Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation

Editor’s Note to the Digital Edition

This digital presentation of Philip Selznick’s Leadership in Administration is part of a series, Classics of the Social Sciences, which will include several of his early works. Proceeds from his books benefit the Philip Selznick Scholarship Fund in the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program, Boalt School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Selznick’s books in this series will include new Forewords by his former students or colleagues. This ebook’s Foreword is by former student Robert Eli Rosen, currently law professor at the University of Miami, who earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984.

With these republications, we honor the scholarly work of Philip Selznick, in particular his major contributions to social, legal and moral theory. Before his death in 2010, he expressed his approval of this project, now being generously supported by his wife, sociologist Doris Fine.

Because this book is often used in sociology classes as well as courses in administration, political science and business, we have tried to ensure that its digital presentation retain the organization and continuity of the print editions. To that end, the original page numbers from the Harper & Row edition (1957) are embedded into the text in {brackets}. These inserts are the same as the pagination of the print edition (1984) currently available from University of California Press. (This ebook does not purport to be a product of or affiliated with UC Press or Harper & Row.) Selznick’s brief introduction added at that time is also retained, referred to here as Preface to the 1984 Edition, not as Preface to the California Edition, the title previously used. In addition, full continuity of referencing, citation, and syllabi is maintained even within the text-flowing ebook format. The Table of Contents, Index, and all cross-references in both the text and the new Foreword are aligned to the original pagination and the current printed edition. We hope that this effort to provide continuity between the print and digital versions of the text will prove useful to the reader.

Steven Alan Childress

Professor, School of Law

Tulane University

2011

Foreword to the Digital Edition

In Leadership in Administration, Philip Selznick dares managers of private and public enterprises to imagine themselves as statesmen and as clinical psychologists. Selznick dares us to imagine that working for public and private organizations can create group integrity (page 40) and be a valued source of personal satisfaction. (17) Realizing these goals requires that organizational actors be committed to their organizations. Managers become leaders, according to Selznick, when they foster, protect and develop such commitments. Leadership in Administration’s achievement is to show how political theory and clinical analysis enable our understanding of organizational commitment.

Although Selznick presents relatively few business case histories in Leadership in Administration, generations of business students have profited from studying the book. While social science literature on organizations receives only scant attention, Leadership in Administration has been assigned for over half a century to students studying organizations. The continuing appeal of the book stems from its concentrated attention to a basic fact of (organizational) life: commitment. Although it may seem desirable, commitment is not an unalloyed good. Among other things, it matters to whom one is engaged, how one is engaged, how this engagement relates to others and how it relates to one’s future. Be it at the personal, social, political or organizational level, living one’s commitments is fraught with danger as well as desire. Leadership in Administration goes to the root of the concept of commitment, leaving its readers with a better knowledge of commitment as a good and as a practice.

For most other writers on organizations, commitment is merely a prediction of conforming behavior: The committed individual will act as expected. The organizationally committed individual will identify with the organization and its role-sets: the job and its habits will define the worker’s character. So understood, a stable and predictable workforce is created by organizational commitment. Command and coordination are furthered. Commitment appears to be valuable to workers because it suggests that they know where they stand, what they must do, and who they are. Commitment is valuable to the organization because commitment is a form of reward for workers and as a result they will not readily leave the organization. Organizationally committed individuals thus will forsake opportunities for self-growth and development. But an organization with committed workers will have lower training costs.

With commitment so understood, the task of human resources managers then is to reconcile the worker to the rote. In a class society, creating such commitments is no mean task. Researchers from the human relations movement as well as those on corporate cultures, among many others, have advised on how to foster such commitments.

Selznick does not treat with disdain this understanding of commitment. But he differentiates it from leadership. If an organization’s roles can be specified in advance, if the rote predominates, then, he argues, there is little need for leadership. If an organization has a stable environment and fully occupies its niche, it may be happily or efficiently staffed by workers who know where they stand and what they must do. Then, though there may be a need for bosses to drive the workers, there is not a need for leaders to commit workers to the underlying mission of the organization, to their own growth as individuals, or to the elaboration of the organization’s capacities. Selznick emphasizes that the ordinary understanding of commitment places the organization at risk of severe internal crisis whenever current ways of acting need to be changed. Leadership in Administration substitutes analysis of role-sets, relatively well-defined patterns of behavior, with that of role-taking, creative positions taken as adaptive responses. It finds that leadership is necessary wherever roles evolve by experience.

Selznick recognized that organizations, like individuals, have a complex relation to their environment. Economists had long noted that variable resources are provided by the environment. Selznick added that the environment also presents pressures for the organization to grow. This insight was later adopted by the ecological and environmental approaches to the study of organizations. Selznick, however, did not focus on their usual question: power. Environmental pressures for change led him to ask questions about the ego-strength, or character, of the organization. For him, organizations—just like individuals—must be concerned with development and character growth.

Recognizing external pressures on the organization led him to conclude that for an organization to be able to mobilize in response to environmental challenges and reconstruct itself when it must, its commitments and those of its members must be to more than the routine and habitual. In uncertain environments, organizations need to develop within themselves competencies to adapt. They also need to be able to respond to the new needs and problems that such adaptations dynamically create. For the organization, then, commitment properly understood is not only a source of stability, but also a resource for dynamic adaptation. Commitments are character-defining: they guide how the organization will respond to pressure, controlling its growth and development.

Given the complexity of the environment, as well as the unfinished development of the organization, commitments are not unchanging. They must be reassessed continuously. (73) But this does not mean that current commitments and organizational forms are expendable means. Current commitments are valued interests. Current organizational forms are expressions of commitment. Organizations have histories to which they are tied.  Organizations have social structures that are valued by its members. Change may become necessary, but it ignores commitments to see the changed organization as cut loose from its historical past. Even revolutions, which hope to supplant the present, either founder or commit horrors when they ignore that individuals have commitments and that present social structures are valued. Selznick, whose 1952 book The Organizational Weapon depicted the attempts to create the new socialist man, and who in his youth, as a leader of the Trotskyist (Shachtmanist) left, fought the horrors of Stalinist bureaucratic collectivism, was ever vigilant against those who deny what is currently valued—even as he recognized the necessity of change and development.

Understanding the organization as a carrier of values, and as a valued enterprise for those within it, is the perspective of Institutional Theory, as Philip Selznick’s approach to organizations became known. An institution is an organization that is infused with value. (40) It becomes so infused by its and its actors’ commitments. Institutional theory directs attention to commitments as having value. But, these commitments may not be valuable for the organization, given its current (or future) needs. Institutional theory directs attention to the tension between how an organization is valued and what is valuable for the organization. The interrelations of that which has value, that which is valued, and that which is valuable generate the research program for the institutional approach to the study of organizations.

Leadership, for Selznick, enables the transformation of a group into a committed polity. (90) An organizational leader integrates organizational purpose and individual commitment.  Selznick rejects the notion that this integrative task is simply a matter of accounting and discipline. That notion ignores that individuals are reflective about their commitments. It also ignores that ends have a complexity and must be chosen. It suggests that organizations are on sorties, ignoring the organizational mission. It suggests that organizations can rely on issuing orders, ignoring the need for creative choices by multiple actors. For Selznick, the task of the leader is to help define the mission, in light of the environment, the capabilities of the organization and the irrepressible demands of forces within it (68), and then to institutionalize the values, distinctive identity, and commitments necessary for the accomplishment of the mission. Recognition of the social structure of the organization transforms merely administrative problems into political ones.

Understanding the organization as a political institution requires an assessment of the current commitments of the organization. This assessment must take into account both internal conflicts within the organization and a recognition that personal satisfaction can only come from being in an organization that receives communal validation. Leadership in Administration’s military examples drive this point home. So too does its emphasis on the importance to modern organizations of professionals, who are charged with protecting communal values while they work for particular organizations. A leader then must pay attention not only to external threats but also to opportunities. The task of the leader is the elaboration of commitment, building an ever-evolving mission into the social structure of the organization.

For Selznick, leadership is reflexive. Leaders are also led by those they seek to lead and that which they seek to change. Leaders are dynamically tied to these commitments. Leaders should infuse commitments into an organization; not percolate them. Utopianism is to be avoided. This reflexivity as commitments are elaborated emphasizes that leaders make political choices—and also occasions the need for clinical analysis.

Utilizing tools of clinical psychology, Selznick presents an expansive understanding of organization-environment interactions. The organization has a history and a future; it has internal needs and conflicts; it has goals and developing aims and capabilities; and it is driven, responsive, adaptive, and open-ended. For others, as we have seen, the internal interests of the organization, its commitments, will be id-like, inflexible, yet driven, not grappling with the changing environment. For Selznick, both the individual and the organization are enmeshed in developmental processes. Leadership spans both processes and creates a polity in which the capacities for growth of the organization utilizes the capacities for growth of those currently in the organization and of those who may join it.

For Selznick, the clinical goal is to increase organizational competences to respond to changing environmental and internal pressures. Where id was, there ego shall be in organizations means especially avoiding drift and opportunism. An organization can drift as long as the environment allows it. But, in drifting, the organization loses its commitment to itself. An organization also must be wary of taking all opportunities which present themselves lest its commitments become shallow. Focusing on growth, development, and character, Leadership in Administration provides multiple examples of short-term thinking and of a leader’s responsibilities to protect against it.

Psychology has been used by other students of leadership: Many who have toiled to develop accounts of the character traits of leaders. For Selznick, psychology is necessary to define a healthy organization. A healthy organization has leaders, but the leaders’ task is political, not psychological. To Selznick, to focus on the character traits of leaders is to degrade the political task of leadership. It is not the leader’s force of personality that allows her to decide what is valuable and make it valued by those in the organization. For a leader to do this requires an understanding of what is of value in the organization’s situation and to engage the commitments of the organization and its members.

The embrace of value by a leader can be illustrated by considering the absence of commitment. To some, apathy toward or independence from the organization would be understood as the opposite of commitment. In Selznick’s understanding, the opposite of commitment is the retreat to technique (called, at the time, the retreat to technology (74), but is properly understood as technocratism and microfocus). An individual can deflect the force of value by using technique as a shield: I’m just a scientist, or lawyer, don’t confront me with ethical problems. I’m doing what is expected of me. Although a technical role may be valued by an actor, the value of integrating purpose and creativity is lost by an excessive or premature interposition of technique. Consequently, Selznick emphasizes protecting within the organization the independence of professionals, but also committing the professional to the organization.

Leadership in Administration is concerned with how leadership can sustain and maintain organizations. The particular ends an organization pursues does not much concern Selznick, although he notes the importance of communal validation. The trade-offs between solidarity and liberty are set by the needs