Dr Jamal Khan :
THERE is an easy and lazy tendency either to understate or underrate the sociology of public management. It is so naïve for some of us to think or act as though there is no social context of management action, and as though, worse still, one can pluck out management from society with a deft touch. While public management is concerned with capability, skill and will to run routine operations and to achieve goals and objectives, sociology involves the human-social facets of individuals and organisations constituting the management system. How sociology, in this regard, has relevance for public management and vice versa arouses our interest and deserves a closer execution.
The sociology of public management embraces a multitude of areas. First, every formal organisation – management agency, army, trade union, private organisation, family, citizen group, etc – attempts to put together human as well as technical resources as tools for the achievement of its prescribed goals. Organisations play a role in sustenance, enhancing the ability of a society to widen its range of choices in modifying the environment. However, individuals within an organisation tend to resent their use as means. Instead, they prefer to work as wholes, seeking to harmonise with the organisation their own inclinations, aptitudes, problems and purposes. Also, an organisation has its locus in an institutional matrix and is, hence, open to pressures and cross-pressures on it from its social and physical milieu to which some general as well as specific adjustments must be made from time to time. Consequently, a public organisation may be looked at as an adaptive social structure.
Within each organisation, an informal and sub-formal structure develops which indicates the spontaneous activities of individuals and groups to control the conditions of their existence. Informal modes of control and communication surface within and beyond an organisation. The informal structure is consequential from the formal system of control and delegation. In practice, the informal structure is useful to the organisational leadership and effective as a means of communication and leadership. Simultaneously, an understanding will have to be reached for such an adjustment by way of power-sharing, human relations, and the like. An organisation, in practice, operates somewhat differently from what is expected in theory, a strategic or periodic relaxation of given rules and conditions may be observed, and bypassing some of the long-established and somewhat rigid rules are seen as helping cut down red-tape. Hierarchy in organisations – though necessary for command, control and coordination – is not cost-free. It tends to breed disaffection among personnel. It tends to inhibit individual identification with organisational objectives. Interpersonal relations and effective operations are likely to be affected in one way or another.
Public management is involved, inter alia, with planning, control and field-level operation and implementation. In practice, the field often appears to perform more productively if a certain degree of operational latitude is accorded to them. Control without some latitude is counterproductive. There is a need for more feedback and reporting between head office and field office. In lieu of a strict enforcement of discipline among personnel at all times, strategic leniency and compassion occasionally may have sometime greater payoffs in facilitating individual identification and ownership, work motivation and productive efficiency. In rigidly-run workplaces, for example, whose heads provide inflexible direction and frequently check up on personnel, motivation and productivity tend to drop than in workplaces where employees are given broad guidelines and more spontaneity to do the work. Studied and carefully-nurtured informality go as far as to claim that authority needs to be used discreetly and lenience demonstrated strategically.
A theoretical study of public management is usually directed toward the formal systems, structures, behaviours, sectors, institutions, organisations, procedures and techniques/tools. But to be effective, the systems and structures must relate to a social ecology in which these often encounter inertia, resistance and hostility. The patterns of behaviour and the value systems of a traditional social organisation based on kinship, ties, caste, sect, cult, bond, religion, tribe and party affiliation are inimical to be achievement-oriented and universal values of knowledge, skill, learning, application, utilisation, performance and productivity on which a modern management system is normally built.
Party patronage, interest-group influence, factional interests and organisational dysfunctions militate against and water down sound personnel policies, merit-based recruitment and planned organisational goals. In conditions of large and rising unemployment/underemployment, such as what exists in Bangladesh, politics interfere with recruitment. The ruling party may be concerned about rising living costs and lower prices, but conventional party interventions may disrupt market forces. An excessive demand on party ties and loyalties from public personnel may alienate them from the party interests and public sector. Stubborn and unfair labour organisations and the influences they exert on political leadership may create a work situation in which discipline is poor, service inadequate, morale low, management defensive and indecisive, customers disaffected and uncertainty pervasive. Re-electability and popularity on the part of politicians may breed unprincipled behaviour and endanger sound, productive and goal-focused management. The divisions and fractiousness of ties, caste, colour, regionalism, creed, sect, gender, age, race, tribe, language and religion may be reflected in the management system, working against team-building, teamwork, professionalism, factuality and the growth of a modern value system.
If these constraints forced by the real world on the management system be pushed aside, if in its concern with the logic and rationality of systems and structures it shuts out the cleavages and schisms of the real social situation in which growth and development occur, public management will remain far removed from reality. Public sector employees – whose behaviours, attitudes and values taken over from the traditional, pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial society are averse to teamwork, participation, collegiality and modern professional value system – can be a part of, rather than a solution to, challenges and problems. Field-level pressures from labour organisations, producer groups, citizen groups and voters may escalate and intensify where politics trumps management nearly always.
The sociology of public management relates to a host of social constraints on development planning and implementation. In certain societies, such as Myanmar, there seems to be a general disinclination toward work, causing many Myanmarese to evince negative work attitude. Also, undifferentiated institutional structures present social barriers to development. Individuals show reluctance to work for compensation because of traditional kinship, rural, tribal, ethnic, lingual, cultural and other ties. Whether or not extended family, joint family and nuclear family systems bear on acceleration or deceleration of management and development are equally researchable. Management’s sociology points to certain aspects that are important for preparing people for organisational life and impose constraints and limitations on the organisations that can develop within a culture – obligations to others, self-responsibility, separation of work and pleasure, and differences in time concepts, viz. discipline of schedules, appointments, deadlines and priorities.
Several sociological and cultural factors bear on public management: the general attitude of the society toward managers/if a career in medicine or law is regarded as having higher status than one in public or business management; the dominant views toward authority and lower-level personnel/ if personnel are expected to follow omniscient paternalistic decisions of the superiors or employee participation is accepted and encouraged; the extent to which cooperation between groups is a way of life/ if class status and social distance is rigid and unvarying or the mobility outlets are open to capable individuals regardless of class affiliation; the extent of union-management cooperation; the view toward achievement and work/ if the society values life achievement through hard work as a desirable personal trait or if achievement in other fields is regarded as paramount; the extent of inflexible class structure and individual mobility/if individuals move to higher positions on the basis of their abilities or they are restricted by class, colour, caste or other forms of ascription not related to ability; the dominant view toward wealth formation and material gain/ attitudes toward saving and the desire for material wealth versus religious satisfaction, the pious life or other nonmaterial stimuli; the view toward natural/ social scientific rationality and methodology/if the society is interested in preserving traditional culture and patterns or in following a given ideology, regardless of the logic involved or the empirical evidence and new discoveries available or if the society recognises the relationships among such factors as demand, supply, price, cost, wage, training, absenteeism and turnover; the view toward risk-taking/ an individual and an organisation willing to take reasonable risks; and the view toward change/if the people in a society maintain their basic faith in traditions or if they embrace change which promises to improve overall productivity and progressive rationality.
When a public sector’s routine operation or a development programme/project for a rural or urban community is involved, the issue here is how the target groups view the output delivery. Do they, for instance, accept, reject, resent or acquiesce to it? Do the resist or welcome such a change in this milieu? In the event such an initiative interferes with the lifestyle, work habits, belief system, customs, etc of the target groups, how they view it and which course of action, if at all, they intend to take. Such queries of sociological import have an influence on the success or failure and acceptance or rejection of a routine or a programme. If initiatives are imposed on a target group, in the long haul they are less likely to succeed. For instance, public management will continue to be somewhat less relevant unless it is enriched by indigenous research in respect of the sociology of work, communication, motivation, leadership, commitment, identification, ownership, performance, productivity and incentives.
Such queries as why people work, why work at all, what motivates them, what turns them off, what they look for in a workplace, etc. need to be answered. Part of the answers has to be found in the context of Bangladesh. The sociological orientation of public sector employees deserves a closer scrutiny. Those who serve as agents of change and as careers of innovating values in, for example, rural communities deserve research probing.
THE sociology of public management is evident in organisational dysfunctions and pathologies. The financial forces of corruption included, dysfunctions are those consequences that interfere with adjustment and create problems in the structure of organisations, foment friction and tension internally in organisations and spread negative externalities throughout the larger society. Corruption starts, spreads, takes root, escalates and contaminates the management system in such a way that it can become systemic. Major, minor and even routine work may not get done without having to bribe individuals and groups. If interpersonal relations in an organisation are formal and impersonal, the likelihood of developing a high esprit de corps is low. The strict exercise of authority and rigid enforcement of discipline tend to drive employees – anxious to be highly regarded by their managers – to conceal from their errors and sloppiness in work. The obstruction of information flow upward in the hierarchy stifles effective management. Insistence on conformity tends to create rigidities in official conduct and inhibit initiative and rational judgement.
(Dr Jamal Khan was professor of public sector management at the University of the West Indies. [email protected].)
