Strange defeat

One of the consequential puzzles of the Second World War was the sudden, catastrophic collapse of the French army following German invasion in 1940. This is the subject of Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat, written in 1940, and it is an event of major historical importance and mystery. The mystery is this: France was a powerful military force, it had declared war against Germany following the Nazi invasion of Poland, it had ample warning that Germany would wage war against it soon following the invasion of Poland, and it had invested heavily in defensive materiel against an anticipated German attack. And yet when the attack came in May 1940, France was surprised, French armies were quickly defeated, and France capitulated after only six weeks of fighting.

Most people who have written on Bloch's account have focused on the high-level hypotheses to be found in the book: incompetence in the French high command, political dysfunction within the French elite, and a predilection for "Hitler rather than Blum" among the elites. However, upon rereading, it is evident that Bloch has other ideas about the failure of the French military besides these large conflicts within French politics and society. As a staff officer with responsibilities for the organization of logistics, Bloch had ample opportunity to observe the behavior and decision-making of line officers and staff officers. And he focuses a great deal of attention on issues having to do with the mindset and expectations of French military men: what they understand about the battle situation, how they anticipate future needs, and how they communicate with other important actors.

The 'thinking oneself into the other fellow's shoes' is always a very difficult form of mental gymnastics, and it is not confined to men who occupy a special position in the military hierarchy. But it would be foolish to deny that staff officers as a whole have been a good deal to blame in this matter of sympathetic understanding. Their failure, when they did fail, was, however, due--I feel pretty sure--not so much to contempt as to lack of imagination and a tendency to take refuge from the urgency of fact in abstractions. (34)

So cognitive and mental framework shortcomings rise to the very top in Bloch's analysis of French army failures in the conduct of the war:

What drove our armies to disaster was the cumulative effect of a great number of different mistakes. One glaring characteristic is, however, common to all of them. Our leaders, or those who acted for them, were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war. In other words, the German triumph was, essentially, a triumph of intellect -- and it is that which makes it so peculiarly serious. (36)

These limitations of imagination and worldview issues were worsened by what Bloch identifies as a crippling organizational deficiency in the French army -- the strict separation between line officers and staff officers. This led to a very large separation in their worldviews, expectations, and ways of thinking about military matters between line and staff officers. Neither group knew what the other group was thinking or presupposing about the complex conditions of war in which they operated.

One simple and obvious remedy for this state of affairs would have been to establish a system which would have made it possible for small groups of officers to serve, turn and turn about, in the front line and at H.Q. But senior generals dislike having the personnel of their staffs changed too often. It should be remembered that in 1915 and 1916 their opposition to any reform along these lines led to an almost complete divorce between the outlook of the regimental and the staff officer. (35)

Associated with these cognitive framework failures was the French military's failure to adjust to the new "tempo of war" created by German tactics. Bloch recognized through his own experience that the German strategy relied on a tempo of action that outpaced the ability of the French high command and army to react effectively. "From the beginning to the end of the war, the metronome at headquarters was always set at too slow a beat" (43).

This "tempo" problem was not restricted only to the high command:

But it would not be fair to confine these criticisms to the High Command. Generally speaking, the combatant troops were no more successful than the staff in adjusting their movements or their tactical appreciations to the speed at which the Germans moved. (47)

This too can be unpacked into an organizational point: the line officers throughout the chain of command had too little training and readiness for initiative and adaptation; and when plans went wrong, chaos ensued. "They [the Germans] relied on action and on improvisation. We, on the other hand, believed in doing nothing and in behaving as we always had behaved" (49). Bloch is explicit in recognizing that initiative and improvisation could have substantially improved the French position:

That is why the Germans, true to their doctrine of speed, tended more and more to move their shock elements along the main arteries. It was, therefore, absolutely unnecessary to cover our front with a line extending for hundreds of kilometres, almost impossible to man, and terribly easy to pierce. On the other hand, the invader might have been badly mauled by a few islands of resistance well sited along the main roads, adequately camouflaged, sufficiently mobile, and armed with a few machine-guns and anti-tank artillery, or even with the humble 75! (50-51)

And the battlefield consequences of the French military's organizational discouragement of initiative and adaptation were severe:

But I am very much afraid that where this sort of self-government and mutual understanding did not exist, contacts between units and their senior formations, or, on the same level, between one unit and another, left a good deal to be desired. I have more than once heard regimental officers complain that they were left too long without orders, and it is very certain--as I have already shown by citing notorious examples--that the staff was imperfectly informed about what was happening on their section of the front. (66)

Bloch's account has many other strands of organizational observation concerning features of the French army that led to poor performance -- about "discipline of troops", about the intelligence organization, and about the poor liaison relationships that had been developed between French and British army staff.

There is an important lesson to draw here: Bloch's account is usually read as an indictment of French politics and society in the 1930s, but not as a detailed military and organizational study of failure. And yet, it is clear that Bloch has provided a great deal of content that contributes to exactly this kind of micro-level analysis of military dysfunction. Bloch, it turns out, was an astute organizational observer.

There is an interesting parallel between the collapse in 1940 and the comparably dramatic collapse of French armies in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian war (link). In both wars there was an obstinate rigidity in the French general staff that impeded adaptiveness to the changing and unexpected circumstances of the war that quickly engulfed them. Michael Howard's excellent history, The Franco-Prussian War provides extensive details about the sources of military failure in 1870.

It is worth observing that the defeat of France was not the only "strange defeat" that occurred between 1939 and 1941. Poland's very weak defense against Hitler's invasion in 1939, Stalin's unconvincing effort to invade Finland in 1939, and the stunning successes of Hitler's Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 all represent military catastrophes that were on their face unlikely. In the Barbarossa case, much of the explanation falls on Stalin directly: his murderous purges of the Red Army officer corps in 1937, his mulish refusal to accept intelligence about a likely German invasion in summer 1941, his disastrous interference in strategy, placement of armies, and his unconditional orders that made maneuver impossible all combined to produce catastrophe in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Russia itself in the first six months of the invasion. This suggests that perhaps explaining successful largescale military undertakings is harder than explaining failure and defeat. There are many ways to fail in a large, complex and highly coordinated activity like an invasion, and only a few ways to succeed.

Social change and agency

Much of the drama of history is found in processes of large social and political change, both slow and rapid. The sudden collapse of the Soviet system in 1989 and 1990, the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, the decades-long rise of the nationalist right in France and the United States, the rise of fascism in Germany, Austria, and Spain in the 1930s, the success of movements for female suffrage in most western democracies since the beginning of the twentieth century -- these are examples of social and political change that are of great importance for the future of humanity, for better and worse.

There is a school of thought that wants to think of social change as being largely the result of human agency: parties, leaders, social movements, organizations, and social classes bring about changes that they "want" that they plan for. And sometimes this is true enough: the Republican tax-cutting policies of the past forty years in the United States have brought about a lot of social change, and a lot of that has been deliberate. Ideology and class interests, conjoined with a determined and persistent political party, have led to a substantial shift of wealth and income to an ever-smaller percentage of the population.

But much social and historical change doesn't look like that story. The change associated with GOP tax activism is a large and important one; but it is a pretty simple one as well. It is more akin to a pirate band taking plunder from a defenseless coastal population than a long, complex process of engagement with social forces, groups, and structures aimed at creating change.

Unquestionably there is a vast amount of agency, both individual and group, in typical processes of large social change. But much of this agency is contentious and decentralized, with widely different objectives, plans, strategies, and coalitions associated with different configurations of actors. Groups set out with one set of objectives; internal conflicts lead to adjustment and re-prioritization of objectives; other groups hijack the activism and organization of competitors and redirect their efforts towards a different set of goals altogether. The result is a set of outcomes that often would create an enormous sense of surprise for the activists and actors who were involved in collective efforts at the beginning: is this what we were striving for?

This feature of the multiplicity of social actors is what makes the field of contentious politics so important and so interesting. Scholars like McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (Dynamics of Contention) have highlighted the complexity that underlies large social movements, and the social mechanisms through which multiple actors interact, compete, collaborate, and divide from each other. And it turns out that some of the same dynamics that are discovered in large processes of social movements are also found in more ordinary social environments as well; this is the special insight offered by Fligstein and McAdam in A Theory of Fields. Corporations, universities, and government agencies all embody some of the mechanisms of "contentious politics".

But social movements represent just one important source of social change. In broad perspective, there are a handful of different kinds of social factors that are involved in important examples of social and political change. And, significantly, all of these mechanisms play out in a social world which also possesses some dynamics of its own that are largely beyond the reach of purposeful intervention.

Change through social movements

When major segments of a population are mobilized around an issue, they can become important sources of social and political change. This raises questions from several perspectives. First, what factors lead to successful mobilization of a group? Second, what tactics and strategies are available to social groups through which they can bring about change through collective action? And third, what tactics and strategies are available to "incumbents" -- current power holders and the structures that they control -- through which they can defeat the efforts of groups involved in collective action? Concerning mobilization: a group needs to be sensitized to an issue that it can be brought to care about, and this rarely happens spontaneously. Rather, leaders and organizations are needed to convey messages, gather resources, plan for collective action, and the like. As McAdam and Kloos show in Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America, the Tea Party served such an organizational role in conservative mobilization in the 2000s. Concerning tactics: groups can exercise their political will through mass actions -- demonstrations, sit-ins, occupations, boycotts, and electoral contests. They can engage in "everyday forms of resistance," in James Scott's words. And they can support "ideological" campaigns, promulgating and legitimizing the perspective of their group to other non-committed social actors. Finally, incumbents (governments and existing power-holders) can use ideological means to discredit the insurgent organizations. They can use the legitimate enforcement of the legal system to interfere with mass actions. And they can call upon organized force -- both official (police, military) and unofficial (militias, armed organizations) against the actions of insurgents. All of these dimensions have been visible in the collective actions and reactions that have occurred around the Black Lives Matter movement in the past year and a half.

Change through influential organizations

Social mobilization is rarely spontaneous. Rather, there is a need for organizations that have resources and capacities that permit them to rally supporters, conduct strikes and demonstrations, and coordinate efforts with other groups and potential allies. Coordinated collective action requires communication, confidence-building, and resources. Organizations like labor unions, political organizations, religious hierarchies, and kin groups are all able to fill these roles. Charles Tilly highlights the importance of the Catholic Church during the uprising in the Vendée (The Vendee); the Solidarity organization in Poland originating in Gdansk provided this impetus in 1980 (link); and SNCC was able to offer substantial organizational impetus to civil rights activism in the South in the 1960s. So organizations are a highly important ingredient of social mobilization; further, they can play an important role in determining the direction and strategy of a social movement. Labor unions in the United States in the 1960s played an important role in advancing the cause of civil rights, and much of this effort was prompted by the emergence of dissident union activism within unions like the United Auto Workers, including the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and Ford Revolutionary Union Movement (FRUM). Activism by African-American auto workers pushed the UAW into a more active position on the struggle for racial equality. (Here is a brief description of some of this history; link.)

Change through state power

The New Deal and the social agenda of the Roosevelt administration were examples of largescale social change initiated by a government. FDR and his political allies were able to enact programs and legislation that profoundly changed the relationship between ordinary people and the economy in which they lived. A generation later the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, supported by the advocacy and political efforts of the Johnson administration, led to a significant change in the political status of African-American citizens. As McAdam shows in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, these changes would not have been possible without wide and persistent activism and mass mobilization of the civil rights movement; but equally, they would not have occurred without the political efforts of the Johnson administration.

Change through education, media, entertainment

Public perception and worldview plainly play a crucial role in social mobilization and engagement in a struggle for social change. It is evident, then, that the content and pervasiveness of the institutions through which the opinions and perceptions of ordinary citizens are shaped are significant factors in the impulse towards social change. If children and young adults are exposed to values of human equality, freedom, and democracy throughout their education, it is more likely that they will be responsive to issues of racism and authoritarian state behavior later in their lives. On the other hand, if the content of the educational system downplays the importance of equality and democracy and minimizes the history of racial and sexual discrimination, then many in the population will be unmoved by calls for mobilization for greater equality. The influence of right-wing media on political attitudes has been well documented for the past several decades, and this is intentional: the owners of Fox News and similar sources have a message they want to convey, and their programs embody that message. And social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or right-wing sites like Parler and Rumble have proven to have an enormous capacity for generating hate-based activism. The institutions of education, media, and entertainment must be counted as causal factors in the occurrence of social and political change.

Change through generational and demographic shifts

These factors serve to identify some of the direct and purposeful sources of social and political change. But, as historians like Emmanuel Ladurie and Ferdinand Braudel demonstrated (link), there are long waves of change in history that are only remotely related to the intentions and purposes of the current generation. Long, slow processes can lead to substantial social change over time (link). For example, Paul Abramson and Ronald Inglehart argued that a large factor driving change in post-World War II democracies was "generational change and value replacement" (link). Here the idea is that value change in a nation is less about individuals and more about the shifting mix of cohorts of individuals over time. Here is their formulation of this hypothesis in the abstract to this paper:

Generational replacement has had a major impact on the distribution of materialist/post-materialist values among Western publics. Between 1970 and 1984 the ratio of post-materialists to materialists increased substantially in West Germany, Britain, and The Netherlands, and increased somewhat in France. In Belgium and Italy materialist values increased as a result of short-term forces conducive to materialism. In Germany, Britain, and The Netherlands population replacement contributed to the rise of post-materialism. In France, it reversed short-term forces contributing to materialism, while in Belgium and Italy population replacement partially offset short-term forces that contributed to materialist values. Analysis of the impact of generational replacement sheds light on the development of value orientations in Western societies and on a process through which attitude change occurs among mass publics.

Inglehart extends this argument along with Pippa Norris in Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism to offer a degree of reassurance about the likely future of extremist populism: the tide of progressive attitudes towards race and ethnicity is very powerful, and right-wing extremism should be expected to decline.

A similar argument can be made about demographic change in the ethnic composition of a region or country. No particular individual needs to change his or her culinary tastes, in order for the ratio of Swedish restaurants to Polish restaurants to shift as a result of largescale immigration of Swedish families into the region. And if Swedish people are, on average, more liberal than Polish people, then the region becomes more liberal -- even though no individual has become more liberal.

Other longterm causes of large social and political change

It is clear that there are longterm processes of change in the world that affect us greatly, but appear to be "systemic" rather than agentic. Did anyone intend the deindustrialization of cities in what came to be known as the Rustbelt -- Cleveland, Peoria, Milwaukee, Flint, Erie? Was there a grand plan behind the sudden ubiquity of the Internet, websites, and social media? Does the shift in population balance between the midwest and the south and plains states reflect a plan or policy? In all instances the answer in "no." These are extended, anonymous processes that result from activities aimed at other goals altogether -- outsourcing of manufacturing to reduce labor costs, creation of new products like iPhones and advertising-supported websites to enhance profits, individual families and employers making decisions about where their economic and social lives will be best pursued. And yet each of these changes is highly consequential for the future. Justin Gest dissects the social and political consequences of deindustrialization in The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality; the change in social and political life created by the internet revolution is palpable; and the political map deriving from the 2020 Census is discouraging to the current Democratic majority. Populous industrial states will lose seven seats (all but one in the industrial midwest), and southern and plains states will gain seven seats (all but Oregon in the southern or plains states). This is a very significant shift in the balance of political power between regions in the House of Representatives.

What all of this implies is that we humans can affect the direction of our societies through our actions and collaborations; but the certainty and power of our efforts are distinctly limited. There are large obstacles to effective social and political struggles for a set of shared goals; there are formidable resources available to the "incumbents" who oppose the achievement of our goals; and there are large, impersonal forces that are largely impervious to agentic intervention. This does not imply the counsel of despair; but it does suggest the importance of having a realistic and fairly modest expectation of how much success can be achieved in a foreseeable period of time. Two of my favorite aphorisms on this topic are from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Karl Marx, and they are contradictory. Dr. King wrote, "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." And in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx wrote, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Dr. King's sentiment is probably too optimistic; there is nothing inevitable about the achievement of a just society. On this topic, Marx seems to have the more realistic view.

(Here are several earlier posts that are relevant to this topic: real utopias, social progress, social justice movements, progressive politics, purposive social action, protest and dissent, power and social movements, corporate power, unintended consequences, and the civil rights movement.)

Corporations and the Nazi regime

It is apparent, 90 years after the beginnings of the Nazi period, that large corporations played an important and lamentable role in Nazi power and administration, and the implementation of the atrocities of slave labor and mass murder. This is true for domestic German industries, like I.G. Farben and Siemens; and it appears to be true for some multinational companies with subsidiaries in Germany, including the major automobile companies such as General Motors and Ford Motor Company. In his important book Industry and Ideology: I. G. Farben in the Nazi Era Peter Hayes summarizes the involvement of I.G. Farben in these terms: "By 1943, the concern's 334 plants and mines across Germany and occupied Europe were turning out more than 3 billion marks' worth of goods and earning net profits of more than 0.5 billion. Nearly 50% of IG's 330,000-person work force had come to consist of conscript or slave laborers, among whom were some of the perhaps 30,000 inmates of Auschwitz who eventually died in the company's new factory and mines near the camp" (xxi-xxii). And one of its subsidiaries was the industrial source of Zyklon B, the extermination gas used to kill more than a million concentration camp victims.

There are two important questions to address here. First is the question of involvement and complicity itself: what was the extent of the involvement of major companies in the Nazi genocide and slave labor system, and were their executives and governors aware of the crimes to which their corporate resources were being devoted? This is an enormously important question, given that the likelihood of significant moral complicity in the crimes of the Nazi period by companies and large organizations. 

But the second question is, if anything, more important and more difficult. What were the features of corporate organization that led to knowing participation in these monstrous crimes by executives, leaders, and other operatives? Is this fundamentally the result of corporate and organizational dysfunction, beyond the reach of individuals within those organizations? Or is it possibly the indication of direct, personal evil-doing by executives, managers, and boards: a knowing and continuing engagement in evil relationships, leading to slave labor and mass murder, for the purpose of corporate business success and profitability? Were corporate leaders of industrial enterprises in Germany themselves fervent Nazis, committed to Hitler's ideology? Consider Peter Hayes' assessment of the question of ideological support by corporate leaders in the foreword to the new edition of Industry and Ideology: "Very few studies still posit enthusiasm for or even general acceptance of Nazi economic policy among the nation's industrial and banking elite during the late 1930s" (x). Perhaps; but certainly there were committed Nazi supporters among German's executive class, including Willy Heidinger, director of IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag (mentioned below).

Rather than ideology, Hayes emphasizes "business rationality" as the motivating factor for business executives during the period. And he cautions that these same motivations may recur in many other contexts.

The amoral pragmatism and professionalism that propelled Farben's executives dwell within all large-scale organizations, whether they be corporate or political, whether they seek to maximize power or profits, whether they claim to serve the individual, a class, or a race. These drives make Farben an instructive case study in the plasticity of private interests and the consequences of permitting any single-minded doctrine to grasp the levers of a state. Lest that point be lost and readers distance themselves too far and easily from Farben's behavior, I have emphasized here the specious rationality of the concerns's deeds and largely let the self-evident wickedness of some of them speak for itself. (xxvi)

Hayes argues that there was a parallel organizational motivation at work leading executives to conform their business practices to the will of the Nazi regime a kind of accommodating instrumental rationality:

No one who grapples henceforth with the role of industry in the initiation and intensification of the Nazi forced-labor system will be able to do without the terms devised by Lutz Budrass and Manfred Grieger to describe a "clandestine entrepreneurial ethic," a "morality of efficiency," that came to dominate industrial decision making during the war years more than concern for profit or fear of punishment. (xi-xii)

It would appear that this "morality of efficiency" involves a truncated worldview that looks something like this: "We make X (synthetic oil, punchcard machines, automobiles, ...); our organizational goal is simply to design and manufacture these goods as efficiently as possible, without concerning ourselves about the uses that others will put them to (and perhaps without regard to the origin of the resources, including labor) that the regime puts at our disposal to facilitate the process". A "morality of efficiency", then, is a deliberate form of tunnel vision or myopia, in which the product and process are the sole object of attention, whereas the uses and intentions of the state are not.

Since 1998 there have been numerous investigations of corporate behavior during the Nazi period, stimulated by class-action lawsuits concerning liability for slave labor. These lawsuits have led a number of corporations to open their archives to independent historians for careful scrutiny. One of the fruits of this new wave of research on corporate behavior under Nazi dictatorship is a volume edited by Christopher Kobrak and Per Hansen, European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 1920-1945. The book confines itself largely to the question of the business environment created by the rise of the Nazi dictatorship and the power of Nazi party organizations in the control of industry, and its editors are cautious about offering normative judgments about corporate behavior during this period. (I will return to this point below.) Currency controls, direct government mandates, and attractive contracts with large German government agencies all served to create a distinctive business environment for multinational enterprises.

In particular, many of the contributors to the volume pay special attention to the degree to which companies doing business in Germany had latitude to make decisions steering their companies away from the increasingly clear goals of the Nazi regime. Mira Wilkins focuses on the separation of ownership and control that was a crucial organizational fact for numerous multinational corporations in this period:

Owners may not (and usually do not) have full control over managers. The principal-agent problem is multiplied many times over within MNEs. Information is asymmetrical. "Control" is always constrained, but in different manners. Increasingly, I find the concept of managerial control in a purely domestic context elusive, but far more so in an international one. Under dictatorship, rules and regulations limited the decision-making of outward and inward MNEs (and domestic enterprises) in varying degrees. Managers of an affiliate within the host country may understand, interpret, or follow the rules and regulations in accord with the parent company's interests or with their own separate agenda. (23)

Here is Wilkins' summary of the situation of multinational enterprises with subsidiaries in Germany in the 1930s:

Ford in Germany encountered a similar quandary. Sir Percival Perry, head of the British Ford company and until 1937 chairman of the board of the German Ford affiliate, sent Edsel Ford in the United States in 1933 numerous letters on German government interventions. "The Nationalist Socialist Party -- Nazis -- interfere with everything and although their interference is not exactly officially Government, yet it is political and very influential," he reported in June 1933.... Like it or not (and many executives in IG Farben did not like it), IG Farben managers came to recognize that business and politics in Nazi Germany were closely bound. So, too, Ford officials realized that they had to take steps to adjust to certain political realities. What seems increasingly clear are the restraints on corporate choices and the differences that developed within individual MNEs between financial, legal, administrative, and operational strategies and structures. (26)

Wilkins does indeed describe a quandary: Ford (or Farben) would harm or even destroy its business in Germany if it refused to cooperate with German political imperatives. But some of those imperatives should have been refused nonetheless.

Lars Heide explores this "principal-agent" problem between parent and subsidiary in greater detail with regard to the example of IBM and its German subsidiary Dehomag. Heide argues that Dehomag, under the direction of the management of Willy Heidinger, had achieved almost complete autonomy with respect to IBM's corporate management in the United States. Heide takes this evidence to refute the arguments made by Edwin Black in his controversial book about IBM during the German dictatorship. Heide argues that the US-based executives could do very little to control Heidinger's decisions and actions. (Heide also documents that available research does not support Black's claim that IBM punchcard technology was used by German authorities to identify Jews for deportation (171).)

While Heide argues that IBM's US-based corporate leaders had little effective control over the IBM subsidiary, the company continued to profit from the business success of Dehomag in the Third Reich. Dehomag became "IBM's most successful affiliate" (150), with a very extensive business involvement in the Nazi war machine. And Heide makes it clear that Heidinger was himself a vocal supporter of the Nazi dictatorship. The issue of control vs. ownership came up again in the case of IBM and Dehomag:

Simultaneously, the German campaign in May-June 1940 provoked pressure on IBM's relation with its German subsidiary. The conquest of Benelux and France caused Thomas J. Watson of IBM to return a German decoration that he had received in Berlin in 1937 while Chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce working for appeasement with Nazi Germany. From June 1940, this act triggered a Heidinger Putsch to regain majority control of Dehomag, apparently supported by the German authorities. However, the IBM majority ownership was rescued by the introduction of enemy company custodianship when the U.S. entered the war. The custodianship gave Heidinger's management free hands, which implied that he had regained his company but for the ownership. (168)

A note is needed concerning the stance the editors and contributors have taken towards the question of moral responsibility of corporations:

For a long time, business and other historians, working on the interwar period and dictatorships, have concentrated on the question of what business contributed to the rise of dictatorships and why. For understandable reasons, the ethical and moral questions have had a rather high priority. With a great deal of justification, there has been no shortage of condemnation of companies and business managers who profited from cooperating with the dictatorships of the interwar period. However, moral condemnation of historical actors and events is not really the role of historians. It is more important to try to understand what happened and why. Moreover, we want to extend the analysis of how this period affected the strategies and structures of modern business.... (x)

But contrary to this sentiment, I believe that the moral question is central for historians of this period: in what ways should the current generation hold business organizations of the past to account for egregious actions such as use of slave labor and facilitation of the extermination of Europe's Jewish population? It is of course relevant to know the context of decision-making and latitude that was available to corporate decision-makers. But we also need to be very clear in our judgments of the business decisions that were made: some were perfectly legitimate business decisions, some were regrettable but understandable compromises with an almost impossible situation, and others were wholly unacceptable crimes. Is it too "present-ist" to maintain that multinational corporations like IBM, General Motors, or Ford should have ceased business operations altogether in Germany once Hitler's crimes became apparent? 

Of interest in this context is a 1962 article by the progressive American historian Gabriel Kolko, "American Business and Germany" (link), published only a few years after the end of the Nazi regime. Kolko offers a detailed treatment of both the US business press and the business behavior of a number of major US corporations with respect to issues of war and dictatorship in the 1930s, and he finds that the "official views" of the business community (the business press) do not align closely with the actual behavior of US corporations. A key point in the article has to do with multinational cartels and agreements:

American business' functional role in world affairs in the decade or so preceding the war found expression in cartel and contractual agreements between key American firms and German industry. The economic significance of the involved companies is much greater than their numbers. Although only twenty-six of them could be found among the top one hundred industrial corporations fo 1937, together these twenty-six accounted for over 60 per cent of the total assets of the hundred. More important, these corporations generally were the largest in their respective industries, and as such were price and policy leaders. (718)

He also makes several observations about I.G. Farben and its role within the Nazi dictatorship:

The existence of both the Nazi party and I.G. Farben was, from the point of view of the expansionist goals of both, a fortuitous coincidence. The United Steel Works had a strong Nazi group among its top executives, centered about Fritz Thyssen, from its inception. German industry was naturally extremely conservative and alarmed by the growing strength of the Social Democrats and Communists. The unification of I.G. Farben and the cartels with the Nazis was not forced by any means. When the Nazis came to power the essential cartel structure was maintained as the economy was divided into eight major national units, continued under the same leadership, and guided only insofar as unified national production and price policies were concerned. (718-719)

And further:

American companies not only knew of I.G.'s relationship to the Nazis, but to other American concerns as well. This was inevitable, for I.G. made a large number of exclusive agreements with American firms which bound companies not formal partners to their restrictions. Du Pont, to cite one case, was forced to recognize the agreements of I.G. and Union Carbide and Carbon in certain fields and to keep out of them. By making innumerable similar arrangements I.G. was able to prevent many major American chemical and metal firms from following independent commercial and development policies and building the productive facilities which were later to become vital to the prosecution of the war.... It is almost superfluous to point out that the motives of the American firms bound to contracts with German concerns were not pro-Nazi, whatever else they may have been. The arrangements with German firms were stimulated by a fear of international price and market competition and a desire for predictable economic conditions as a basis for business planning. (720)

Kolko concludes the article with these lines:

In their public relations roles the large American corporations inextricably bound to German industry declared their sympathy for the public's antagonism to strategic aid to Germany after 1936, but in their actual behavior these firms pursued a course whose dominant objective was to satisfy their private interests. The export philosophy of General Motors, the agreements for postwar re-establishment of cartel arrangements, the conscious disinterest in the political implications of strategic materials sales by Dow, Standard Oil, and others, suggest that the guiding values of business were distinctly class values. Such conflicts between the business community's actions and the business press indicate the limited usefulness of considering only the business press and corporation press releases in attempting to evaluate the historic relationship of American business to foreign affairs. Equally important, the basic policies of large corporations on the international scene in the 1930s were motivated less by the attraction of new trade frontiers and markets than by their desire for the economic stabilization and predictability which only cartels and market agreements could create. The basis of such "anti-imperialism" by American business was not altruism, but its recognition that its aim of profits with stability could best be attained by international business solidarity. (728)

There is much more to be said about the conduct of corporations during the German dictatorship, and later posts will discuss some recent research on Daimler-Benz, General Motors, and other multinational corporations with respect to the use of slave labor and possible involvement in management of the extermination of Europe's Jewish population.  

 

Good government and the pandemic

Governments at multiple levels are making decisions that affect all of us in ways that really matter. Our health may be protected, or we may contract a serious and life-ending illness; our jobs may be preserved, or we may be furloughed; our savings and retirement funds may be buffered, or they may be wiped out. So what do we want from government when it makes decisions of this degree of seriousness?

It is not particularly hard to answer this question. We want government to fulfill its mission of preserving the public good in the most prudent possible way. We want to see a process of reasoned decision-making, informed by honesty and integrity; full commitment to science and evidence; commitment to the common good by legislators and executives; policies that are informed by accurate knowledge of what citizens in all parts of society need and want; and effective design and administration of public policy. We want decisions that respect the laws and institutions of our democracy. And we want government fully committed to serving all the people without bias or preference. We want good government, without irrational impulsive decisions by officials, without corruption and self serving, without a craven attempt to use the tools of government for the advantage of one's political party or one's followers. 

Many aspects of this ideal have been challenged in our national politics for years: climate denial; disregard of racial disparities in criminal justice, education, and health; corporate capture of regulatory processes. And now in the past three years we've had to confront the threat posed to our democracy by right-wing extremism and hate-based political activism. We've had to worry about the deliberate efforts by the right to undermine voting rights, to create tax "reforms" that benefit corporations and ultra-rich individuals, and to capture the Federal court system with hacks whose only qualifications are their loyalty to the conservative agenda. We have had to ask whether our institutions of law and constitution will survive, and whether there are institutions, practices, and strategies that can make our democracy more resilient in the face of assault by right-wing populism. 

Is good government possible within a liberal democracy? Is this description a realistic expectation of the governments that serve us within liberal democracies? Or is this description simply naive idealism? 

It is certainly true that we have lost institutional capacity in government (in regulatory agencies, for example -- EPA, NRC, FDA, FAA) as a result of the determined assault on government by conservatives and corporate interests. And, of course, there is the fact of corrupt and self-interested use of office by some elected officials and government officers -- greatly exacerbated in the past three and a half years. But it is clear that honest, effective, and evidence-based democratic government is possible, and we need to struggle to make it a reality. The values expressed here are crucial to democracy. So it is our task as citizens to reaffirm the role that public institutions must play in a complex society like ours. 

In fact, the Covid-19 crisis has created some grounds for hope for the future of good government, as demonstrated at the level of state government. In Michigan, for example, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has followed an exemplary process in attempting to design policies and regulations that will best protect the Michigan population from the ravages of the pandemic. Her priorities have been admirable and appropriate, and her efforts to pull together the best possible advice from experts in the state, including experts in public health, workplace safety, logistics, and medicine from the state's universities, provides a case study in prudent, forward-looking, and fact-based policy formation in a time of great uncertainty. Governors in other states have likewise shown wisdom and courage in leading their various agencies to create wise policies for public health. Governor Inslee in Washington, Governor Cuomo in New York, Governor Hogan in Maryland, Governor Newsom in California, and Governor DeWine in Ohio have all succeeded fairly well in creating rational and science-informed policies to preserve the public health of the populations of their states. (These six states represent about 29% of the whole population of the United States.) And, in the absence of effective Federal action in this crisis, governors have succeeded in creating regional partnerships with other states to coordinate their policies. Of course it is evident that there are also a handful of Republican governors who continue to deny the seriousness of the crisis and to act in flagrant disregard of the most basic public health policy recommendations. But it is clear that we have some good examples of government processes that have worked well at the state level. (At the national level, of course, it is a completely different story.) So good government is indeed possible. We must do our part by electing leaders and legislators who are committed to the principles of good government.

Can the functions of government be delegated to voluntary individual action? The pandemic sheds light on this question too. The efforts that some states pursued in February and March to beg citizens to practice voluntary social distancing were fundamentally ineffective. Spring break in Florida, crowds in California, people saying "they have faith that God will take care of them" -- as a public we didn't do very well in self-designing or self-imposing sound public health behaviors. And as epidemiologists have demonstrated throughout this crisis, it doesn't take many non-compliant individuals to keep the exponential growth of infection going. Free-riding ("I can go to the grocery store without a mask if enough other people don't"), failure to understand non-linear processes ("there are just a few cases in Seattle, how bad can it get"), and perverse magical thinking ("it will all blow over in a while, and I'll probably be OK") seem to have motivated enough people to behave badly that voluntary measures were doomed to failure. One part of the problem is the complexity of a disease epidemic. Most citizens simply could not incorporate the mathematics of an epidemic into their practical thinking. They could not accept that on this nice sunny day, devastating disaster was already unfolding. So the power and regulatory authority of the state was needed. (Even mandatory measures don't seem to be enforceable in many places.) 

We thus have concrete illustration of the fact that good government is both necessary and possible. So a fundamental demand of citizens upon their potential leaders must be one of commitment and competence: is this candidate committed to using government for the key functions of securing the health, safety, freedoms, and wellbeing of all citizens? And does he or she have the leadership competence and skill that will be needed to marshal the organizations and agencies of government in support of these fundamental goals? 

Slime mold intelligence

We often think of intelligent action in terms of a number of ideas: goal-directedness, belief acquisition, planning, prioritization of needs and wants, oversight and management of bodily behavior, and weighting of risks and benefits of alternative courses of action. These assumptions presuppose the existence of the rational subject who actively orchestrates goals, beliefs, and priorities into an intelligent plan of action. (Here is a series of posts on "rational life plans"; link, link, link.)

It is interesting to discover that some simple adaptive systems apparently embody an ability to modify behavior so as to achieve a specific goal without possessing a number of these cognitive and computational functions. These systems seem to embody some kind of cross-temporal intelligence. An example that is worth considering is the spatial and logistical capabilities of the slime mold. A slime mold is a multi-cellular "organism" consisting of large numbers of independent cells without a central control function or nervous system. It is perhaps more accurate to refer to the population as a colony rather than an organism. Nonetheless the slime mold has a remarkable ability to seek out and "optimize" access to food sources in the environment through the creation of a dynamic network of tubules established through space.

The slime mold lacks beliefs, it lacks a central cognitive function or executive function, it lacks "memory" -- and yet the organism (colony?) achieves a surprising level of efficiency in exploring and exploiting the food environment that surrounds it. Researchers have used slime molds to simulate the structure of logistical networks (rail and road networks, telephone and data networks), and the results are striking. A slime mold colony appear to be "intelligent" in performing the task of efficiently discovering and exploiting food sources in the environment in which it finds itself.

One of the earliest explorations of this parallel between biological networks and human-designed networks was Tero et al, "Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design" in Science in 2010 (link). Here is the abstract of their article:

Abstract Transport networks are ubiquitous in both social and biological systems. Robust network performance involves a complex trade-off involving cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance. Biological networks have been honed by many cycles of evolutionary selection pressure and are likely to yield reasonable solutions to such combinatorial optimization problems. Furthermore, they develop without centralized control and may represent a readily scalable solution for growing networks in general. We show that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks—in this case, the Tokyo rail system. The core mechanisms needed for adaptive network formation can be captured in a biologically inspired mathematical model that may be useful to guide network construction in other domains.

Their conclusion is this:

Overall, we conclude that the Physarum networks showed characteristics similar to those of the [Japanese] rail network in terms of cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance. However, the Physarum networks self-organized without centralized control or explicit global information by a process of selective reinforcement of preferred routes and simultaneous removal of redundant connections. (441)

They attempt to uncover the mechanism through which this selective reinforcement of routes takes place, using a simulation "based on feedback loops between the thickness of each tube and internal protoplasmic flow in which high rates of streaming stimulate an increase in tube diameter, whereas tubes tend to decline at low flow rates" (441). The simulation is successful in approximately reproducing the observable dynamics of evolution of the slime mold networks. Here is their summary of the simulation:

Our biologically inspired mathematical model can capture the basic dynamics of network adaptability through iteration of local rules and produces solutions with properties comparable or better than those real-world infrastructure networks. Furthermore, the model has a number of tunable parameters that allow adjustment of the benefit-cost ratio to increase specific features, such as fault tolerance or transport efficiency, while keeping costs low. Such a model may provide a useful starting point to improve routing protocols and topology control for self-organized networks such as remote sensor arrays, mobile ad hoc networks, or wireless mesh networks. (442)

Here is a summary description of what we might describe as the "spatial problem-solving abilities" of the slime mold based on this research by Katherine Harman in a Scientific American blog post (link):

Like the humans behind a constructed network, the organism is interested in saving costs while maximizing utility. In fact, the researchers wrote that this slimy single-celled amoeboid can "find the shortest path through a maze or connect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner with low total length yet short average minimum distances between pairs of food sources, with a high degree of fault tolerance to accidental disconnection"—and all without the benefit of "centralized control or explicit global information." In other words, it can build highly efficient connective networks without the help of a planning board.

This research has several noteworthy features. First, it seems to provide a satisfactory account of the mechanism through which slime mold "network design intelligence" is achieved. Second, the explanation depends only on locally embodied responses at the local level, without needing to appeal to any sort of central coordination or calculation. The process is entirely myopic and locally embodied, and the "global intelligence" of the colony is entirely generated by the locally embodied action states of the individual mold cells. And finally, the simulation appears to offer resources for solving real problems of network design, without the trouble of sending out a swarm of slime mold colonies to work out the most efficient array of connectors.

We might summarize this level of slime-mold intelligence as being captured by:

• trial-and-error extension of lines of exploration
• localized feedback on results of a given line leading to increase/decrease of the volume of that line

This system is decentralized and myopic with no ability to plan over time and no "over-the-horizon" vision of potential gains from new lines of exploration. In these respects slime-mold intelligence has a lot in common with the evolution of species in a given ecological environment. It is an example of "climbing Mt. Improbable" involving random variation and selection based on a single parameter (volume of flow rather than reproductive fitness). If this is a valid analogy, then we might be led to expect that the slime mold is capable of finding local optima in network design but not global optima. (Or the slime colony may avoid this trap by being able to fully explore the space of network configurations over time.) What the myopia of this process precludes is the possibility of strategic action and planning -- absorbing sacrifices at an early part of the process in order to achieve greater gains later in the process. Slime molds would not be very good at chess, Go, or war.

I've been tempted to offer the example of slime mold intelligence as a description of several important social processes apparently involving collective intentionality: corporate behavior and discovery of pharmaceuticals (link) and the aggregate behavior of large government agencies (link).

On pharmaceutical companies:

So here's the question for consideration here: what if we attempted to model the system of population, disease, and the pharmaceutical industry by representing pharma and its multiple research and discovery units as the slime organism and the disease space as a set of disease populations with different profitability characteristics? Would we see a major concentration of pharma slime around a few high-frequency, high profit disease-drug pairs? Would we see substantial under-investment of pharma slime on low frequency low profit "orphan" disease populations? And would we see hyper-concentrations around diseases whose incidence is responsive to marketing and diagnostic standards? (link)

On the "intelligence" of firms and agencies:

But it is perfectly plain that the behavior of functional units within agencies are only loosely controlled by the will of the executive. This does not mean that executives have no control over the activities and priorities of subordinate units. But it does reflect a simple and unavoidable fact about large organizations. An organization is more like a slime mold than it is like a control algorithm in a factory. (link)

In each instance the analogy works best when we emphasize the relative weakness of central strategic control (executives) and the solution-seeking activities of local units. But of course there is a substantial degree of executive involvement in both private and public organizations -- not fully effective, not algorithmic, but present nonetheless. So the analogy is imperfect. It might be more accurate to say that the behavior of large complex organizations incorporates both imperfect central executive control and the activities of local units with myopic search capabilities coupled with feedback mechanisms. The resulting behavior of such a system will not look at all like the idealized business-school model of "fully implemented rational business plans", but it will also not look like a purely localized resource-maximizing network of activities.

******

Here is a very interesting set of course notes in which Prof. Donglei Du from the University of New Brunswick sets the terms for a computational and heuristic solution to a similar set of logistics problems. Du asks his students to consider the optimal locations of warehouses to supply retailers in multiple locations; link. Here is how Du formulates the problem:

*     Assuming that plants and retailer locations are fixed, we concentrate on the following strategic decisions in terms of warehouses.

• Pick the optimal number, location, and size of warehouses 
• Determine optimal sourcing strategy
• Which plant/vendor should produce which product 
• Determine best distribution channels
• Which warehouses should service which retailers

The objective is to design or reconfigure the logistics network so as to minimize annual system-wide costs, including

• Production/ purchasing costs
• Inventory carrying costs, and facility costs (handling and fixed costs)
• Transportation costs

As Du demonstrates, the mathematics involved in an exact solution are challenging, and become rapidly more difficult as the number of nodes increases.

Even though this example looks rather similar to the rail system example above, it is difficult to see how it might be modeled using a slime mold colony. The challenge seems to be that the optimization problem here is the question of placement of nodes (warehouses) rather than placement of routes (tubules).

High-reliability organizations

Charles Perrow takes a particularly negative view of the possibility of safe management of high-risk technologies in Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. His summary of the Three Mile Island accident is illustrative: “The system caused the accident, not the operators” (12). Perrow’s account of TMI is chiefly an account of complex and tightly-coupled system processes, and the difficulty these processes create for operators and managers when they go wrong. And he is doubtful that the industry can safely manage its nuclear plants.

It is interesting to note that systems engineer and safety expert Nancy Leveson addresses the same features of “system accidents” that Perrow addresses, but with a greater level of confidence about the possibility of creating engineering and organizational enhancements. A recent expression of her theory of technology safety is provided in Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety (Engineering Systems) and Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts.

In examining the safety of high-risk industries, our goal should be to identify some of the behavioral, organizational, and regulatory dysfunctions that increase the likelihood and severity of accidents, and to consider organizational and behavioral changes that would serve to reduce the risk and severity of accidents. This is the approach taken by a group of organizational theorists, engineers, and safety experts who explore the idea and practice of a “high reliability organization”. Scott Sagan describes the HRO approach in these terms in The Limits of Safety:

The common assumption of the high reliability theorists is not a naive belief in the ability of human beings to behave with perfect rationality, it is the much more plausible belief that organizations, properly designed and managed, can compensate for well-known human frailties and can therefore be significantly more rational and effective than can individuals. (Sagan, 16)

Sagan lists several conclusions advanced by HRO theorists, based on a small number of studies of high-risk organizational environments. Researchers have identified a set of organizational features that appear to be common among HROs:

• Leadership safety objectives: priority on avoiding altogether serious operational failures
• Organizational leaders must place high priority on safety in order to communicate this objective clearly and consistently to the rest of the organization
• The need for redundancy. Multiple and independent channels of communication, decision-making, and implementation can produce a highly reliable overall system
• Decentralization -- authority must exist in order to permit rapid and appropriate responses to dangers by individuals closest to the problems
• culture – recruit individuals who help maintain a strong organizational culture emphasizing safety and reliability
• continuity – maintain continuous operations, vigilance, and training
• organizational learning – learn from prior accidents and near-misses.
• Improve the use of simulation and imagination of failure scenarios

Here is Sagan's effort to compare Normal Accident Theory with High Reliability Organization Theory:

The genuinely important question here is whether there are indeed organizational arrangements, design principles, and behavioral practices that are consistently effective in significantly reducing the incidence and harmfulness of accidents in high-risk enterprises, or whether on the other hand, the ideal of a "High Reliability Organization" is more chimera than reality.

A respected organizational theorist who has written on high-reliability organizations and practices extensively is Karl Weick. He and Kathleen Sutcliffe attempt to draw some useable maxims for high reliability in Managing the Unexpected: Sustained Performance in a Complex World. They use several examples of real-world business failures to illustrate their central recommendations, including an in-depth case study of the Washington Mutual financial collapse in 2008.

The chief recommendations of their book come down to five maxims for enhancing reliability:

1. Pay attention to weak signals of unexpected events
2. Avoid extreme simplification
3. Pay close attention to operations
4. Maintain a commitment to resilience
5. Defer to expertise

Maxim 1 (preoccupation with failure) encourages a style of thinking -- an alertness to unusual activity or anomalous events and a commitment to learning from near-misses in the past. This alertness is both individual and organizational; individual members of the organization need to be alert to weak signals in their areas, and managers need to be receptive to hearing the "bad news" when ominous signals are reported. By paying attention to "weak signals" of possible failure, managers will have more time to design solutions to failures when they emerge.

Maxim 2 addresses the common cognitive mistake of subsuming unusual or unexpected outcomes under more common and harmless categories. Managers should be reluctant to accept simplifications. The Columbia space shuttle disaster seems to fall in this category, where senior NASA managers dismissed evidence of foam strike during lift-off by subsuming it under many earlier instances of debris strikes.

Maxim 3 addresses the organizational failure associated with distant management -- top executives who are highly "hands-off" in their knowledge and actions with regard to ongoing operations of the business. (The current Boeing story seems to illustrate this failure; even the decision to move the corporate headquarters to Chicago, very distant from the engineering and manufacturing facilities in Seattle, illustrates a hands-off attitude towards operations.) Executives who look at their work as "the big picture" rather than ensuring high-quality activity within the actual operations of the organization are likely to oversee disaster at some point.

Maxim 4 is both cognitive and organizational. "Resilience" refers to the "ability of an organization (system) to maintain or regain a dynamically stable state, which allows it to continue operations after a major mishap and/ or in the presence of a continuous stress". A resilient organization is one where process design has been carried out in order to avoid single-point failures, where resources and tools are available to address possible "off-design" failures, and where the interruption of one series of activities (electrical power) does not completely block another vital series of activities (flow of cooling water). A resilient team is one in which multiple capable individuals are ready to work together to solve problems, sometimes in novel ways, to ameliorate the consequences of unexpected failure.

Maxim 5 emphasizes the point that complex activities and processes need to be managed by teams incorporating experience, knowledge, and creativity in order to be able to confront and surmount unexpected failures. Weick and Sutcliffe give telling examples of instances where key expertise was lost at the frontline level through attrition or employee discouragement, and where senior executives substituted their judgment for the recommendations of more expert subordinates.

These maxims involve a substantial dose of cognitive practice, changing the way that employees, managers, and executives think: the importance of paying attention to signs of unexpected outcomes (pumps that repeatedly fail in a refinery), learning from near-misses, making full use of the expertise of members of the organization, .... It is also possible to see how various organizations could be evaluated in terms of their performance on these five maxims -- before a serious failure has occurred -- and could improve performance accordingly.

It is interesting to observe, however, that Weick and Sutcliffe do not highlight some factors that have been given strong priority in other treatments of high-reliability organizations: the importance of establishing a high priority for system safety in the highest management levels of the organization (which unavoidably competes with cost and profit pressures), the organizational feature of an empowered safety executive outside the scope of production and business executives in the organization, the possible benefits of a somewhat decentralized system of control, the possible benefits of redundancy, the importance of well-designed training aimed at enhancing system safety as well as personal safety, and the importance of creating a culture of honesty and compliance when it comes to safety. When mid-level managers are discouraged from bringing forward their concerns about the "signals" they perceive in their areas, this is a pre-catastrophe situation.

There is a place in the management literature for a handbook of research on high-reliability organizations; at present, such a resource does not exist.

(See also Sagan and Blanford's volume Learning from a Disaster: Improving Nuclear Safety and Security after Fukushima.)

Organizations as open systems

Key to understanding the "ontology of government" is the empirical and theoretical challenge of understanding how organizations work. The activities of government encompass organizations across a wide range of scales, from the local office of the Department of Motor Vehicles (40 employees) to the Department of Defense (861,000 civilian employees). Having the best understanding possible of how organizations work and fail is crucial to understanding the workings of government.

I have given substantial attention to the theory of strategic action fields as a basis for understanding organizations in previous posts (link, link). The basic idea in that approach is that organizations are a bit like social movements, with active coalition-building, conflicting goals, and strategic jockeying making up much of the substantive behavior of the organization. It is significant that organizational theory as a field has moved in this direction in the past fifteen years or so as well. A good example is Scott and Davis, Organizations and Organizing: Rational, Natural and Open System Perspectives (2007). Their book is intended as a "state of the art" textbook in the field of organizational studies. And the title expresses some of the shifts that have taken place in the field since the work of March, Simon, and Perrow (link, link). The word "organizing" in the title signals the idea that organizations are no longer looked at as static structures within which actors carry out well defined roles; but are instead dynamic processes in which active efforts by leaders, managers, and employees define goals and strategies and work to carry them out. And the "open system" phrase highlights the point that organizations always exist and function within a broader environment -- political constraints, economic forces, public opinion, technological innovation, other organizations, and today climate change and environmental disaster.

Organizations themselves exist only as a complex set of social processes, some of which reproduce existing modes of behavior and others that serve to challenge, undermine, contradict, and transform current routines. Individual actors are constrained by, make use of, and modify existing structures. (20)

Most analysts have conceived of organizations as social structures created by individuals to support the collaborative pursuit of specified goals. Given this conception, all organizations confront a number of common problems: all must define (and redefine) their objectives; all must induce participants to contribute services; all must control and coordinate these contributions; resources must be garnered from the environment and products or services dispensed; participants must be selected, trained, and replaced; and some sort of working accommodation with the neighbors must be achieved. (23)

Scott and Davis analyze the field of organizational studies in several dimensions: sector (for-profit, public, non-profit), levels of analysis (social psychological level, organizational level, ecological level), and theoretical perspective. They emphasize several key "ontological" elements that any theory of organizations needs to address: the environment in which an organization functions; the strategy and goals of the organization and its powerful actors; the features of work and technology chosen by the organization; the features of formal organization that have been codified (human resources, job design, organizational structure); the elements of "informal organization" that exist in the entity (culture, social networks); and the people of the organization.

They describe three theoretical frameworks through which organizational theories have attempted to approach the empirical analysis of organizations. First, the rational framework:

Organizations are collectivities oriented to the pursuit of relatively specific goals. They are "purposeful" in the sense that the activities and interactions of participants are coordinated to achieve specified goals..... Organizations are collectivities that exhibit a relatively high degree of formalization. The cooperation among participants is "conscious" and "deliberate"; the structure of relations is made explicit. (38)

From the rational system perspective, organizations are instruments designed to attain specified goals. How blunt or fine an instrument they are depends on many factors that are summarized by the concept of rationality of structure. The term rationality in this context is used in the narrow sense of technical or functional rationality (Mannheim, 1950 trans.: 53) and refers to the extent to which a series of actions is organized in such a way as to lead to predetermined goals with maximum efficiency. (45)

Here is a description of the natural-systems framework:

Organizations are collectivities whose participants are pursuing multiple interests, both disparate and common, but who recognize the value of perpetuating the organization as an important resource. The natural system view emphasizes the common attributes that organizations share with all social collectivities. (39)

Organizational goals and their relation to the behavior of participants are much more problematic for the natural than the rational system theorist. This is largely because natural system analysts pay more attention to behavior and hence worry more about the complex interconnections between the normative and the behavioral structures of organizations. Two general themes characterize their views of organizational goals. First, there is frequently a disparity between the stated and the “real” goals pursued by organizations—between the professed or official goals that are announced and the actual or operative goals that can be observed to govern the activities of participants. Second, natural system analysts emphasize that even when the stated goals are actually being pursued, they are never the only goals governing participants’ behavior. They point out that all organizations must pursue support or “maintenance” goals in addition to their output goals (Gross, 1968; Perrow, 1970:135). No organization can devote its full resources to producing products or services; each must expend energies maintaining itself. (67)

And the "open-system" definition:

From the open system perspective, environments shape, support, and infiltrate organizations. Connections with "external" elements can be more critical than those among "internal" components; indeed, for many functions the distinction between organization and environment is revealed to be shifting, ambiguous, and arbitrary.... Organizations are congeries of interdependent flows and activities linking shifting coalitions of participants embedded in wider material-resource and institutional environments.  (40)

(Note that the natural-system and "open-system" definitions are very consistent with the strategic-action-field approach.)

Here is a useful table provided by Scott and Davis to illustrate the three approaches to organizational studies:

An important characteristic of recent organizational theory has to do with the way that theorists think about the actors within organizations. Instead of looking at individual behavior within an organization as being fundamentally rational and goal-directed, primarily responsive to incentives and punishments, organizational theorists have come to pay more attention to the non-rational components of organizational behavior -- values, cultural affinities, cognitive frameworks and expectations.

This emphasis on culture and mental frameworks leads to another important shift of emphasis in next-generation ideas about organizations, involving an emphasis on informal practices, norms, and behaviors that exist within organizations. Rather than looking at an organization as a rational structure implementing mission and strategy, contemporary organization theory confirms the idea that informal practices, norms, and cultural expectations are ineliminable parts of organizational behavior. Here is a good description of the concept of culture provided by Scott and Davis in the context of organizations:

Culture describes the pattern of values, beliefs, and expectations more or less shared by the organization’s members. Schein (1992) analyzes culture in terms of underlying assumptions about the organization’s relationship to its environment (that is, what business are we in, and why); the nature of reality and truth (how do we decide which interpretations of information and events are correct, and how do we make decisions); the nature of human nature (are people basically lazy or industrious, fixed or malleable); the nature of human activity (what are the “right” things to do, and what is the best way to influence human action); and the nature of human relationships (should people relate as competitors or cooperators, individualists or collaborators). These components hang together as a more-or-less coherent theory that guides the organization’s more formalized policies and strategies. Of course, the extent to which these elements are “shared” or even coherent within a culture is likely to be highly contentious (see Martin, 2002)—there can be subcultures and even countercultures within an organization. (33)

Also of interest is Scott's earlier book Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests, and Identities, which first appeared in 1995 and is now in its 4th edition (2014). Scott looks at organizations as a particular kind of institution, with differentiating characteristics but commonalities as well. The IBM Corporation is an organization; the practice of youth soccer in the United States is an institution; but both have features in common. In some contexts, however, he appears to distinguish between institutions and organizations, with institutions constituting the larger normative, regulative, and opportunity-creating environment within which organizations emerge.

Scott opens with a series of crucial questions about organizations -- questions for which we need answers if we want to know how organizations work, what confers stability upon them, and why and how they change. Out of a long list of questions, these seem particularly important for our purposes here: "How are we to regard behavior in organizational settings? Does it reflect the pursuit of rational interests and the exercise of conscious choice, or is it primarily shaped by conventions, routines, and habits?" "Why do individuals and organizations conform to institutions? Is it because they are rewarded for doing so, because they believe they are morally obligated to obey, or because they can conceive of no other way of behaving?" "Why is the behavior of organizational participants often observed to depart from the formal rules and stated goals of the organization?" "Do control systems function only when they are associated with incentives ... or are other processes sometimes at work?" "How do differences in cultural beliefs shape the nature and operation of organizations?" (Introduction).

Scott and Davis's work is of particular interest here because it supports analysis of a key question I've pursued over the past year: how does government work, and what ontological assumptions do we need to make in order to better understand the successes and failures of government action? What I have called organizational dysfunction in earlier posts (link, link) finds a very comfortable home in the theoretical spaces created by the intellectual frameworks of organizational studies described by Scott and Davis.

The 737 MAX disaster as an organizational failure

The topic of the organizational causes of technology failure comes up frequently in Understanding Society. The tragic crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in the past year present an important case to study. Is this an instance of pilot error (as has occasionally been suggested)? Is it a case of engineering and design failures? Or are there important corporate and regulatory failures that created the environment in which the accidents occurred, as the public record seems to suggest?

The formal accident investigations are not yet complete, and the FAA and other air safety agencies around the world have not yet approved the aircraft for flight following the suspension of certification following the second crash. There will certainly be a detailed and expert case study of this case at some point in the future, and I will be eager to read the resulting book. In the meantime, though, it is  useful to bring the perspectives of Charles Perrow, Diane Vaughan, and Andrew Hopkins to bear on what we can learn about this case from the public media sources that are available. The preliminary sketch of a case study offered below is a first effort and is intended simply to help us learn more about the social and organizational processes that govern the complex technologies upon which we depend. Many of the dysfunctions identified in the safety literature appear to have had a role in this disaster.

I have made every effort to offer an accurate summary based on publicly available sources, but readers should bear in mind that it is a preliminary effort.

The key conclusions I've been led to include these:

The updated flight control system of the aircraft (MCAS) created the conditions for crashes in rare flight conditions and instrument failures.

• Faults in the AOA sensor and the MCAS flight control system persisted through the design process 
• pilot training and information about changes in the flight control system were likely inadequate to permit pilots to override the control system when necessary  

There were fairly clear signs of organizational dysfunction in the development and design process for the aircraft:

• Disempowered mid-level experts (engineers, designers, software experts)
• Inadequate organizational embodiment of safety oversight
• Business priorities placing cost savings, timeliness, profits over safety
• Executives with divided incentives
• Breakdown of internal management controls leading to faulty manufacturing processes 

Cost-containment and speed trumped safety. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the corporation put cost-cutting and speed ahead of the professional advice and judgment of the engineers. Management pushed the design and certification process aggressively, leading to implementation of a control system that could fail in foreseeable flight conditions.

The regulatory system seems to have been at fault as well, with the FAA taking a deferential attitude towards the company's assertions of expertise throughout the certification process. The regulatory process was "outsourced" to a company that already has inordinate political clout in Congress and the agencies.

• Inadequate government regulation
• FAA lacked direct expertise and oversight sufficient to detect design failures. 
• Too much influence by the company over regulators and legislators

Here is a video presentation of the case as I currently understand it (link). 

See also this earlier discussion of regulatory failure in the 737 MAX case (link). Here are several experts on the topic of organizational failure whose work is especially relevant to the current case:

Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies
Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Enlarged Edition
Andrew Hopkins, Lessons from Longford: The ESSO Gas Plant Explosion