Suchergebnisse

The most interesting educational experiment in the world today for the student of comparative administration and business and government is the Administrative Staff College at Henley-on-Thames, England. This College is pioneering the methods which, in any industrialized nation, are needed to restore the flexibility and initiative that must always accompany free enterprise. The College also provides a new approach to leadership training in that enrollees are recruited in fixed proportions from public and private employment by a method that produces balanced management teams among the members (as the "students" are called), and the teaching procedure stresses group work and self-instruction rather than formal lectures.This original venture, headed by Princeton-trained Noel F. Hall, was founded in 1946 and opened in 1948. Already it is being imitated in widely scattered parts of the world. Henley has turned out some 1,300 policy administrators of the average age of 39, all of whom had been tapped for higher responsibilities by their employers—who incidentally foot the bill—before going to Henley for the three months' session. Each session—there are three a year—is limited to 60 members; six of the 60 members may be drawn from overseas and the rest come from private business, the central civil service, local government, the nationalized industries, and banking.

How to bring managerial independence and public accountability into a working accord, so that neither efficiency nor necessary controls will be neglected, is the fundamental problem arising out of the operation of government corporations. Having dealt with managerial independence in the first instalment of this article, we now are faced with the problem of explaining how such independence can be reconciled with the controls necessary to assure public accountability. Experience everywhere has shown that governments can carry on a business enterprise efficiently only, when it possesses sufficient autonomy and flexibility to call forth managerial skills that are self-reliant and inventive as well as prudent. It has been argued that the corporate device, when faithfully followed, is superior to departmentalism in at least three major respects: it is potentially less subject to injurious political considerations; it is more autonomous in organization and capable of a greater degree of unity in its management, both of which are essential to efficient operation; and it has more flexibility with regard to its financial operations and is designed to stand on its own financial feet, as a business-operated enterprise should. The competent manager of a government corporation must be free within his own sphere, but he must also be externally accountable in important respects as regards both policy and administration, and to both Congress and the President. To effect such an equilibrium is difficult, at best, but it is particularly difficult and uncertain when the political climate is hostile toward the social purposes for which government corporations are created.

The government corporation has become a familiar device of public administration all over the world; and yet in some countries, and especially in the United States, uncertainty as to its distinctive purpose and underlying principles seems to grow, rather than to diminish, as the public corporation becomes older and more extensively used. Lack of interest and research cannot be blamed, because in recent years the degree of concentration in this area has probably been relatively as great as in any other sphere of political science. The basic explanation is that administrative formulas and management principles are rarely, if ever, capable of immunization against group pressures and public policy controls, which bend administration to their own designs, sometimes in conformity with what the impartial experts consider sound principle and practice, but just as often in knowing disregard of such considerations and in a determined effort to support their own interests and economic viewpoints.