The Critical Importance of Administrative Doctrine

All organizations are guided by a doctrine of management that reflects basic values. The first administrative doctrine was that contained in the brutality of military discipline: ‘Do this or die.” Indeed one of the main reasons officers traditionally carried pistols was to shoot their own men if they were not sufficiently enthusiastic about obeying an order-especially one involving great danger. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), “It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that a good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy.”

A more modern example of a doctrine is Henry Ford’s famous simplistic dictum: “All that we ask of the men is that they do the work which is set before them.” With Ford there was an underlying assumption that employees who do not respond adequately to the “work which is set before them” should be dismissed. (A much better alternative than being shot!) The behavioral technique used here as the same as that applied to those small experimental animals who have spent generations running through mazes for psychologists.    The more work, the more cheese.

Administrative doctrines resemble the paradigms of Thomas S. Kuhn. In his landmark 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn explained that as the natural sciences progressed, they amassed a body of ever-changing theory. Scientific advances were based not on the accumulation of knowledge and facts but rather on a dominant paradigm (or model) used in any specific period to explain the phenomena under study. Rather than refuting previous theories, each paradigm would build on the body of relevant knowledge and theories. Once a paradigm was accepted by consensus among current scholars, it would last as long as it was useful. Ultimately, it would be replaced by a more relevant and useful paradigm; this process of replacement was Kuhn’s “scientific revolution.”

During the spring of 1940, Nazi Germany conquered France using tanks and troops in a blitzkrieg formation (for “lightning war,” the tactical method used by the German army in the invasion of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union during World War II. The classic blitzkrieg campaign involves swift strikes with tanks and planes and a series of army columns exploiting weak spots in the enemy line. Advance units pass behind the enemy, destroying its lines of communication and disrupting unit cohesion.) Germany won despite the fact that France not only had more troops, but also significantly more tanks that were of better quality. What made the difference was that the Germans had a better tactical doctrine for the use of their tanks – in massed assaults as opposed to piecemeal support for infantry.

Remember that the military, the seminal administrative institution of all societies, only has to be led in battle a relatively few days of any year. It is often true, as Mao Zedong famously said, that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But political power is empty and meaningless without concomitant economic and administrative power. Historian Paul Kennedy in his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) demonstrated how in modern times ultimate victory went to the state that was economically strong. Those that were merely strong- Austria, France, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, and the Soviet Union – all suffered from “imperial overstretch” and declined as great powers.

Revolutionaries with their guns can start a revolution, but only the administrators who follow in their wake can solidify and complete it. Napoleon solidified the French Revolution of 1789 with the administrative reforms embodied in the Code Napoleon and the creation of a merit-based civil service. The US Constitution of 1787, which followed the Revolution of 1776, still provides the administrative framework of American government. The Russian Revolution of 1917 led to the administrative apparatus of a socialistic state that, with its command economy, was so cumbersome and inefficient that a subsequent revolution in 1991 replaced it with a regime that had greater hopes for efficiency. All the political revolutions in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s, while initially politically motivated, increasingly became administrative revolutions to secure for their people the blessings of a new administrative doctrine that allows a state’s economy to function with the greater efficiency offered by a free market.

Every major political revolution-from American to the French to the Russian-can be said to have been caused by the same thing-poor public administration. The large middle section of the American Declaration of Independence is a list consisting largely of administrative complaints against George III, the British king. For example, the Declaration asserted that the king “has obstructed the administration of justice,” has imposed “taxes on us without our consent,” and has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people. And eat out their substance.”

QUESTION

1. Explain why an effective administrative doctrine is essential for the successful public administration of a state.

2. Describe why the competence/incompetence cycle of large organizations are greatly like the boom- and- bust of the traditional business cycle.