Book Review - Administrative Behavior
Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization. By HERBERT A. SIMON. (New York: The Macmillan Company. 1947. Pp. xvi, 259. $4.00.)
Professor Simon brings a penetrating insight into ad- ministrative operations and a distinguished talent for ab- stract thinking to the task of describing the function of decision-making in large organizations. This task in turn leads him to careful building of the vocabulary and set of concepts without which description would be impossible. The reader who balks at conceptual writing and lacks a broad set of administrative experiences to which Professor Simon’s broad generalizations can be related will find the book hard-going.
Certain distinctions are fundamental to Simon’Asdescrip- tion of decision-making and will command general accept- ance. The correctness of an administrative decision is more ascertainable if the decision concerns the best means to an already defined end than if it concerns the relative values of the ends themselves; an administrative science can concern itself with the former but not with the latter. An individual’s behavior encompasses both a rational sphere and an irrational sphere, and much of the function of administrative organization lies in providing those conditions that will enable officials to make decisions in a rational framework. Efficiency of administration is rela- tive; it cannot be appraised solely in terms of success in achieving objectives but must be appraised in the light of the limited resources available to the administrator for achieving the desired objectives. Individual officials, even if they succeed in overcoming preponderant concern with their personal welfare and the welfare of private groups, may identify themselves either with the objective of their organization (e.g. promotion of health) or with the con- servation of their organization qua organization; either of these identifications if not compensated for by adminis- trative arrangements may lessen the officials’ usefulness as decision-makers. Each employee has an “area of ac- ceptance” or, in Barnard’s phrase, an “area of indiffer- ence,” within which he is ready to accept directions by a superior without those directions being formally phrased as commands or implemented by sanctions.
Distinctions of this sort are numerous and serve to clarify thinking about administration. The fact that such distinctions are scarcely novel does not deprive of value their orderly statement as universally valid features of administrative operations.
Despite a notable effort to be realistic, and to distinguish clearly between how administration does operate and how it ideally should operate, Simon has not wholly avoided enmeshment in the formalism that seems a frequent ac- companiment of conceptual analysis. The emphasis is so heavily upon assuring correctness of decisions that there is little if any recognition of the time factor. Yet this factor often makes some decision imperative even at the expense of correctness and precludes the mobilization of relevant information and the thoughtful weighting of values that are requisite to a correct decision. The tele- phone call demanding an instantaneous answer, the quickly called conference on an unanticipated subject, the whole tempo of emergency agencies, are largely ignored by the analysis. The illustrations used by Simon are drawn from such relatively orderly and standardized areas of public activity as social work, sewer construction, ship designing, and fire protection.
The illustrations suggest another curious feature of the book. Although the focusing on decision-making coupled with the conceptual character of the study lead the reader to think of decision-making as almost the same process as policy formation, the illustrations suggest that Simon has in mind principally the social worker, sanitary engineer, and fire chief. The professionalization of such decision- makers and their quite narrow range of discretion make it easy to say, “Two persons, given the same possible al- ternatives, the same values, the same knowledge, can ra- tionally reach only the same decision.” While Simon properly uses this as a basis for a plea to extend the area of rationality in decision-making, it seems to the reviewer to mislead readers into extravagant expectations of auto- maton-like formation of policy. Above the social-worker level the honest differences of opinion among administrators of sound judgment, shared values, and mastery of subject- matter are surely one of the major features of administra- tion. The lack of administrators’ assurance of or agree- ment on the correctness of particular decisions, and the dynamism of conflict out of which decisions often emerge, seem widespread enough phenomena to warrant doubt of our ability to judge the correctness of many decisions on any basis other than empirical study of results. The re- viewer’s feeling that the higher reaches of decision-making have at times eluded the author is strengthened further by Simon’s discussion of “the planning process” entirely in terms of an engineer’s choice of railroad routes and dam sites and a naval department’s designing of a battle- ship. Important as the planning process is to decision- making in public administration, the whole process is here reduced to physical designing by professionalized personnel rather than treated in the more appropriate terms of policy formation for a great administrative agency.
These observations do not do justice to the rich variety of issues that Simon illuminates. The psychological aspects of administrative behavior, the problems of communication preceding and following decisions, the validity of many widely accepted “principles” of public administration, the nature of administrative efficiency, and other administra- tive problems of like moment, are explored with an im- pressive competence. Any student of the theory of ad- ministration will henceforth have to start with Simon’s analysi? of decision-making.
JAMES W. FESLER
2018-07-21 李亮创建