Dr Jamal Khan :
(From previous issue)
The sociology of public management, further, looks into the relationships among managers/personnel, the customers and the public interest. An important question is how a manager regards his customers – the citizen/taxpayer he works for, the beneficiaries of the organisational routines and the recipients of development programme/project payoffs. If it is still a patron-client relationship – and this is what generally obtains in Bangladesh – it needs to be replaced by a service provider-customer relationship. As and when personnel serve their customers by generating and delivering outputs, they need to reorient their attitude toward their customers. As to personnel-public interest interface, what kind of social obligations and responsibilities the personnel have regarding public interest emerge as a concern. Plan implementation has its share of sociology. A question comes into sight: why so many routines and projects fizzle out and bog down, and why so many initiatives are not executed as planned. There are gaps, in many instances, between project conception/formulation and project implementation. Several reasons are responsible for the gaps. However, it would be useful to find out to what extent – apart from the well-known managerial and operational problems – the sociological constraints impede the progress of programmes and projects. The task of clearly identifying the sociological constraints remain – what the constraints are, why those pose problems, how these can be tackled, and what problems apparently seem unworkable.
In examining the interface between sociology and public management, the complexity of social structure become an issue, which gives rise to the problem of compliance with organisational objectives and norms. There are manifold ways in which formal structures are modified in reality, to mention some, power/authority, interests, policies, perspectives, institutional/organisational matrix, analytical/procedural aspects, hierarchies/layers, and social distance and conflict. There is also a special relationship the public organization has with its environment. In terms of the broader environment in which a public agency operates, it exchanges transactions with the environment and serves as an intermediary.
The value issues in everyday working life highlight not only the issues of cooperation and collaboration but also the concern of conflict and confrontation. Harmony and coexistence as one form of conduct and discord and confrontation as another type of behaviour have two different sets of consequences for organisational performance.
The nature of loyalty of public personnel and their commitment to their jobs, specialisations and organisations is consequential in its predictive value, i.e. whether or not employees are likely to have a sense of ownership of, pride in and attention to what they do in work settings and how they actually play out their job contracts, because, after all, jobs are contracts between employer and employee for producing and delivering work output in return for compensations.
Built into organisation, management, processes and relationships, conflict has sociological import. A tendency to overemphasise conformity and consensus, particularly with regard to means as well as ends, may not always yield positive results. Conflict is generated and sustained by employee resistance to change, disagreement, differences, divergences, tensions and contradictions. Such resistance may assume varied forms, viz. persistent reduction in output and reliability, increase in the number of quits and requests for transfers, chronic quarrels, violent spats, sullen hostility, wildcat and slowdown strikes, and, of course, the expression of a great deal of spurious reasons why the change will not or cannot work. Even the more petty forms of resistance and deflection can be ruinous, detracting from work, focusing, teamwork and performance. Few efforts, if any, are made by top management to bring individual objectives and organisational goals closer.
Sociologically significant, operating culture tilts heavily toward self-preservation and cagey operation. Such a culture shared and shown by majority of public personnel – routineers, time-servers, cautious careerists, gatekeepers and clock-watchers carefully navigating their careers, avoiding any type of risks and fondly looking to retirement and pensions – not only perpetuate a narrow circle of rigidity, control, centralisation, concentration and containment but also stymie creative, innovative, entrepreneurial, futuristic and meritorious personnel. Culture, further, influences the form of organisation that grows in a society. Each culture teaches people how to act toward the superior, toward subordinates and peers, how to interpret their functions in a particular role or position, when they have been threatened, insulted and humiliated, when they have been complimented, and so on.
(Dr Jamal Khan was professor of public sector management at the University of the West Indies. [email protected].)
(To be continued)
When and where people grow up feeling that they should do exactly what they are directed to do, an organisation that has explicit job descriptions and one that utilises a directive leadership style will be more appropriate than one where positions are open-ended and there is a permissive and participative leadership style. Then again, in a society where individuals grow up thinking that they should accept a directive only when they are convinced it is legitimate, when they know the purpose of the direction and when they see themselves contributing to a goal and making sense out of nonsense, rather than submitting to another individual, then an open-ended participative organisation will be more appropriate.
CULTURE moulds people and people are the basic building blocks or organisations. Culture does more than give people codes of behaviour, knowledge of useful facts, frames of reference, and so on. It also influences his personality, cognition, perception, intellect, affect, social and relational skills and sociality. Significantly, culture gives people identity and an abiding sense of being and becoming. Operating culture is the outgrowth of a long and multifarious historical process – the process which unfolds shifts from particularism to universalism, ascription to achievement, passivity to activity, spoils to merit, diffuseness to specificity and differentiation, authoritarianism to participativeness, monism to pluralism, self-orientation to collectivity-orientation, effectivity-orientation to effective neutrality-orientation, mechanistic to organismic, deterministic to probabilistic, hierarchy to polyarchy, centralisation to decentralisation, technique to purpose, unilateralism to multilateralism, traditionality to modernity, exclusivity to equifinality, verticality to horizontality, closed system to open system, isolation to connectiveness, autarky to interdependence, uniqueness to generality, and individuality to synergy. With the change in time and need, operating culture has been making room for output-consciousness and task-oriented culture.
The management of the human factor and human relations is yet another aspect of the sociology of public management. People are not complex but also interactive, variable and somewhat unpredictable. Unlike natural resources which seek and expect pristine synthesis, symmetry and elegance everywhere they look, sociology, public management and other social sciences deal with the living world, the living humans and scarce resources the outcome of which is often neither elegant nor symmetrical. The human being is a total person interested in himself and conscious of the inputs received from external facts, such as family, neighbours, schools, prayer centres, labour organisations, political parties, interest groups, civil society and advocacy groups. People or personnel cannot run away from the impact of these forces when they respond to work. An employee brings to the workplace a whole person who is only partially motivated by the need to work. What he cannot do is to leave behind the influence, the aspiration and the drive to satisfy natural demands that no organisation can fulfil. Employees may be intent on, for instance, family well-being, child education, home ownership, religious quest, community/social work or comparative art-forms. None of these concerns or pursuits can be shaken off as they pass through the workplace door, even though they come to work because they need money income and self-actualisation and have contracted to exchange work for that income.
Sociologically, one needs to cautiously approach standardisation when it comes to individual employees. Contrary to popular notion, there is no average person. Attempts to take the average of humans, based on the assumption that people are all alike, are risky. Yet, certain realities and compulsions of organised workplaces require order, discipline, consistency and predictability, rules and procedures are developed, work hours are fixed, safety becomes focal, attendance is monitored, division of work linked to achievable outputs, and so on. Despite these standardised techniques, there are opportunities for marginal differential treatment. Work can be re-arranged, job enlargement and enrichment achieved, work hours modified, shift choice provided, merit performance and professionalism recognised, raises and promotions recommended and so forth. The tendency of management/superiors to treat individual employees in a standard and routine way is strong because such a practice simplifies their jobs. Caution and restraint need to be exercised because individual employees want individualised and fair treatment. Though it has its place, standard is not always compatible with the nature of humans, and it must be appreciated discreetly within an organisation. The two correlates are in need of sociological research: curbing where possible and desirable mindless derivative culture and metropolitan bias and indigenising where feasible public management – being fully cognisant of management universals and methodologies – in terms of idea, value, structure, function, process, practice and technique.
Since independence in 1971, sociological impetus – under accelerating social demands, needs, aspirations and expectations – has driven Bangladesh’s public management in enhancing society’s systemic capacity to widen and deepen its range of choice, gradually modify the general and task environment and achieve some preserved goals. But, so far, research funding, collaboration, publication, dissemination, impact, interaction, alliance-building, and consulting have been limited. One, simultaneously, comes across a perceptible insufficiency of appreciation for and undertaking of the sociological aspects of management, change, growth, development and empowerment. Sociologically-induced organisational behaviour and managerial leadership are, in part, generalisable and, in another part, particularistic. Social attitudes, beliefs and values vary in courts around the world and operate at different levels in diverse ways. Socio-cultural variables conditioning public management in, for example, Bangladesh point to attitudes regarding organisational use of information and patterns of organisational confidentiality; social distance that is created and sustained over time between managers and personnel and personnel and customers; pervasive and persistent hierarchy tend to produce false social distinction, status consciousness and social inequality; offering and receiving bribery to obtain outputs and rationalising such transactions as fair service charge; and it has long been traditional for people to spend their lives working for some organisations or sectors, although there appears to have been some shift in this belief and practice in recent years. These are few examples, but there are many more. Bringing our discourse to an end, each national culture has a unique – but some generic – effect on institutions/organisations operating in that culture and this effect, ultimately, tends to constitute the primary pathology of the organisations.
(Dr Jamal Khan was professor of public sector management at the University of the West Indies. [email protected].)
(Concluded)
