize the interests and the integrity of the organization itself.

Assumptions of this kind serve to guarantee that scholars of private-sector (as opposed to public-sector) organizations will rarely speak the same language. For the latter, immensely more often than for the former, it is immediately recognized, for example, that the status quo in any organization reflects the outcome of an earlier, even if on-going, power struggle. An organization’s goals, its rules of the game, the means chosen for goal achievement, the norms and standards used to recruit, train, reward, promote or separate those who make up the organization itself—all of these aspects of an organization, and more, are reflections of on-going struggle, conflict and power-seeking.

The fact that this is so should not be mistaken, as so often is the case, as organizational pathology. Organizational pathologies there may be, but they are not inherent in the fact that the people who make them up may not be of one mind, that they are competitive in spirit and power-seeking in their behavior. Indeed, without internal conflict, organizations inevitably tend to go stale and atrophy.

Power Obscured

This tendency to obscure the struggle over power, to keep our secret knowledge about such struggles in the closet, so to speak, is deeply rooted in the social sciences, particularly as they developed in the United States in the decades following World War II. Structural-functionalism, so-called systems theories, and rational-actor models emphasize aspects of human behavior that presumably tend to preserve institutions in their particular settings. Assumptions about behavioral dynamics tend to define equilibrium as “normal,” and “system maintenance” modes as preferable to modes that are “dysfunctional.” Scholars who are guided by such theories and assumptions are inclined to privilege, in every sense, aspects of society and of society’s organizations that seemed to reinforce society’s capacity to remain effectively integrated over time.

It was easy to fall into believing that behavior, or indeed philosophies or theories, that privileged the importance of struggle, conflict, power seeking carried with them threats to the integrity and/or the survival of social organizations themselves. Although there has been considerable challenge to and revision of these theoretical “canons,” they continue to hold much more sway in the United States than they ever have in the intellectual circles and universities of Europe and elsewhere abroad

It is possible therefore that the inattention to power and to power struggle that characterizes the literature on management may be a simple reflection of the biases in the social sciences. Nevertheless, I still find it curious that there should be so little attention to conflict and power struggles within the firm in the same literature that not only attends to it explicitly in relationships among firms but also believes that it is natural and healthy in that sphere. Concepts like competition, marginality, creative destruction, mergers and acquisitions, market share, first mover advantage, proprietary information reflect, after all, that the name of the game is really a struggle for power of one kind or another.

So far in the history of the knowledge we have accumulated about organizational behavior and organizational learning, the knowledge base has remained overwhelmingly the individual firm. But, as is only too apparent today in every sphere of life, complex organizations that deeply affect us are now ubiquitous. They are found everywhere. They tend to grow larger as phenomena associated with “globalization” have the parallel effect of somehow making the globe itself seem considerably smaller. The point to stress here, however, is simply put. Our understanding of organizational learning and knowledge will remain hobbled and incomplete unless and until we explore much further how these other organizations behave, whether and how they learn, and what they are, or are not, then able to do with the things they learn.

In my second chapter in the Handbook, I provide something like a guide, designed to alert the reader to some critical aspects of public-sector organizations that distinguish them (sometimes in degree, sometimes in kind) from organizations, like the firm, found in the private sector.

In the public sector, every single aspect of the organizational learning phenomena is permeated by political considerations. In fact, the very structural contours of public-sector and particularly governmental organizations are themselves the outcomes of the political processes. What these organizations then do, how they do it, what they are inclined or permitted to learn, the use to which this knowledge is put, how the organizations may or may not be restructured—all of these things must also be seen as a reflection of politics.

Political Organization Characteristics

Politics means, as I have already suggested, that there exists within the organization an on-going struggle to have one’s particular point of view—one’s values, one’s sense of how best to do things or solve problems, one’s sense of what is more or less permissible on moral or ethical grounds—to have this point of view prevail over others. As I have said, these things occur in the private-sector firm as well. But, here is a short list of what is markedly different about organizations in the public sector. These organizations and/or those who manage them are:

• Normative at their core, in every sense. Their very existence is designed to satisfy the sets of preferences of those who, from time to time, have prevailed in the political power struggle.

• Weighed down by many, often-contradictory goals. The typical public or governmental body will almost never have anything like an overriding purpose, or goal, which is comparable to the search for profit, or a reasonable return on capital.

• Accountable to many diverse constituencies. In democracies, voters are only one of these constituencies, and often far from the most important one in terms of the influence exercised over the organization itself.

• Lacking in real autonomy. Goals of the organization are typically imposed from the outside. Managers of these organizations, even at the highest levels have, at best, very limited control over goal definition.

• Reactive rather than proactive. This condition is implied in what has just been said.

• Deeply institutionalized and, partly for that reason, also conservative.

Public-sector organizations are actually arenas in which the struggle over what Easton once called the authoritative allocation of values is on going. It does not cease. Policies, even after enacted, will be opposed along the way, particularly at the point of implementation. This struggle is not only inter-organizational, within say, the executive branch of government. Nor is it restricted to competition and struggle between branches of government. It includes actors from the outside, formally and informally. Examples would be the so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the interest groups and the lobbys (including from outside the country), perhaps international organizations as well.

We need to recognize that, within the public sector, double-loop learning, even if it occurs at all (in the sense of signaling that existing policies are wrong, perhaps even disastrous), can rarely affect what the organization then does with such knowledge. That is, bringing about changes in policies themselves is simply not an option that organizational managers may actually pursue. Even in those cases where we find what some writers have called “learning organizations,” for example, those that systematize and institutionalize environmental scanning, even single-loop learning, that dictates changes in methods, is very arduous to bring about.

Public and Private Managers Compared

It has long been my judgment that, compared with the existential conditions that surround the public-sector managers, those who manage private-sector firms are living in a decision-making-and-action paradise. To be sure, corporate managers have to deal with their stakeholders, including market-sector analysts who impinge on shareholder value. But these, like consumers, are largely outside constituencies defined by corporate managers themselves. By comparison to the challenge represented by interest groups, political parties and factions, legislative committee members, journalists, investigative authorities, courts, and ordinary citizens who impinge on and interfere with what managers of public organizations do, or can do, managing even world-scale corporations like General Electric, Siemens and the like is really a cakewalk.

Everyone here has had at least one experience of great frustration with public-sector organizations. The typical laments are that these organizations are slow and inefficient, sometimes arrogant and insensitive, more often wasteful in what they do, and so on. Most of us, in these circumstances, might say something like, “Well, it’s all about politics, so what do you expect?”

What we should expect, I think, are at least two things. First, because these organizations are present in all societies, we need to know more about what makes them tick. General theories of organizations and of organizational learning will remain woefully incomplete as long as the present gap in our knowledge remains as huge as I know it to be. Second, and equally important, we need to probe much more deeply into the question whether and to what extent the characteristics of public-sector organizations (such as conflict and power struggles) are germane to private-sector organizations as well. I believe that an important step in exactly this direction has been taken by a number of distinguished scholars whose work appears in the Handbook we are celebrating today.

Models of Organization, Especially Federalism

I wish to turn at this point to suggest that the ways in which persons in the public sector have dealt with organizational and other forms of power struggles may have useful implications for the management of the private-sector firm as well, particularly the global firm.

Consider, for example, that for the first time in history we are witnessing the emergence of the genuinely multinational firm. That is, the global enterprise, even if it never really loses the original nationality of the parent firm, will be compelled by circumstances to be more than nominally multi-national. On the one hand, global firms will retain pace those who define these organizations as “without nationality”) their identity as English, German, American, Dutch, etc.

On the other hand, more than ever before, they will be compelled to take local conditions and demands much more carefully into consideration—from the moment of setting the strategic plans to those moments of organizing productions, marketing and servicing clients in local markets.

One implication of this trend would be that the so-called Sloan Model, as conceived by the General Motors Corporation of the 1920s that was its fountainhead, would not work nearly as well in a global context today. This is because, along almost every relevant dimension, the world is a much less homogeneous place than was, and remains, the United States of America. I know that the Sloan Model dies hard and that, indeed, some global firms are inclined to adopt it at this time. Even if they do, I imagine that this organizational structure will, sooner rather than later, be modified along lines I will suggest in a moment.

In a culturally diverse world, that will remain that way for a very long time, it is impossible to imagine a single, undifferentiated world economy, in which one might visualize a single undifferentiated type of supermarket. Expectations that one is moving in exactly this direction are certain to run into all sorts of walls, palpable or unseen, or cultural resistances. In this context, management will be challenged to implement in organizational terms what Meinolf Dierkes was driving at in his opening address yesterday: The organizational ways and means of recognizing, indeed encouraging, cultural diversity, but without having the organization fall into a state of sub-optimal activity, or paralysis, as a consequence.

At a minimum, corporations will have to learn to do better than they typically do the gathering and utilization of information from their subsidiaries overseas. Meinolf cited yesterday Ariane Berthoin Antal’s research on the woeful lack of corporate learning from expatriates to illustrate this need and defect. I might add that, by comparison, public sector organizations are immensely more wanting on this score. It is sufficient to reflect on how many governmental bodies that operate abroad, or even nationally, systematically gather information in quarterly reports, or through de-briefings of field personnel, only then to place this information in archives that are never consulted.

A major reason for this non-learning in the public sector lies in what I have already noted about the normative and ideological nature of these selfsame organizations. But, as the private-sector firm globalizes, it will perhaps be driven by the profit motive, and by its competition in the market place, to do better than this in the utilization of these learning materials and opportunities.

As the firm globalizes, it will inevitably confront another specific problem that has long troubled nation-states, and the nation-builders who would create or reform them. The problem goes something like this: How should the state organize itself when it is very large, or when, even if it small, consists of great racial, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity?

Historically in politics, it has been found that the so-called unitary state, which is highly centralized and monocratic, does not work well where territory is large and/or diversity is great. Instead, the federal form of organization and governance is the typical model adopted. It is no accident, for example, that the geographically largest of the world’s contemporary nations are federal in form. At the other end of the scale geographically we find that a tiny nation like Switzerland is so linguistically and culturally diverse internally, that the federalism is the model of choice there as well.

Indeed, in politics and government, the most important worldwide trend today is in the direction of federal arrangement. People want more local autonomy. They demand devolution of powers, including the power to tax. It is noteworthy that these pressures and demands emerge right along with all of those advances in transportation, communication, and information technology that are in theory the building blocks for larger and larger organizational models.

Somewhat paradoxically, these demands for increased local autonomy seem to vary positively with the presumed increased ability of the center to know what is going on at the periphery, and to control what happens there. This was certainly the dominant assumption that underlay the explosive growth of the multi-national firms on the heels of the revolutionary changes associated with jet travel, instantaneous and simultaneous systems of communication, computerized storage, retrieval and analysis of information, etc.

Nevertheless, the corporate sector is increasingly feeling some of the same pressures for more local autonomy. The overriding challenge, as so many chapters in the Handbook illustrate, involves finding the ways and means of managing the enormous diversity that the existence of the global corporate organization implies.

Writers like Charles Handy believe that the corporate model of the future is the federal, perhaps even the confederal form. If this is so (and I have some doubts here) then new sets of skills will certainly be required of corporate managers. Many of these skills, for reasons I briefly touched on earlier, come much more easily to public-sector managers. Without them, the latter would not survive very long in a context that requires much negotiation and compromise, that is not hierarchical, that does not permit very often, if ever, that one can simply fire the incompetent or the obstructionists. Where authority is more “flat” than “hierarchical,” and where constituents are multifarious, successful managers are near magicians who manage to stay on top notwithstanding that at least half of the former are determined to defeat them.

To be sure, such skills are found in the private sector as well. We may be talking only about nuances, but this in itself does not diminish the need to recognize the nuances and to take them into account in our theorizing about organizational learning and knowledge.

Were corporate organizational modes to shift more in the federal direction, this would have the benefit, perhaps, of bringing the matter of conflict and power seeking more out into the open. By its very nature, federalism requires that the adaptation to organizational diversity take place primarily at the center Such adaptation requires devolving much more autonomy to the periphery than would be consistent with how today’s managers of global firms think about strategic plans, capital budgets, operational codes, information systems, local alignments to central policies, etc.

The federal model also brings exciting opportunities to benchmark, to look around more systematically for best practice, and to encourage more local experimentation as to the best routes to goal achievement. Environmental scanning with such ends in view is built into federal systems. There exists there a greater propensity to copy, to acculturate, when it is learned that someone else does something better.

Federal models also introduce and may intensify existing tensions within organizations, or the competition that exists amongst them. It is here that creative management is required, in order to keep in useful balance the relationship of recognized conflict and power seeking, on the one hand, and the achievement of the organization’s overall principal goals, on the other.

There may be implicit here another problem, mentioned yesterday by Neil Smelser. An organization’s equilibrium may actually be such that it impedes any learning at all, or, in any case, any learning that may imply change that modifies the equilibrium. All manner of conservatism is implicit in this scenario. My sense of it is that, as a way of minimizing such organizational stasis, the federal model is superior to its unitary alternative. One reason would be that it is in the latter form of organization, and not federalism, that the organizational myth develops that “the person on top of the organization is really in control.”

Conclusion

A Word About the Catholic Church. Finally, a word about one of oldest and most successful federal organizations, mentioned by Neil Smelser but not labeled as federal: I refer to the Catholic Church, headquartered at Rome, whose astonishing success lies, in my view, largely in the extent to which the center has been willing and able to adapt to the most fantastic variety of local conditions and circumstances. The Pontiff has almost always allowed his primarily local managers or field administrators, namely the Catholic bishops, an astonishing amount of discretion, even where some matters of basic doctrine are concerned. If the “strategic plan” fashioned at the Vatican is the “holy word,” the methods to be followed in its local implementation is a matter left largely to the “managing directors,” the bishops in individual dioceses at the periphery. It was not just by the creation of a variety of religious orders that the Church was able to incorporate and adapt to the diversity it encountered around the globe. The Vatican has been much too wise to pretend that a successful global enterprise could become or remain that way on the basis of developing a single corporate culture, a single mission statement, a single general strategy articulated by Rome, on a single set of operating guidelines and instructions that would permit only minimal deviation at the periphery.

I’ve put together these thoughts not because I am convinced that they are necessarily correct. I got into the handbook venture somewhat reluctantly. Having done so, I have learned and benefited much in my own thinking from the literature consulted. Along the way, I have been forced to acknowledge that, alas, many organizations in the political sphere, perhaps most of them, will not be able to engage in or to capitalize double-loop learning.

Also along the way, however, I have also learned that there are indeed management skills that are typically engendered in the public sector that will become more and more salient in the private sector, particularly if present trends toward the globalization of enterprises persist and grow. Imparting these skills would then become an increasingly demanding imperative. This process would, in itself, come to represent a newer or additional form of organizational learning and knowledge that will someday find its way into a second edition of our Handbook.

Revised: 11/13/02. All contents copyright 2001 by Steve Barth, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), and individual authors. All rights reserved. For more information, please contact the Webmaster. Photographs by Peter Hinsel.