Armand LAUFFER

UNDERSTANDING
YOUR SOCIAL
AGENCY
SECOND EDITION

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HUMAN SERVICES GUIDE 3

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UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

SECOND EDITION

SAGE HUMAN SERVICES GUIDES, VOLUME 3

 SAGE HUMAN SERVICES GUIDES
A series of books edited by ARM AND LAUFFER and CHARLES D.
GARVIN. Published in cooperation with the University of Michigan
School of Social Work and other organizations.

1: GRANTSMANSHIP by Armand Lauffer 48: MANAGING HUMAN SERVICES

(second edition) PERSONNEL by Peter J. Pecora and
10: GROUP PARTICIPATION Michael J. Austin
by Harvey J. Bertcher 49: IMPLEMENTING CHANGE IN SERVICE
(second edition) PROGRAMS by Morris Schaefer
11: BE ASSERTIVE by Sandra Stone Sundel and 50: PLANNING FOR RESEARCH
Martin Sundel by Raymond M. Berger and
14: NEEDS ASSESSMENT by Keith A. Neuber with Michael A. Patchner
William T. Atkins, James A. Jacobson, and 51: IMPLEMENTING THE RESEARCH PLAN
Nicholas A. Reuterman by Raymond M. Berger and
15: DEVELOPING CASEWORK SKILLS Michael A. Patchner
by James A. Pippin 52: MANAGING CONFLICT by Herb Bisno
17: EFFECTIVE MEETINGS by John E. Tropman 53: STRATEGIES FOR HELPING VICTIMS
20: CHANGING ORGANIZATIONS AND OF ELDER MISTREATMENT
COMMUNITY PROGRAMS by Jack Rothman, by Risa S. Breckman and Ronald D. Adelman
John L. Erlich, and Joseph G. Teresa 54: COMPUTERIZING YOUR AGENCY’S
25: HELPING WOMEN COPE WITH GRIEF INFORMATION SYSTEM by Denise E. Bronson,
by Phyllis R. Silverman Donald C. Pelz, and Eileen Trzcinski
29: EVALUATING YOUR AGENCY’S 55: HOW PERSONAL GROWTH AND TASK
PROGRAMS by Michael J. Austin, GROUPS WORK by Robert K. Conyne
Gary Cox, Naomi Gottlieb, J. David Hawkins, 56: COMMUNICATION BASICS
Jean M. Kruzich, and Ronald Rauch FOR HUMAN SERVICE PROFESSIONALS
30: ASSESSMENT TOOLS by Armand Lauffer by Elam Nunnally and Caryl Moy
31: UNDERSTANDING PROGRAM 57: COMMUNICATION DISORDERS IN AGING
EVALUATION by Leonard Rutman and edited by Raymond H. Hull
George Mowbray and Kathleen M. Griffin
33: FAMILY ASSESSMENT by Adele M. Holman 58: THE PRACTICE OF CASE MANAGEMENT
35: SUPERVISION by Eileen Gambrill and by David P. Moxley
Theodore J. Stein 59: MEASUREMENT IN DIRECT PRACTICE
37: STRESS MANAGEMENT FOR HUMAN by Betty J. Blythe and Tony Tripodi
SERVICES by Richard E. Farmer, 60: BUILDING COALITIONS IN THE HUMAN
Lynn Hunt Monohan, and Reinhold W. Hekeler SERVICES by Milan J. Diuhy with the
38: FAMILY CAREGIVERS AND DEPENDENT assistance of Sanford L. Kravitz
ELDERLY by Dianne Springer and 61: PSYCHIATRIC MEDICATIONS
Timothy H. Brubaker by Kenneth J. Bender
39: DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING 62: PRACTICE WISDOM by Donald F. Krill
PROCEDURES FOR HEALTH AND 63: PROPOSAL WRITING by Soraya M. Coley
HUMAN SERVICES by Morris Schaefer and Cynthia A. Scheinberg
40: GROUP THERAPY WITH ALCOHOLICS 64: QUALITY ASSURANCE FOR LONG-TERM
by Baruch Levine and Virginia Gallogly CARE PROVIDERS by William Ammentorp,
41: DYNAMIC INTERVIEWING by Frank F. Maple Kenneth D. Gossett, and Nancy Euchner Poe
43: CAREERS, COLLEAGUES, AND CONFLICTS 65: GROUP COUNSELING WITH JUVENILE
by Armand Lauffer DELINQUENTS by Matthew L. Ferrara
45: TREATING ANXIETY DISORDERS 66: ADVANCED CASE MANAGEMENT:
by Bruce A. Thyer NEW STRATEGIES FOR THE NINETIES
46: TREATING ALCOHOLISM by Norma Radol Raiff and Barbara Shore
by Norman K. Denzin 67: TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN
47: WORKING UNDER THE SAFETY NET HUMAN SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS
by Steve Burghardt and Michael Fabricant by Lawrence L. Martin
 A SAGE HUMAN SERVICES GUIDE 3

UNDERSTANDING
YOUR SOCIAL
AGENCY
SECOND EDITION

Armand LAUFFER rtl

35 "

,L3%
Published in cooperation with the University of
Michigan School of Social Work
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Indiana University
Library

SAGE PUBLICATIONS
The International Professional Publishers
Newbury Park London New Delhr
Copyright © 1984 by Sage Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
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Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lauffer, Armand.
Understanding your social agency (second edition).

(Sage human services guides ; v. 3)

I. Social service—Handbooks, manuals, etc.
2. Organization—Handbooks, manuals, etc.
I. Title II. Series.
HV35.U5 1984 361 84-18014
ISBN 0-8039-2349X (pbk.)

94 15 14 13 12 11
 CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments 9

Introduction 13
The Ten Perspectives
1. Your Agency as a Career Arena 21
2. Your Agency as a System of Roles 37
3. Your Agency as a System of Small Groups 47
4. Your Agency as a Formal Organization 55
5. Your Agency as an Input-Output Processing System 63
6. Your Agency in Interaction with Its Environment 77
7. Your Agency as a People-Changing and
People-Processing System 91
8. Your Agency as the Context Within Which
Technologies Are Applied 103
9. Your Agency as a Goal-Seeking Organization 115
10. Your Agency as a Locus of Power and
Exchange Relationships 129
Using the Ten Perspectives
11. A Contingency Approach to Problem-Solving
in the Agency 143
References 163
About the Author 167
To Orly and Josh

whose understanding deepens

to wisdom as they continue tshuvah

 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2020 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/understandingyou02edlauf
 PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most acknowledgments begin with references to those whose

aid and support were invaluable to the author. These I will
make momentarily. But first I want to make a rather unusual
acknowledgment.
There isn’t a single new idea in this second edition of
Understanding Your Social Agency, nor were there any new
ideas in the first edition when it came out in 1977! So why
publish it in the first place? And why publish it again in
an expanded version with three additional chapters and nearly
twice the number of original pages? The answers to both
questions are the same and they are different. I’ll explain.
An earlier version of UYSA was developed at the University
of Michigan’s Continuing Education Program in the Human
Services under a grant from the state’s Office of Substance
Abuse Services and later expanded through a grant from
the Edna McConnel Clark Foundation. At the time, my co¬
authors and I were concerned with providing access to con¬
cepts about organizations and how they work to social agency
practitioners. The idea was to help those practitioners translate
behavioral science concepts into action guides they could use
to improve both the quality and scope of service delivery.
When Sage decided to publish UYSA a few years later,
it had been fully tested with feedback from hundreds of users
suggesting some needed revisions and some additions. These

9
10 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

we made. We had expected only modest interest, so the responses

from new readers took us somewhat by surprise. It quickly
became the leading seller in the Human Services Guides series,
having gone through seven printings in its first seven years.
Along with the expanded readership came expanded usage
of the book.
In addition to agency practitioners who continued to pur¬
chase it and use it as an action guide, college and university
instructors ordered it for their students as supplementary reading
in some courses and as the core text in others. It has been
ordered by more than 600 college book stores for community
college courses; for undergraduate sociology, social work,
and human service courses; and for use in graduate and pro¬
fessional schools of social work, business, public health, and
nursing. “But why?” we wondered, since there was nothing
new in the book.
We had designed it to demystify organizations; to take
the sometimes arcane literature of sociology and social
psychology and to make it accessible to practitioners. We
had not intended it as an original contribution to literature.
That there was nothing new in the book was by design. We
had purposefully selected basic (one might call them classic
and neoclassic) concepts from the social sciences, essentially
drawing from mainstream theorists and their oft-quoted books
and published journal articles.
And that, apparently, was precisely what attracted both
instructors and students. The first edition of Understanding
Your Social Agency was used as a key to much of the literature
on organizations for both students and practitioners. “My
students had been resisting the reading assignments in com¬
plex organizations,” a colleague wrote, “but they took to
UYSA with no difficulty. They saw it as an English translation
of jargonese. Once they understood the basic concepts, I
had much less difficulty in sending them back to Parsons,
Simon, Thompson, Blau, and the others.” He then went
on to tell me what he thought was missing from the book.
PREFACE 11

I took his words seriously and did a little informal market

analysis of my own, querying both students and faculty who
had used the book. And based on their suggestions I have
expanded UYSA in a number of ways. First, each of the
original chapters has had material added. Chapter 1, in fact,
was reshaped to emphasize careers in organizations not just
personality styles. The last chapter was expanded to show
the relationships between the use of power in organizations
and the processes of economic and social exchange. Three
new chapters were added to deal with organizational goals,
technologies, and people processing and changing activities.
That these are not new concepts is their strength. Grounded
empirically and subject to heavy review and reexamination,
they are at the foundation of our growing knowledge of how
social agencies work. I don’t mean to imply that other, newer
ideas or approaches to organizational analysis have no value.
To the contrary; it is my expectation that once readers are
familiar with the basics and the original sources on which
this volume is supported, they will be able to go on to more
contemporary sources independently and with a more critical
eye.
For the original idea of the book we all owe thanks to
Professor Beth Reed, whose guidance and direction led to
completion of the first edition. Lynn Nybell and Carla
Overberger not only wrote some of the original chapter drafts,
but designed the basic format, which remains unchanged.
Professor Lawrence Zeff added immeasurably to the first
three chapters. Matt Lampe drafted the first version of the
chapter on power relationships. I bear ultimate responsibility
for the current version of UYSA and for the additional materials.
But if real credit is due, it is not to the “translator” but
to the theorists and researchers on whom we have drawn
liberally.
 INTRODUCTION

Eight hours a day, five days a week! That’s a heavy commit¬

ment of time to put into work. If you are a social worker
or anyone else employed in the human services, chances are
that most of your time is spent within an organizational con¬
text. The context may be that of a social agency, a hospital,
a school; these are all formal organizations and often complex
ones. Each such organization is bound together by its mis¬
sions, technologies, formal rules and informal norms, operating
procedures, authority structures, and patterns for relation
to consumers and resource providers.
If your job is meaningful, if you care about the work
you do and the people you do it with (both clients and col¬
leagues), your thoughts about the organization are likely to
carry over into non-job related activities. As if forty hours-
plus of living within and thinking about a formal organization
were not enough, you are undoubtedly also a member, customer,
client, and perhaps even a “victim” of many other formal
organizations. Within any of these, you may be on one or
another rung of some sort of career ladder, working your
way into greater responsibility and commitment. Thus perhaps
half or more of your waking time is shaped directly by your
involvement in one or more organizations.
Living within an organization can be both satisfying and
disturbing. Complaints about the red tape and impersonality
of a bureaucracy, job stress and burn out, feelings of dependency

13
14 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

coupled with frustration; these are all-too-frequent responses

to life in the organization. Yet we often also find that life
very satisfying—both motivating and fulfilling. The causes
and consequences of such feelings are rarely well understood
by employees of human service organization. Despite their
sensitivity to individual needs and perceptions, social workers
are not sufficiently aware of organizational forces that shape
and give meaning to those needs and perceptions.

ORGANIZATIONS

This is a book about organizations. Before you can under¬

stand your social agency better, you’ll have to know how
organizations work and what they are. Organizations are pur¬
poseful social units; that is, they are deliberately constructed
to achieve certain goals or to perform tasks and conduct
programs that might not be as effectively or efficiently per¬
formed by individuals or informal groups. One might say
that organizations are the means for achieving certain ends,
although some people might argue that, once established,
organizations tend to become ends in their own right. There
is logic to this position, for just as organizations are resources
for meeting the interests of certain publics, they also seek
resources to do their work and support their own interests.
But organizations aren’t just means and ends. They are
made up of people who perform a variety of tasks in the
fulfillment of their many roles within the various offices and
positions established within the organization. Their actions
are coordinated so that individual outputs are somehow sup¬
portive of each other and integrated with the organization’s
goals.
Implicit in this definition are a number of norms against
which an organization might be judged: purpose (relevance,
importance; appropriateness of the organization’s construc¬
tion (structure) in relation to that purpose; goal attainment
(effectiveness); efficiency; types of actions and programs per-
INTRODUCTION 15

formed; the people involved as mandators, staff, consumers

(and the status, training, or supervision that might be required
for them to perform their roles); the nature of the coordina¬
tion process with its implications for power and authority
relationships. These will be dealt with in Chapters 1 through 10.
Implicit also are the two major themes that have dominated
the literature on organizations. The first, generally referred
to as the “classical school” might more descriptively be called
structural determinism. It assumes that what organizations
do is primarily influenced by their technologies and by their
structures. Structural determination focusses attention on divi¬
sion of labor, chain of command, delegation of authority,
and obligations. Relationships between people and organiza¬
tional subunits are perceived to be arranged to accomplish
general goals and more specific objectives. Classical theorists
assume that tasks can be so organized as to accomplish effi¬
ciently what the organization is designed for. Within this
conceptualization people’s relationships within an organiza¬
tion have no meaning other than those established by the
organization. Their goal-oriented behavior (that is, the ac¬
tivities they perform in pursuit of the organization’s goals)
can be optimized through incentives, training, just treatment,
proper supervision—all oriented toward the performance of
tasks as specified. This approach in the literature on ad¬
ministration has come to be known as scientific management.
But this approach is not scientific at all, according to those
who have enunciated the second major theme in organiza¬
tional theory. These “neoclassicists” are mostly behavioral
scientists whose studies suggest that people, not structures,
are what give shape and meaning to organizations. Often
referred to as the human relations school, these behavioral
scientists argue that organizations are, and should be
manipulated to serve people’s ends and not the reverse. People
are not motivated by economic (rational) considerations alone.
The rewards for participation in organization life are fre¬
quently social and personal and may have little bearing on
the purposes of the organization of which they are members
16 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

(staff, legitimators, consumers). The emphasis of these theorists

is on the natural interests of participants, not on the designed
or blue-printed functions to which they may be assigned.
There is yet a third major theme, generally known as the
“systems” approach, which has come to be referred to as
the modern school of organizational theory. This approach
focuses on the interrelationships of the (1) individual partici¬
pant, (2) the formal arrangement of organizational functions
(the formal organization); (3) the informal roles and norms
that emerge out of daily interaction (the informal organiza¬
tion); (4) the forces in the environment (geographic, economic,
and sociocultural) that shape organizational goals and provide
the organization with necessary legitimacy and resources (in¬
puts) as well as the consumers of its products (outputs); (5)
the goals of the organization and technologies it uses to achieve
those goals; and (6) the related tasks and functions that must
be performed if the organization is to respond to internal
and external forces, enabling it to survive and to grow.
If I have taken sides between these points of view, it is
in the direction of taking an “open systems” approach. This
is not to suggest that I will be presenting a comprehensive
picture of how agencies work or that I’ve come up with a
single integrated theory of organizations. To the contrary,
the ten perspectives on organizations presented in this book,
despite the implications each has for the others, are intended
to provide the reader with different viewpoints from which
the organization can be examined.
More about these perspectives shortly. First, we should
identify what distinguishes social agencies from other
organizations.

SOCIAL AGENCIES

I have chosen the term “social agency” deliberately to

contrast with the more current appellation “human service
INTRODUCTION 17

organization (HSO)”. When I first began my career in social

work, there were social agencies, hospitals, prisons, schools,
libraries, and other entities that have recently been grouped
under the more general designation of HSO. I liked the earlier
term and still do. Social implies a mission, a purpose, an
orientation toward service. “Social agency” was of course,
just short for “social service agency”. Agency, in contrast
with other forms of organization, implies a particular kind
of social unit, one that acts in behalf of or in place of others;
in this sense, the general public, or sectors within it.
Moreover, while HSO is a term current within the social
work profession and among a number of behavioral scientists,
it is rarely used by doctors, nurses, librarians, teachers, pro¬
fessors, attorneys, and others who work in human service
organizations, but who are content in calling them by other
names. I’m not sure why this is so. I suspect that there may
be a kind of “imperialism” in the language of social workers,or
perhaps the term is a way of avoiding the very troublesome
fact that social work technologies may be more indeterminate
than those of some of the other professions I mentioned.
The imperialism is also evidenced in the multiplicity of settings
and host organizations in which social workers are now found
(not just in social agencies). And it is in those settings where
the indeterminacy (lack of close correlation between what
social workers do and the end they profess to strive toward)
is most evident—where their work may be evaluated in com¬
parison with that of other professions. I don’t mean this
as a criticism of social work. There are good reasons (explana¬
tions) for such indeterminacy, and we will explore them in
Chapters 7 and 8.
There is, of course, another very important justification
for the HSO designation. By opening a lens wide, it is possible
to take in a broader field, and, in so doing, learn more through
classification and comparison. For this reason much of my
analysis will be drawn from the literature on HSOs and I
will occasionally use the term interchangeably with “social
agency.” Let’s look at that literature right now; a great deal
18 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

of it attempts to spell out how HSOs differ from other

organizations.
To illustrate, I’ll draw on the work of two of my colleagues
at Michigan, Rosemary Sarri and Yeheskel Hasenfeld (1978),
who refer to HSOs as agencies of the community, broadly
defined to include society at large and smaller geographic
or interest communities, established for purposes of promoting
welfare, education, health, social control, and the preserva¬
tion of social values mandated by society in order to con¬
tribute to the fulfillment of societal (social) functions. Draw¬
ing on joint work with two other Michigan colleagues (Robert
Vinter, 1963; and Richard English, 1974), they classify HSOs
on the basis of the kinds of clients they serve and the activities
they perform on those people. Clients can be classified along
a continuum from the “most normal” to the “most malfunc¬
tioning” (those labeled mentally ill, social deviants, criminals).
So far this may not seem very different from the consumers
of other kinds of organizations such as business firms. Don’t
they also serve all kinds of people? The difference is that
people become clients of HSOs specifically because they have
been located on such a continuum and have had their
characteristics so labeled.
The activities that HSOs perform can be categorized as
“people processing” and “people changing,” (what Robert
Vinter has described as “treatment”). Processing is essentially
a program of labeling. It includes intake, diagnosis or assess¬
ment, categorization, and referral to others for purposes of
action or treatment. Treatment refers to a variety of change
strategies aimed at control, education, personal development,
and so on.
These are useful designations, and you might keep them
in mind as you read on. But they say more about the what
than the what for of these organizations. Around this question
a former colleague, David Austin adds considerable clarity.
Austin (1981) defines the work of HSOs to be oriented toward
the production of public goods, in contrast to industry or
private, profit-making organizations that produce or distribute
INTRODUCTION 19

private goods. As public goods, their products (services) are

always under some form of public scrutiny, often evaluated
differently by distinct interest groups. Some public goods
are universal, available to all equally and simultaneously (like
air quality control) while other services are available to all,
but not necessarily used equally (such as those provided by
schools and libraries). Some public goods are categorical,
that is they are available only to certain categories of people:
the aged, the infirm, the mentally ill, children with special
needs. Finally, others are redistributional, reallocating goods
and services to those who have not been successful at com¬
peting for such resources in the market (examples include
social security and welfare grants, public housing).
The social agencies I will be referring to throughout this
book generally fall into the categorical and redistributional
designations of HSOs. Their services include protection, stan¬
dard of living enhancement, developmental enhancement, and
nonfiscal redistribution of resources.

HOW TO USE THE BOOK, AND WHAT FOR

I have divided the book into eleven chapters. Each of the

first ten takes a particular perspective or point of view from
which to examine an agency. For example, in Chapter 1,
we explore what it means to live in the agency eight hours
a day and how individuals work out their career patterns
within them. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the formal organiza¬
tion of roles and the informal organization of norms and
small groups in which human relations are so central. In
Chapter 4 we use organization charts to comprehend the for¬
mal organization, but begin to examine the often invisible
functional links between subunits that are not (officially) con¬
nected directly.
Chapter 5 is our first full introduction to systems theory
in which the agency is understood to be composed of produc¬
tion (service to clients), adaptive, boundary, and management
20 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

subsystems. Elements in the boundary system are assessed

more fully in Chapter 6, as we look at the ecological factors
that influence an organization’s goals and the means it has
at its disposal. Those means are the focus of Chapter 7,
which deals with people changing and people processing, and
Chapter 8, which examines the agency as the context within
which a number of human service and other organizational
technologies are applied.
How those technologies shape an agency’s goals and how
those goals are further shaped by environmental forces is
the subject of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 builds on much of
what was presented earlier, but from a different perspective—
that of exchange relationships between people and organiza¬
tional units, and how these exchanges contribute to the establish¬
ment of power and authority within the organization and
through the organization.
In each of these chapters I have included one or more
exercises to give you the opportunity of testing the concepts
presented, so as to assess their utility in your work setting.
You get a chance to test them all individually and together
in Chapter 11, in which I share with you a contingency ap¬
proach to understanding your social agency, and to making
each of the ten perspectives into a problem-solving method.
As this suggests, the book was designed for use by people
who work within social agencies or who are in other ways
affected by them. You may be more interested in just finding
out about social agencies and how they work or in getting
a handle on the social science literature that deals with organiza¬
tions. I think you will find this volume, slim as it is, a helpful
introduction. But understand, it is only an introduction and
is not intended to substitute for more rigorous and advanced
study. I think you will find each chapter both mind-opening
and useful. For those of you who have taken formal courses
in organizational theory, this book might serve as a review
and to reawaken your curiosity and quicken your critical eye.

—Armand Lauffer
Ann Arbor, 1984
Chapter 1

YOUR AGENCY AS A CAREER ARENA

Work and careers are integrally related. The place in which

you work is the arena within which career decisions and moves
are made. By career, I am referring to the stages and levels
of your occupational growth and development. By arena,
I mean the place where the action takes place—careers are
active processes.
In this chapter we will take the perspective that your agency
is a career arena. We’ll look at the closeness of fit between
your interests and capacities, the opportunities and demands
of the agency and those of the profession or occupation you
have chosen. We will then examine five fairly typical ways
in which agency personnel make their career choices as they
work their way up the ladder, box themselves into corners,
make lateral moves, or move out of the agency or a particular
work unit within it.

AGENCIES, OCCUPATIONS, AND PROFESSIONS

Most of us take career related jobs for a variety of reasons:

for income and security; for status and prestige; as an oppor¬
tunity to fulfill ourselves; or to do something useful for socie¬
ty, to be of benefit to others. These are the same reasons

21
22 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

we choose such occupations as counseling and undergo specializ¬

ed training in order to perform occupational functions and
job related tasks. That training often is given in a professional
school. Becoming members of a profession provides entry
access to a number of occupations.
Although there is a close coincidence between professions
and occupations, these are not necessarily identical. For exam¬
ple, social workers can become substance abuse counselors,
group therapists, or community organizers. Occupations, such
as family treatment, may be entered into by persons trained
in a number of professions: psychology, social work, psychiatry,
or education.
Because careers hold out the promise of continuous ad¬
vancement (and the rewards that come with advancement),
many people are willing to undergo a number of years’ train¬
ing in order to prepare themselves properly, and to take step¬
ping stone or trial work experience jobs, so as to try out
different occupational identities at various stages in the career
advancement process. In a number of cases such activities
require delaying the gratifications of higher paying or more
fulfilling jobs. At some point, however, any of us may find
ourselves caught between several masters.
As employees, we are accountable to our employers, but
as professionals, we may feel ourselves more accountable
to the norms and values of our chosen profession or to the
clients on whose behalf we practice. As individuals, we have
personal goals and needs that may or may not be adequately
fulfilled through our occupational pursuits. The extent to
which your work within the agency is satisfying and fulfilling
will depend to a great extent on the congruity or fit between
your interests and capacities and the demands and expecta¬
tions of both the employer and the profession with which
you identify. Some of the variables that can be used to assess
the closeness of fit are summarized in the following table.
CAREER ARENA 23

Table 1
Closeness of Fit Between
-- Worker, Job, and Profession*
.. w.nv.)

You, the Worker The Agency The Profession

Knowledge and skill Tasks and other techni¬ Competencies in the per¬
cal requirements of the formance of professional
job tasks

Personal reward and Capacity of the agency Capacity of the profession

value hierarchy (e.g., to provide those rewards to provide such rewards
income, security, prestige, now or in the foreseeable
fulfillment, etc.) future

Ability to cope with stress Stressfulness or ambigui¬ Expectation that ambiguity

and ambiguity ty integral to the job is integral to practice
and availability of mech¬ and availability of support
anisms to deal with them system to cope with stress

Personality characteris¬ Extent to which rules Professional norms of

tics: tending toward inde¬ govern decision making autonomy
pendence or compliance and worker autonomy

*Since both work and profession are interwoven in the occupational choice, I have dealt
with only three variables: worker, profession, and work setting. For a more complete
discussion of the variables listed, see Lauffer (1982: ch. 4).

If the fit between the agency and the profession is not

close around any of these issues, you may find yourself having
to do battle to improve things at work, you may choose
to leave the job for another in which you can be more profes¬
sional, or you will have to find some way of accommodating
to the agency and its requirements. This may not be all that
difficult, particularly if you are fully identified with the agency
and its goals and are understanding of its limitations. Things
get a bit more complicated when the fit between you and
your capacities and those of the agency or the profession are
not close.
If there is a mismatch between you and the agency, say
in the areas of your knowledge and skill and the technical
requirements of the job, this can be corrected if you’re willing
24 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

and have the capacity to learn. If not, you may have to accept
limited career opportunities within the agency or seek another
more compatible job. Job redesign is another possibility, and
a number of agencies have moved in the direction of restructur¬
ing jobs to fit the interests and capacities of staff (within
the overall mission of the organization). The same is true
in the areas of stress management and coping with ambiguity.
Staff training, establishment of support groups, and changes
in job task specification can do much to correct an otherwise
defeating situation.
A poor fit between your values and personality characteristics
and the agency’s capacity to meet your needs may be harder
to correct for. On the value side, it may just not be possible
for the organization to accommodate to your income re¬
quirements, need for prestige or security, desire to engage
in social action. If you can’t or won’t compromise your in¬
terests, and if the agency won’t budge, you may have to look
elsewhere.
CAREER ARENA 25

Take a moment now to complete the following exercise.

Step 1: Rank order the items in each column, indi¬

cating what you seek in a job and the rewards that
your agency or work setting is capable of
providing you. Add other items we may have left
out.

YOUR REWARD/VALUE REWARDS THE AGENCY

HIERARCHY CAN PROVIDE
- Feeling of accomplishment _ Opportunity to be successful
_ Prestige and social standing _ Prestige and social standing
- Helping others _ Opportunities to be helpful
_ Good working relationships _ Positive work-related climate
_ High income/job security _ High income/job security
_ Overcoming challenges _ Challenging work
_ Professional or _ Opportunity to develop
self-development

Step 2: How close is the fit? Rate the closeness of fit on a

five-point scale by placing a check (s) where
appropriate.
High Fit I_1_I_I_I No Fit
4 3 2 1 0

Step 3:If the fit is not close, what are your

alternatives? Check the ones that you think make
the most sense.
_ Seek other work - Try to change myself
_ Try to change the agency or
_ Accept things as they are _ Work climate
26 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Step 4: Jot down a few ideas of how you would go about

doing what you checked in Step 3.

Taken from A. Lauffer (1979).

MATCHING WHAT YOU VALUE WITH

WORK-RELATED REWARDS
Now design similar exercises to deal with the other three
variables we identified in the preceding table. Fill them in.
What have you learned about yourself and the agency? Could
you redesign all four exercises to deal with worker-agency
occupation congruity? How?
When the fit between the individual and the profession
is poor, accommodation or change may be more difficult.
Although one can’t expect a profession to change itself in
response to the needs of individual practitioners, there are
generally opportunities to find a particular nitch in the profes¬
sion that fits the individual’s capacities or needs. This may
require an occupational shift say from direct practice to manage¬
ment. Changing one’s aspirations or ability to perform ac¬
cording to the profession’s norms is another option. While
leaving and entering another field is a third, this can be very
costly to the individual when weighed against the years of
personal investment in education and the development of a
professional identity.
The extreme choices of going through a major personal
overhaul, redirecting the agency or changing the profession
(perhaps by pioneering a new specialization within it), or leav¬
ing one or both, are rarely necessary. Most of us manage
with a little adjustment here or there. In fact, successful practi¬
tioners and administrators are often those who not only make
successful adjustments, but who can use the lack of close
CAREER ARENA 27

fit as a challenge to their ingenuity or creativity. They are

often the innovators in both the workplace and professional
arenas. After all, it takes a bit of dissatisfaction with what
is or a vision of a better state of affairs to want to take
the risks that come with innovation and change.
Taking risks may also depend on the stage you are at in
your career. In the early stages of your career, you are more
likely to test out different work settings, different styles of
professional and work related behaviors, and to press for changes
in the way in which the agency or the profession operates.
As you move on, consolidating your gains, you may be a
bit less willing to rock the boat, having invested a good deal
in your achievements. More about this later, when we explore
career styles within an agency setting. First, I want to discuss
with you those kinds of agencies where both professional
challenges and career opportunities seem to be the greatest.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR CAREER MOBILITY

In some agencies upward mobility is possible; in others

there may be greater opportunities to move laterally or horizon¬
tally, and in still others there are significant and positive oppor¬
tunities to move downward with no loss of benefits or prestige.
Upward mobility generally refers to movement into managerial
or specialist levels within an organization. Such movements
are accompanied by an increase in responsibility and autonomy,
better pay and working conditions, more prestige (but sometimes
more pressure and job stress, too). Large agencies, particularly
those with tall hierarchies (see Chapter 4) in which there are
many levels of management, or those in which there is a high
ratio between managers and subordinates, afford the greatest
opportunities for upward mobility.
But for many professionals such upward mobility is not
a goal. Few college professors aspire to become deans or univer¬
sity presidents; most even shy away from becoming department
28 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

heads. Most school teachers do not aspire to specialists or

school principals. Most social workers were trained to be direct
service practitioners (with individuals, families, groups, and
communities), and they value direct practice. They may aspire
to become more skilled and competant therapists, counselors,
and organizers, and the professional rewards they receive (prestige
earned, a sense of doing what one is qualified for, an oppor¬
tunity to work out one’s social commitments) may be precisely
what they aim for. Movement into a managerial role would
be diverting at best and more likely perceived as requiring
considerable sacrifice.
For these people lateral mobility may be much more ap¬
propriate. For a school teacher lateral mobility might entail
moving from the classroom in one part of town to a classroom
in another part of town where working conditions are con¬
sidered better or where the challenges are greater. For the
social worker it may mean a shift from treating individuals
to work in family treatment or from work in protective services
for children to protective services for older adults. Such shifts
may entail some retraining, but rarely require downgrading
in terms of salary or benefits.
Large agencies that provide a wide variety of services or
that serve many populations and cover multiple geographic
locales provide considerable opportunities for lateral moves.
But so do smaller agencies that are in a growth or expansionary
phase in their development or that shift their programs and
services in response to new needs and opportunities (examples
are home health care services for the disabled and women’s
crisis centers). In some of these settings, in fact, workers may
be expected to shift jobs or to perform multiple jobs at a
moment’s notice. These kinds of organizations generally have
flat structures with few or no levels of hierarchy between practi¬
tioners and top management.
There are other, stable organizations (with either tall or
flat structures) in which great value is placed on the profes¬
sionalism of the staff (universities, family service agencies.
CAREER ARENA 29

guidance clinics). Here a downward move from administration

to direct practice (teaching, research, counseling, treatment)
is seen as an opportunity for fulfillment and for advancing
the purposes of the organization. No loss of either prestige
or income need accompany such moves.

DEALING WITH CHANGE

Career mobility, as the term implies, is a process of change.

But not everyone is comfortable with change. Some people,
in fact, attempt to protect themselves against change when
they perceive it to be against their interests. Almost everyone
opposes change if it either reduces the scope and the importance
of the tasks assigned them, or if change results in a net reduc¬
tion of the staff and the resources under their control. Change
tends to be resisted by people who have been in their positions
for a long time and are comfortable with programs and pro¬
cedures as they are. Rational arguments about the objective
results of a given change are not likely to be as persuasive
as arguments that spell out the payoffs or benefits to the
parties directly affected by the proposed change.
Change is welcomed when it provides opportunities for ad¬
vancement and for aggrandizement. The forces for change
are strengthened by fluctuation in an agency’s external environ¬
ment. This is particularly true when changes occur in client
populations, in funding sources, in public opinion, or in other
agencies upon which your agency depends. Those individuals
who interact with elements in that environment—intake and
outside workers, community agents, case managers, ad¬
ministrators, fund raisers—are the most likely to welcome
change and to promote it.
Change is more likely to be generated or supported from
within the organization when staff turnover is great or people
are moved from one unit to another within the agency; new
people join the staff; or staff backgrounds, educational levels,
30 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

skills and areas of expertise are diverse. Internally generated

change is likely to be supported when staff members have
been given an opportunity to participate in the design of the
change process; the decision to institute a change comes after
a gradual and extended process of introduction; similar changes
in like organizations have proved rewarding to members of
that organization and this information is known; both ad¬
ministrative and charismatic leaders in the organization sup¬
port (or at least do not oppose) the change.
Turn your attention for a moment to your own agency
or to your work unit. How do your supervisors, your subor¬
dinates, and your peers react to change? Who activates it?
Take a specific example of a policy, programmatic, or pro¬
cedural change with which you are particularly familiar. Can
you describe the behavior of your colleagues in promoting
or opposing the change in question? Does the foregoing discus¬
sion shed some light on what happened? Knowing what you
know now, how would you deal with personnel issues to facilitate
a smoother change in policy, program, or procedure?

FIVE CAREER PATTERNS

Anthony Downs, a social scientist with the Urban Institute,

describes five career styles common to most complex organiza¬
tions, each of which is a different response to change (Downs,
1967). I think you will find his analysis instructive and recognize
both yourself and many of your colleagues and supervisors
within it. He refers to “climbers,” “zealots,” “advocates,”
and “statesmen.” Before we examine each of these, one at
a time, I want to point out that these categories tend to deal
primarily with upward mobility within an organizational set¬
ting and thus are too limited to serve as a framework for
analysis of all aspects of organizational careers. Nevertheless,
they do provide some important insights into why people behave
as they do in social agencies and other work settings.
CAREER ARENA 31

The “climber” is on the move up, hopefully, to the top.

There are a number of ways in which he or she can get there.
The most direct is promotion. One way to improve the odds
for promotion is to be recognized as competent at carrying
out one’s official tasks. Another is to get involved in as many
committees and subgroups as possible.
If the chances for promotion are relatively small, the climber
may resort to aggrandizing his or her area of responsibility.
This strategy is often perceived by others as empire building.
The more resources under the climber’s control, the more
influence he or she has within the organization and the more
indispensable the climber becomes. The surest way to build
an empire is to increase the number of personnel directly under
one’s control. As the number of subordinates increases, added
staff must be justified by absorbing more programs and respon¬
sibilities. These may come either from areas previously con¬
trolled by other people or from new programs generated by
the climber.
When the path to promotion is blocked and when empire
building is not feasible, the only route left for a climber may
be to jump to another agency, selling personal skill, expertise,
and confidence. The only real constraint here is the job market.
If there are no jobs available for the climber and all possible
contacts made during the empire building process have been
tried, then the climber’s path may be blocked. The response
is often frustration that may be expressed in interpersonal conflict.
In terms of leadership style, the climber tends to closely
control subordinates to ensure nobody else is seen as a rising
star. This style of leadership often suppresses innovation from
below. Nevertheless, the climber believes, rightfully so, that
the more change there is, the greater opportunity for advance¬
ment of subordinates as well as himself or herself.
The second type is the “conserver” who is in many ways
the opposite of the climber. Like climbers, however, conservers
tend to be concerned mainly with themselves. Unlike climbers,
conservers strive to maintain the status quo. They are very
32 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

much against any change that would threaten the relatively

secure position they presently occupy. They prefer to be told
exactly what to do so that they will not be blamed for any
possible mix-up. Conservers supervise their subordinates close¬
ly in order to prevent innovation that might upset standardized
and tried procedures and policies. In short, you may recognize
the conserver as the typical bureaucrat.
The “zealot” is very stubborn and believes he or she knows
what is wrong with, or what is best for, the agency or one
of its client populations. Win or lose, they fight the good
fight, always on the side of right. Typically, zealots have a
high energy level. The ability to fight all odds continuously
and still maintain enthusiasm is precisely their strength. For
these reasons, zealots become excellent change agents. They
are often effective in the start-up of a new program or a new
agency. Unfortunately, the same degree of innovation is not
expected of subordinates. Loyalty to the zealot is.
The “advocate” is a person who has exceptionally high
commitment to the goals of the organization or department
of which she or he is a member or to a client population
serviced by the agency. Great pride is taken in the accomplish¬
ment of the agency’s or department’s service goals. The organiza¬
tion advocate has two major skills: the ability to protect his
or her part of the organization against all external threats—
hence in a budget meeting, for example, he or she will fight
to get the most for her or his agency; and the ability to mediate
conflict within his or her department or organization. The
combination of these two skills makes the agency advocate
the person likely to be promoted to the head of an organization.
The client or consumer advocate does the same for those with
whom he or she is concerned. In doing so, consumer or client
advocates are more likely to be in conflict with others in the
agency. Consumer advocates are not as likely to head a service
agency as are agency advocates.
CAREER ARENA 33

All advocates use what can be called a situational approach

to leadership. Hence, innovation is encouraged when appropriate
and discouraged when superfluous.
The “statesman” tends to be more concerned with the welfare
of society as a whole than with the agency or a particular
client population. Regardless of the impact on the organiza¬
tion, the statesman will do what he or she perceives to be
in the best interests of society. Unlikely to devote much time
to performing detailed, day-to-day activities, the statesman
spends a good deal of time developing overall plans and objec¬
tives. Statesmen do well in public relations type situations
or any area that interfaces with clients or the public at large.
When backed up by managerial staff who are zealots or ad¬
vocates, they make good agency administrators, but not when
left on their own.
Use the exercise that follows to explore how these five con¬
cepts might be used in the analysis of your own social agency.

EXERCISE
Describe some of the key persons in your agency
with one or more of these characterizations. Do
some people fit more than one characterization?
Have some moved from being zealots or climbers to
conservers as they have stayed in a particular job
for a long time? What does that suggest about your
agency’s personnel policies and practices? Your own
career options?

Although we have barely scratched the surface of your agen¬

cy, we have begun to use one perspective or viewpoint to
understand it as an arena for working out career styles and
opportunities.
34 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

If you hold the perspective that the agency is indeed an

arena within which people respond to change in different ways,
and within that arena different styles of managing one’s career
are possible, then among other things you might:

— pick an agency or work setting in which your own capacities

and interests fit the job requirements;
— look for a closeness of fit between the organization and your
professional commitments and aspirations;
— select persons for staff positions whose personalities and leader¬
ship styles are consistent with those required by the organiza¬
tion to help fulfill its goals;
— define duties and responsibilities of the job to fit the needs,
skills, leadership styles, and characteristics of the person selected
for the organization;
— deal with interpersonal conflicts or on-the-job problems by
accounting for the attitudes, styles, or characteristics of the
people involved;
— dismiss an individual who isn’t helping to reach the goals of
the organization after attempts to relocate her or him to a
position more compatible with her or his skills, personality,
and other characteristics;
— conclude that reasons for activities not being properly perform¬
ed involve the lack of feedback and understanding of exactly
what is expected rather than that the individual is not motivated
or needs training;
— promote a person to a position of more responsibility because
she or he is really effective in her or his current job and you
see her or him as a competent, capable person in the next
level job; and perhaps most important,
— learn as much as possible about the personal leadership styles
and personalities of staff members in your own and other
key organizations.
CAREER ARENA 35

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

Personnel practices and job Every problem may be

assignments can be designed analyzed only in terms of
to encourage change or pro¬ change and stability. It puts
mote stability. a premium on change.
It can help you find those There is a danger of
people for whom change is “psychologizing” every pro¬
beneficial and identify those blem and seeing them as the
who may be threatened by outgrowth of personality
it. types.
Implications of strategies for It does not do much to
change within and interac¬ clarify roles and
tion between organizations responsibilities.
can be predicted and analyz¬ Approaches to group leader¬
ed by understanding the ship and efforts of coordina¬
people and how they are tion may be ignored because
likely to act in the proposed of exclusive focus on
situation. individuals—and careers.
Chapter 2

YOUR AGENCY AS A SYSTEM OF ROLES

Just as people can shape organizations, organizations can shape

the people within them by requiring that they perform specified
roles. Persons assigned to these roles are expected to perform
organizational tasks that are considered appropriate to the
assigned roles. The distribution of tasks to people in different
roles is often reflected in an official job description. But no
job description is ever comprehensive or fully accurate. No
organization could operate effectively if people did only what
was contained within their job description, nor could staff
members operate effectively if they tried to do everything con¬
tained in the usual job description.

PERFORMING ORGANIZATIONAL ROLES

In a given hospital setting, for example, nurses may not

be expected to give blood transfusions or to remove stitches
from an incision. But in an emergency situation it may be
necessary for them to perform one or both of these operations.
Over time these tasks may be routinely assigned to one or
more nurses but not appear in the formal job description
until years later. In a vocational rehabilitation agency, all

37
38 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

rehab counselors may be expected to do job counseling, case

management, job finding, and job placement with clients
of all types and with all kinds of disabilities. In practice,
however, staff members in a district office “specialize.” One
focuses more heavily on working with sight and hearing disabled.
Another works with paraplegics. One staff member becomes
expert in job finding and job placement, especially in in¬
dustrial settings. Each performs a somewhat specialized role
in relation to his or her co-workers.
This role consists in part of the functions, tasks, and ac¬
tivities prescribed by the organization. It also includes tasks
undertaken by the role occupant on his or her own initiative
or influenced by the expectations held about that role by
people who interact with the role occupant.
Some of the people who interact with a role occupant
are intended by the ogranization to do so. Examples include
superiors, subordinates, and those with whom the person
must regularly interact in the performance of his or her
assigned tasks. Co-workers can pressure a role occupant to
conform to their expectations. Other individuals may have
influence because they are important to the role occupant who
looks up to them, respects their judgment, and values their
approval. These people may occupy positions either within or
outside the organization.
A person’s own perceptions and interpretations of what is
expected for effective role performance also impacts on behav¬
ior. All efforts by others to communicate role expectations
to a role occupant are subject to interpretation by that person.
This filtering process distorts to varying degrees the messages
sent to the individual. For example, a supervisor tells a staff
member to a call a client who has an emergency. It is almost
five o’clock, agency closing time. After about 60 minutes
of trying, the staff member reaches the client and offers help.
But the supervisor intended the call to be made during office
hours. She feels it is unprofessional to call after hours and
would generate inappropriate expectations in the future. The
SYSTEM OF ROLES 39

staff member is at a loss. “I’m not going all out for clients,
if it gets me into trouble,” he concludes. “Next time, I’ll
just follow the rules. The hell with the client.” What he
did not understand is that the supervisor also was concerned
about the client, but she had a different idea about how the
professional helping role should be performed.

ROLE/ROLE-SET RELATIONSHIPS

All those people who have influence over someone’s role

behavior and who interact with the role occupant comprise
a “role set.” This is the set of other role performers with
whom a role occupant interacts. Each of these role performers
interacts with others in their role sets. That is why we call
it a system of roles. The role set can become an extremely
important unit of analysis in trying to understand role perfor¬
mance. Sources of interpersonal conflict are often found in
role performance-role set interactions. It is sometimes more
effective to try to influence someone indirectly through his
or her role set than by approaching the person directly. Solu¬
tions to job performance problems can often be found in
role-role set interactions.
Whatever the nature of the interactions, many roles endure
over time, regardless of their occupants or others in the role
set. The job of typist, for example, exists beyond the life
of the role occupant. This is a major stabilizing factor for
the organization. Although each occupant modifies the role
performed, a substantial portion of the role often remains
unchanged regardless of who occupies the role. Some observers
feel that when someone new is placed into an existing role,
he or she is more likely to act very similarly to the person
who previously held that role, rather than to the way he
or she acted in a previous role. Others expect it, and one
comes to respond to those expectations. Somehow the role
40 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

and other people’s expectations of the role require people

to behave in ways consistent with past role behavior. Never¬
theless, individuals do perform a particular role differently
from others in that role.
To understand this point, think about actors in a play.
Roles are generally established and defined in the script. But
different actors will bring different styles, interpretations, and
experiences to the same role. The role will never be portrayed
by two performers in exactly the same way. What one actor
does with a role may also be affected by how other actors
play their roles or how the director wants the script interpreted.
Nevertheless, the role continues to exist beyond the life of
any particular player.
Consider a staff role previously occupied by a person who
did everything he or she was told, but no more. Assume
that a new person now occupies this same role who has a
lot of energy and is willing to do whatever will help the
agency. The new person is intelligent and wants to learn.
In time the expectations of people for his or her role perfor¬
mance will differ from what they were for the first person
in this role. The basic job description has remained the same,
but the expected role behavior is substantially changed.

EXPECTATIONS, CONFLICTS, AND STRAINS

If everyone in organizations both understood and sent com¬

plementary role messages, lived up to role expectations, and
made compatible role demands,there would be few problems
in interpersonal and organizational behavior. Unfortunately,
things don’t happen that way. Problems in the performance
of roles can and do occur.
Role conflict occurs when contradictory expectations exist
for role performance and living up to one expectation makes
compliance with another difficult, if not impossible. Role
SYSTEM OF ROLES 41

strain is the discomfort experienced when role conflict is

encountered. Role conflict can usually be identified by ex¬
amining the expectations held by the person and members of
his or her role set.
There are a number of possible sources for role conflict.
Individuals can and do occupy more than one role at a time,
and different roles may not always be compatible. For exam¬
ple, being supervisor of some staff and subordinate of others
are incompatible roles for some people. Sources of conflict
include “double messages,” contradictory signals from two
senders; lack of knowledge, skill, or resources to fill a role;
lack of clarity about expected behavior; lack of time or energy
to perform; and conflicts emerging from the role occupant’s
personality traits that are out of synch with required behaviors.
Some observers suggest that persons occupying certain kinds
of roles in organizations are especially likely to experience
role strain and conflict. They tend to be (1) those in contact
with the external environment who must satisfy expectations
of both people within the organization and people outside
of it; (2) those expected to provide innovative ideas that may
not set well with colleagues and supervisors; and (3) those
in middle management positions who must respond to both
supervisors and subordinates.
Role strain is often associated with job stress and burnout.
The symptoms associated with burnout are by now well known.
They include loss of interest in work or in the service mission
of the agency; “work-to-rule” (that is, doing just enough
to get by, or following agency procedures to the letter even
when flexibility based on professional judgment would be
more appropriate); performing one’s role in such a way as
to disassociate one’s self personally from it—making no real
investment in the role.
Understanding the position and the accompanying roles
that individuals hold can provide insight into organizational
behavior. Role analysis can aid in planning more effective
divisions of labor and in solving problems that seem not
42 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

to get resolved at the interpersonal level. It also provides

new ideas for alternative solutions of implementing change.
The following exercise should illustrate the point.
It is intended to help people who interact with one another
compare what is happening with what they would like to
see happening. While it is a fairly straightforward exercise,
it often reveals interesting discrepancies. Ideally, it should
be worked through in a nonthreatening situation with a wide
range of staff.

— Bring together key persons who have contact with one another.
— Ask each person to list the tasks he or she performs on the job.
— Have each person list the behaviors he or she feels are expected
of him or her by two significant other persons in the room.
— Have each person also list the behaviors he or she expects
of two other persons in the group.
— Use the chart below to help order your statements.
SYSTEM OF ROLES
43

ROLE TITLE

Persons with whom What I think they What I expect

I have contact expect from me of myself

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.
44 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Be very specific. List behaviors, not feelings. If feelings

are part of the expectations, include the behaviors that are
used to evidence the feelings.
— Now exchange this chart with the persons on your list.
Ask them to star the statements that differ from their
own perceptions.
— Compare lists. Check perceived messages against the
messages on the charts. Pay attention to discrepancies,
conflicts, and inaccurate statements.
— Consider what strategies could be used to bring inconsistent
statements together. This may include rewriting job descrip¬
tions, restructuring supervisor lines, reassigning certain tasks,
or clarifying communication.

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

Among other things, if you hold the perspective that organiza¬

tions are systems of roles, you might

— want to design clear, written job descriptions, with perfor¬

mance criteria so that everyone knows what is to be expected
of the role occupant;
— try to avoid unclear or competing expectations that make
it difficult for staff members to perform their jobs;
— establish an ongoing mechanism for clarification and evalua¬
tion of role expectations and demands, for both new and
experienced workers;
— avoid spending excessive time resolving role problems rather
than doing organizational problem solving or improving ser¬
vice delivery;
SYSTEM OF ROLES 45

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

Positions can be initially It may lead to a static con¬

defined so that they are not ception of jobs and posi¬
dependent on the people tions. Positions tend to
who fill them. perpetuate themselves.
Activities or tasks required Organizational interaction
in a role can be explained may be portrayed as a
to others. series of faulty messages
and unclear expectations
rather than examining the
larger organizational picture.
Attention to the above can Organizational structures
assure that the next occupant and the intended interaction
in the position has fewer patterns are not adequately
problems in understanding distinguished.
his or her job.
Blaming people for individual
behaviors is deemphasized
through understanding of the
attributes required for effec¬
tive performance.
Key People who occupy any
role or people who occupy
key roles can be analyzed in
terms of their role sets to
monitor role performance
and possible reasons for in¬
adequate role behavior.
The organization can change
even when the roles remain
the same. As different peo¬
ple occupy a role, the role
set changes—thereby increas-
✓

ing opportunities for change.

.

.
Chapter 3

YOUR AGENCY AS A SYSTEM OF SMALL GROUPS

Organizations of all sizes can be viewed as systems of small

groups. The emergence of both formal work groups and infor¬
mal social groups is inevitable. It occurs throughout every
organization. Groups mobilize powerful forces that have strong
effects on the individual. From the organization’s point of
view, these effects may be good in that they help fulfill the
goals of the organization or bad in that they hinder organiza¬
tional goal attainment. The more you understand about the
dynamics of behavior, the more likely you will be able to
use these dynamics for the good of the organization.

GROUP NORMS

Before moving on, we want to discuss the emergence of

group norms. A norm is a standard of behavior that is accepted
and legitimated by members of a group. Norms exist for all
groups and are a controlling influence on the attitudes and
behaviors of group members. They evolve over time and emerge
from the interactions of group members.
Norms may be formal and explicit or informal but understood
by everyone who has been a group member for a reasonable

47
48 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

length of time. For example, it may be a norm in one agency

that staff members behave with restraint in monthly staff
meetings; at another agency, that they take this opportunity
to confront agency administration. In most cases, members
of a group who do not follow established norms will feel
pressure from other group members to conform. This is true
regardless of whether membership in the group is voluntary
or involuntary. Adherence to the norms of the group is a
requirement for acceptance by others. Some people may feel
less pressured to conform to group norms. The marginal member
has, by definition, few ties to the group. For different reasons,
the informal leader and much sought-after members may also
be able to deviate from the norms. Their prestige makes it
possible for them to break the rules or establish new ones.

INFLUENCING LEADERS

Because group leaders often epitomize the norms of a group,

it pays to find out who plays a leadership role in each group
with which you are concerned. By understanding how and
why the group’s leader(s) acts as he or she does, you may
learn a good deal about the group’s interactions with other
groups, with a supervisor, or with client populations. Norms
influence the way in which members of the group behave.
The group’s leader has the highest potential influence on the
norms of the group and thus on the behavior of its members.
It follows that if you want to influence the group informally,
you should direct your efforts at the group leader who in
turn can modify the norms and behavior of all or most of
the group members.
But trying to influence the group leader is only part of
the picture. Leaders are not very influential in groups that
don’t stick together very well. The same is true of group norms.
Norms are powerful controls on member behavior. By group
cohesion, I mean the extent to which group members are at¬
tracted to the group and feel a part of it. The stronger this
SYSTEM OF SMALL GROUPS 49

attraction, the more effective the group norms are in influenc¬

ing the behavior of a particular member. In a highly cohesive
group, the leader may be able to more strongly influence,
or perhaps control, the behavior of the members. This in¬
creases the importance of influencing the group leader if you
want to induce the group to change its collective behavior.

THE FUNCTIONS OF INFORMAL GROUPS

I mentioned earlier that the formation of informal groups

is inevitable in an organization, but I did not explain why
this is so. Isn’t the pressure to conform to group norms too
great a cost to the individual? If so, why identify with the
group? We all give up some of our individuality when we
become group members, but we also gain something in terms
of personal identity and effectiveness. If there were no benefits
derived from membership there would be no motivation to
join. There are at least three major benefits to informal group
membership: established identity; increased task accomplish¬
ment; and emotional support. Joining a group gives one a
sense of shared identity. Being a member of a group that
has high status results in transfer of that status to the group’s
members.
A second reason for joining a group relates to task comple¬
tion. Often a group can give needed assistance in meeting
individual goals and completing a job that the individual could
not do alone. For example, when assisting a client, a staff
member may need the knowledge and expertise held by another
group member. Being a member of a group increases the
likelihood that needed information will be more readily available.
Other staff members are willing to help since they know that
they can call on this member to reciprocate and help with
their clients in the future.
Finally, a group gives emotional support to its members.
One can let one’s hair down in one’s group, blow off steam,
50 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

and share one’s frustrations with people who are expected to

understand and be supportive. This emotional support makes
the work place more gratifying and satisfying.
But some groups don’t work well. They may not be suppor¬
tive of individual members. Some groups operate to frustrate
the aims of the overall organization. Their norms may be
incompatible with the purposes of the agency. This, of course,
is not necessarily bad. It can serve to force others within the
organization to examine its purposes, its priorities, and its
programs.
One more point: Groups tend to make more extreme deci¬
sions than individuals. It is easier to take a risk in a group,
particularly when there is a strong leader in the group or
when consensus is strong, than when one is totally and in¬
dividually responsible for a decision. Union actions are good
examples. Individual risks are reduced in proportion to the
cohesiveness of “solidarity” of union members. However, groups
that are not cohesive, that are little more than time-limited
collections of individuals (like some committees), are not likely
to take risks. They tend to settle for those actions that are
least likely to “rock the boat.”
There are important implications for your agency in this
phenomenon. For example, a manager may not want to or
may be incapable of making a decision and therefore will
delegate his responsibility. While the manager cannot control
the specific decision to be made, he or she can influence the
amount of risk that will be taken in that decision. If a very
high risk or low risk decision is desired, the decision should
be delegated to the appropriate group. Should a more moderate
decision be desired, this activity is best delegated to an in¬
dividual or less cohesive group.
SYSTEM OF SMALL GROUPS 51

EXERCISE
Before you go on, describe two situations on separate
sheets of paper: one in which you belonged to a cohesive
group and one in which the group was only minimally
connected interpersonally. For each, answer the following
questions.

1. Can you recall a situation in which the group

attempted to pressure you and behave in
some way that you felt conflicted with your
own values? Describe.
2. How did you react? Describe.
3. What was the outcome of your reaction and
the group pressure? Describe.
4. Based on the foregoing discussion, what
might you do to make certain that neither
you nor others will be put in such a posi¬
tion again?

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

Among other things, if you hold the perspective that organiza¬

tions are systems of small groups you might:

— use group norms rather than administrative mandate to

facilitate change or further accomplishment of the organi¬
zation’s aims;
— isolate individuals or groups, or remove individuals from groups
whose norms do not adhere to organizational norms to improve
administrative control;
— hire individuals whose values are consistent with organizatinal
norms to ensure smooth staff interaction;
— keep groups small enough and with people of similar backgrounds
to increase cohesion in groups that help attain organizational
goals;
52 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

— encourage diversity among group norms in the interest of pro¬

moting organizational change;
— include group leaders in staff meetings that may affect the
norms of the group to aid in increasing acceptance of change
by group members;
— emphasize similarities of community and organizational norms
to promote community support;
— decide the degree of risk desired to determine whether decisions
should be made by individuals or groups.

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

The organization can be This approach emphasizes

perceived as being composed what happens to small
of informal groups, each groups rather than the
with a life of its own and organization as a whole and
each with interests that in¬ to its service goals.
fluence organizational
effectiveness.
Various groups within the It does not give enough atten¬
organization can be mobiliz¬ tion to formal organizational
ed to contribute to the total structure or lines of
organization. authority.

Change within the organiza¬ It emphasizes the process of

tion can be encouraged by interpersonal interaction
building on divergent group rather than the results of
norms. service delivery.

Individuals can find support An inappropriate focus on

in groups whose norms are group norms may result in
most similar or acceptable to pressures toward conformity.
their own.
SYSTEM OF SMALL GROUPS 53

Strengths Limits

The organization can find Inappropriate emphasis on

and retain individuals whose improving group cohesion
personal values are similar can eliminate the potential
to its norms. gains derived from individual
innovation.
The riskiness of decisions
can be influenced even if
the content of a decision
cannot be controlled.
Acceptance of change can be
enhanced by including at
least the group leaders in
the decision-making process.
Leaders can be encouraged
to help influence the direc¬
tion group norms take and,
therefore, group members
behavior.
Chapter 4

YOUR AGENCY AS A FORMAL ORGANIZATION

The most common way to represent an organization’s formal

structure is by drawing an organization chart. Organization
charts show the formal division of work within an organiza¬
tion. They are composed of boxes and lines between them,
each box representing a work unit (a position or department).
The lines between boxes designate the lines of authority or
communication connecting them. Authority lines depict who
is directly responsible to whom; communication lines depict
the flow of information through formal communication chan¬
nels. This may include the directives that are sent down from
management and upward reporting from lower work units.
Superior-subordinate positions are shown in terms of organiza¬
tional levels. Organization charts (sometimes called
“organigrams”) can also be used to show each work unit’s
function within the larger organization. It may be easier to
understand this by seeing it. Look at the two relatively typical
organization charts that follow.

55
56 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

ORGANIZATION CHARTS

In Chart 1 the relationships between several units in a mental

health clinic are shown: accounting, intake, treatment (counsel¬
ing), staff development, and research and development. Only
four levels of hierarchical relationships are shown. If we were
to assume that the clinic is part of a larger organization, say
a regional mental hospital, the clinic might have been shown
as only one of several clinics, all part of a community mental
health center serving a subregion under the jurisdiction of
the hospital. Thus the chart would have included at least two
additional levels.
The chart depicts only the formal dimensions of the hierar¬
chical relationships. It gives no information about what hap¬
pens within a work unit (role-related and normative behavior).
Positions or offices are the unit of analysis, and only the
formal relationships between positions are shown. Yet these
relationships help to examine issues of interdependence, locate
points of potential conflict, and permit examination of direc¬
tion of work and communication flow.
Moreover, the specific way the total organization is set up—
for example, how many subordinates each supervisor has directly
under his or her control—can tell you a great deal about
the agency. Two agencies with exactly the same number of
employees might be structured very differently. The first may
have a relatively small number of subordinates for each super¬
visor and, therefore a large number of layers or levels. This
increases the chances for red tape. Since communication lines
are long, this agency is somewhat inflexible to change because
it takes so long for information to get up to the top and
directives to get back down. It is likely that supervision will be
close since there are fewer subordinates.
Chart 2 depicts a second agency, one with a large number
of subordinates for every supervisor but a small number of
hierarchical levels. The chances are that this agency can react
and adapt quickly to change because communication lines
FORMAL ORGANIZATION 57

Chart 1

are short. This might mean that as the needs of clients shift
and as interactions with other agencies change, the second
agency can handle its new situation more flexibly than the
first one we examined. Moreover, because there are so many
employees, each supervisor will probably delegate responsibili¬
ty to lower level employees.
Its formal leadership style is likely to be different than
that found in the first agency. Unlike the agency in Chart
1, this agency may face a coordination problem. It is generally
easier to coordinate the efforts of many units or individuals
when you have a tall structure with reverse hierarchical levels,
rather than a flat structure where authority is diffused across
fewer levels. It may be necessary to employ experts for the
coordination effort. This effort may require management training
experts rather than those with expertise in a particular field
of practice such as family treatment or psychiatric nursing.
58 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Chart 2

Chart 3 illustrates how the organization chart can be used

to map the relationship between work groups. It is a somewhat
different way of depicting what we showed on Chart 1. Every
position, with the exception of the very top and very bottom
ones, belongs to two work groups. By taking the first organiza¬
tion chart shown above and superimposing the work group
triangles, we see a different picture of the communication
across organizational levels. The Supervisor for Group Ser¬
vices, for example, is depicted as superior to the staff in the
Group Work units. As such he or she hands down the policies
sent from above. But this supervisor is also a subordinate
to the person responsible for treatment. This provides the
supervisor an opportunity to send up to his or her supervisor
the views of the group workers. And the person responsible
for the treatment program can, as a subordinate to the Clinic
Director, pass these views to the top. Depicting the formal
structure of your agency this way helps you understand how
work groups can be used to facilitate communication both
FORMAL ORGANIZATION 59

Chart 3

up and down, how agency activities can be coordinated, and

which units should be located within a larger substructure
of the whole agency.
The organization chart is basically a map that describes
formal relationships within an organization. Some people don’t
like to use them, arguing that no map can tell you everything
about an organization. They point out that charts don’t show
the “real” organization which they define as made up of infor¬
mal relationships and procedures that emerge as people go
about performing the tasks required on the job. While it is
true that the informal organization is not directly dealt with
when one looks at the formal structure, this perspective does
open up a rich source of information and suggests alternative
ways of solving organization problems and those identified
in the preceding chapters.
60 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

DESIGNING ORGANIZATION CHARTS

Before we go on to examine the strengths and limits of
this perspective, we would like you to design two organization
charts for your agency. Follow the instructions below or modify
them to be more useful to you.

EXERCISE 1: FORMAL ORGANIZATION CHART

— If a formal organization chart exists for your agency, haul
it out and look it over.
— Does it fit what you know to be true about the present struc¬
ture of your organization? If yes, go on to Exercise 2.
— If there is no organization chart, or if the chart is outdated,
gather information to make a current chart. You will probably
find that you have more information than
you can fit onto a formal organization chart.

EXERCISE 2: INFORMAL ORGANIZATION CHART

— Put aside the formal organization chart.
— Think about who talks to whom in the agency. Think
about to whom you go for important information about
your job. With whom do you ride to work or eat lunch?
— Observe the same process in your supervisor, your co¬
worker, and an agency administrator.
— Make a chart of what you think is the informal organiza¬
tion. Draw lines of communication, of formal authority,
and of the power relationships between people or work
units.
— Place yourself somewhere on the chart. With whom do
you most often interact? Around what issues?
FORMAL ORGANIZATION 61

EXERCISE 3: IDENTIFYING CRITICAL LOCATIONS

— Locate and mark the decision makers in your organization
on both charts.

First indicate those with formal authority in one color of ink.

Then locate the informal leaders, including gatekeepers (for
example, phone receptionists, secretaries, intake workers) in a
second color.

This exercise should help you visualize much of what goes

on in the agency in which you work. A lot of information
simply will not fit on any chart. This is one of the reasons
charts are limited in their utility. On the other hand, they are
graphic depictions of data that are often obscured or forgotten.

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

If you view an agency as a system of formal structures,

you might:
— draw an organization chart to trace the formal lines of com¬
munication between work units;
— problem solve along structural lines, for example, change
the location of a supervisor, or change the number of units
supervised or numbers of organizational layers, rather than
focus on personal issues;
— locate all work groups within the organizational map and
understand how they all interrelate;
— describe the type of organization structure you have and the
advantages and disadvantages of it.
62 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

It makes the formal lines of Too much focus on the for¬

authority and the division mal structure without recog¬
of labor explicit, making it nition of informal relation¬
easier to know when and if ships presents an incomplete
changes should be made. view of the organization.
It makes possible the iden¬ Looking at structures
tification of places where sometimes results in a static
formal structures can be view of the organization—it
changed to more closely is a snapshot—it freezes the
coincide with informal in¬ action while losing sight of
teraction patterns. the interactions between
units and within them.
Organizations make it possi¬ The human dimension is
ble to depict the flow of largely excluded from view.
authority and information
within an organization and
to communicate these simply
and directly to others.
Chapter 5

YOUR AGENCY AS AN INPUT-OUTPUT

PROCESSING SYSTEM

Until now, we’ve examined your agency as if it had no business;

that is, as if it did not do anything for or on behalf of others.
Were we to end our analysis at this point, it would leave
us with only fragmentary perspectives of the whole. In the
discussion that follows we will examine the agency from a
structure-functional perspective; that is, we will look at those
subsystems of the whole that make it possible for the agency
to get the resources it needs and to transform them into pro¬
ducts for distribution.1

FUNCTIONAL SUBSYSTEMS
AND THEIR INTERRELATIONSHIPS

Every social agency is composed of a set of interrelated

units or subsystems designed to achieve a common set of objec¬
tives. The activities of these units are aimed at (1) recruiting
inputs into the agency, such as money, credit, clients, and
staff; (2) processing inputs, or changing them from money,
credit, clients, staff, and other inputs into such programs and

63
64 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

1
INPUTS PROCESSING OUTPUTS —

FEEDBACK

Figure 1

services as prevention, education, counseling, rehabilitation,

or day treatment; and (3) producing outputs, such as healthier
people or improved education in the schools. For systems
to survive or to maintain themselves, they must take in at
least as many resources as they consume. To maintain itself,
your agency must divert some of the resources that could
be used for production into maintenance activities. Therefore,
more inputs are required than those used for outputs.
In every system output has a return effect (feedback) on
the resources that enter and re-enter the agency. The types
of outputs—for example, workshops conducted, or reduction
in number of students addicted to drugs in the local high
school—influence the amount of money, types of clients, and
other resources that flow into the system. The process can
be charted as shown in Figure 1.
Within the larger system, four major subsystems can be
identified. Each performs a specific function, without which
the agency will experience difficulties. Actors involved in one
particular subsystem have a common kind of motivation. In
small agencies, one person may work in several or all sub¬
systems. However, work within each subsystem usually re¬
quires specific motivation, knowledge, and skills appropriate
to that subsystem. Although the four subsystems will be presented
separately, in the real world they exist in a state of ongoing
interaction. A change in one subsystem will have an impact
on the other three and the entire organization.
The four subsystems perform the following functions: (1)
production; (2) boundary exchange; (3) adaptation and (4)
management. These are diagrammed in Figure 2.
INPUT-OUTPUT PROCESSING SYSTEM 65

B MANAGEMENT B
0 0
U U
INPUTS PRODUCTION OUTPUTS ~|
N N
D D
A A
ADAPTATION R
R
Y Y

FEEDBACK

Figure 2

The Production Subsystem. In a human service agency the

function of the production subsystem is to provide service.2
Resources (inputs) such as money and manpower entering the
agency are transformed into services. The importance of this
subsystem is demonstrated by the fact that the agency’s name
or its classification is often related to the service it provides.
An example of this is a “child guidance clinic.” If we dia¬
grammed only the productions subsystem, it would look as
in Figure 3.

The Boundary Subsystem. Like all organizations, human

service agencies rely on imputs from their environment for
survival, and they produce outputs to that environment. The
function of the boundary subsystem is to obtain from the
environment those resources needed to perform the tasks of
the production subsystem and to return the “products” or
services to the environment. Resources processed by the boun¬
dary subsystem include:
— money and credit to cover costs of both providing services
and maintaining the agency;
— personnel such as administrators, counselors, doctors, nurses,
clerical staff and others;
✓

— clients;
66 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

— INPUTS PRODUCTION OUTPUTS-!

Feedback

Figure 3

— knowledge and expertise to implement services;

— complementary services from other agencies;
— social support and legitimation from the environment such
as other service agencies, potential clients, community influen-
tials, regulatory agencies, and so on.

Accounting for both the production and boundary sub¬

systems, the agency diagram has grown to look like Figure 4.
Staff performing boundary functions are faced with com¬
peting expectations—those of members of their role sets within
their own organizations and those of others who comprise
external role sets. A crisis center director, for example, might
experience conflicting demands from agency staff who want
to protect the privacy of juvenile runaways and from the police
who want to follow the letter of the law. When agency staff
perform “outward facing” activities such as recruiting volunteers,
going after funding, or working as outreach workers to contact
potential clients, they are performing boundary functions. Staff
activities to develop ties with community influentials, improve
public relations, or place recovered clients in half-way houses
are other examples of boundary functions.
The Adaptive Subsystem. The adaptive subsystem permits
the agency to modify its activities in regard to a changing
environment. In part, it performs an intelligence function,
evaluating the activities of the agency in relation to changes
in that environment. An agency that cannot adapt to new
client needs, new state requirements, or funding priorities quickly
becomes obsolete. Obsolete agencies find it difficult to recruit
INPUT-OUTPUT PROCESSING SYSTEM 67

B B
O 0
U U
INPUTS N N
PRODUCTION OUTPUTS
D D
A A
R R
Y Y

FEEDBACK

Figure 4

resources, including clients and the money and manpower to

serve them. When you add the adaptive subsystem to the
other two, the agency diagram looks like Figure 5.

The three functions of the adaptive subsystem are to

— audit the external environment of the agency;
— monitor internal activities; and
— evaluate outputs.
Auditing the external environment requires being alert to
changes in units upon which the agency is dependent (e.g.,
a state office, a local board, funders, etc.). It also involves
identifying developments in service technology (e.g., new forms
of therapy, new management techniques) that might supersede
or replace those employed by the agency. Finally, it involves
assessing changes in client needs or populations. For example,
the increased use of alcohol by secondary school children might
suggest new client populations in need of treatment by agency
staff.
External auditing requires that those agency people who
“face outward”—the directors, board chairpersons, and pro¬
gram developers—keep abreast of environmental changes. These
include changes in both available resources and the suppliers
of resources. Those persons managing the adaptive subsystem
68 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

B B
O PRODUCTION 0
— INPUTS —► U OUTPUTS -i
U
N N
D
A
V D
A
' ADAPTIVE
R R
Y Y

FEEDBACK

Figure 5

of resources. Those persons managing the adaptive subsystem

must possess analytic skills to assess and evaluate changes
in the environment and interactional skills to negotiate effec¬
tively with elements in the environment.
Monitoring internal activities requires collecting informa¬
tion at two levels: the “client level” and the “operations level.”
Client level information includes client perceptions of needs,
worker perceptions of client needs, and actions taken by the
agency regarding the client. It is a record keeping function
that ensures more rational and continuous client service, and
provides data for a more comprehensive look at an agency’s
clients.
Auditing at the “operations level” involves gathering and
analyzing information about recruiting clients to the agency;
the kinds of services offered to different types of clients; staff
case loads; and kinds of interventions used. These records
deal with ongoing aspects of agency performance and provide
information about agency operations.
Evaluation of agency outputs is often a legal or fiscal re¬
quirement, particularly when the agency has to justify its ex¬
istence and the continuation of its services. Evaluation also
informs agency staff and others of the effectiveness of their
efforts. Few evaluations are easy to conduct. Valid measures
are difficult to arrive at. The results of an evaluation may
be painful. Evaluations are complicated by the fact that most
INPUT-OUTPUT PROCESSING SYSTEM 69

- INPUTS —^ OUTPUTS n

FEEDBACK

Figure 6

agencies have multiple goals that result in multiple outputs.

For these reasons agencies often short-circuit the evaluation
process or avoid it. This is unfortunate because without ade¬
quate evaluation, feedback is incomplete and the agency is
less likely to be able to adjust effectively to environmental
changes.
The Management Subsystem. Cutting across all others, the
management subsystem’s activities include coordinating the
activities of staff performing in each subsystem; resolving con¬
flicts among the subsystems and the organizational hierarchy
to maintain adequate staff performance; and mediating the
demands of the internal and external systems. It is at this
level that goals and priorities are set and guidelines for the
organization are designed. The final agency diagram looks
like Figure 6.
Note that Figure 6 does not quite correspond to the formal
organization discussed in Chapter 4. In fact, while different
functions tend to be allocated to different work units, any
work unit within a complex organization might perform all
or part of the functions associated with the four subsystems.
Managers must understand the functions of all four sub¬
systems if they are to effectively coordinate those functions
70 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

and resolve conflicts. Just as the total system has two

motivations—survival and service—so does each subsystem.
Managers make decisions about allocating resources between
those conflicting motivations. The primary function of the
managerial subsystem is to maintain the organization. By so
doing it provides support for the other subsystems.
Managerial decisions often represent compromises between
members of various subsystems. If those compromises respond
only to the most strident voices, they may lead to inconsistent
or unworkable agency policies. A good administrator must
be able to make tolerable compromises, compromises that
assure effective agency operation. This approach differs from
more traditional views of management in which administrators
direct, staff perform tasks, and administrators check to see
if directives were fulfilled. It leads to negotiations and shared
decision making in management.

EXAMPLES OF THE SYSTEMS APPROACH

The preceding discussion summarized what is often referred

to as the “systems approach” and draws on the work of
sociologist Talcott Parsons. It would be better to refer
to it as a systems approach, because Parson’s work has been
complemented by the contributions of other theorists. Whatever
we choose to call it, we might all agree that the systems perspec¬
tive requires management to perform flexibly. If the manager
recognizes the organization’s multiple and often incompatible
goals, his or her trust will be toward workable compromise
in the face of incompatible demands. Managers should be
seen as persons who explore organizational resources and seek
modification rather than establishing and enforcing hard and
fast rules. The systems approach to management goes beyond
reacting to what is, in order to project what might be or
should be. It requires the manager to explore alternative means
of using inputs to achieve outputs. It suggests the need to
INPUT-OUTPUT PROCESSING SYSTEM 71

define and redefine those outputs in terms of organizational

goals. Figure 7 summarizes the preceding discussion.
The following exercises will help you think through the
information you have read about agency subsystems. Use them
or other examples drawn from your own experience to help
colleagues understand how to approach organizational pro¬
blems and operations from the systems perspective.

EXERCISE A
The child placement agency never seems to find out
about changes in state and federal regulations until
the last minute. It is constantly struggling to make
last minute adjustments in its programs and apply
for new licenses.
In what subsystems is the problem located? How
will it affect the other subsystems?

In this example, the problem lies in the adaptive subsystem—in

the failure of those doing the auditing to be alert to the changes
indicated by state and federal regulating agencies. It is not
enough to be in contact with state and federal officials. It
may also be necessary to be ready to shift agency operations
in the direction of the general policy drift. Your organization
must be willing to assign adequate resources to both auditing
and in preparation for possible adaptation. To survive, it may
be necessary to anticipate changes and be ready to adapt rapidly.
Inefficiency in this subsystem affects each of the other sub¬
systems. The effect on other subsystems would depend upon
what state or federal regulation changes occur. For example,
if new regulations concern staff training, the managerial sub¬
system and the boundary subsystem are most affected. The
boundary subsystem has to secure the resources from the en¬
vironment such as trainers and facilities in order to provide
the new training. The managerial subsystem then has to coor-
72 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Production Subsystem
Function: accomplishment of work
related tasks
PRODUCTION
transformation of energy
within agency
Motivation: effectiveness and effi¬
ciency in service delivery

Boundary Subsystem
Function: management of exchanges
B B at system boundaries to
O 0 obtain resources
PRODUCTION
u U
N N — maintenance and recruit¬
D D ment of social support
A A
R R Motivation: acquisition of needed
Y Y inputs and assurance of
market for outputs

Adaptive Subsystem
Function: — assessment of needs
- feedback and evaluation
Motivation: response to pressure for
change or exploration of
new opportunities for
service

Management Subsystem
Function: — coordination and direc¬
tion of substructures
— support of staff in ade¬
quate job performance
— coordination of external
demands and agency
resources;
— maintenance of organiza¬
tional activities
Motivation: maintenance or expansion
of production, adaptive
and boundary subsystems

Figure 7 Summary of Agency Subsystems

INPUT-OUTPUT PROCESSING SYSTEM 73

dinate the activities of staff while they undergo the training

to meet regulations. The production subsystem is affected as
staff are required to reallocate their time from direct services
to training.
Now consider another example, Exercise B.

EXERCISE B
Agency Y has been unsuccessful in its attempts to
initiate an alcohol safety court referral program in
its county. The adjacent two counties have had such
programs for over a year. Every time the director
proposes that the County Board of Commissioners
consider his proposal, the idea is supported but the
program never has gotten beyond the expression of
support stage. The director seems unable to get ac¬
tual budgeting for the program and has been unable
to enlist the aid of any single member of the
Board.
In which subsystem is the problem located?
Which subsystem could bring pressure to bear on
the Board?
Which combination of could be used to solve this
problem?
Work out the answers yourself or with your agency
colleagues.

If you prefer, reflect on an organizational problem you have

recently experienced. How did you resolve that problem? In
which subsystem did it lie? If the problem still exists, confront
it using a systems perspective. Utilize what you have learned
about subsystems to locate a point at which problem resolution
could be aimed. If you are finding some difficulty in working
this problem through, why not work on it at a staff meeting?
74 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

Among other things, if you view the organization as a system

of subsystems you might
— develop a picture of your agency operations that extends beyond
the individual unit or agency;
— be better able to identify and locate resources you want and
need in your service delivery system;
— develop a better understanding of other units both inside and
outside your agency or department;
— be able to anticipate potential problems and develop organiza¬
tional mechanisms to handle risk and uncertainty;
— be able to better balance the resources spent on agency
maintenance and services;
— be aware of the interdependencies of all the subsystems and
that a change in one subsystem affects all other subsystems.
INPUT-OUTPUT PROCESSING SYSTEM 75

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

The systems approach en¬ In focusing on the entire system,

compasses the entire the major purpose of the
organization—structural organization—the production
subunits, task groups, and function—may be downgraded
individuals. in importance.
It makes it possible to con¬
sider allocation of resources
to both agency survival and
service delivery more
rationally.
It specifies which functions It involves a high initial in¬
should be carried out by the vestment of time and energy
appropriate subunits of an to establish the task and
organization. performance measures that
accompany this approach.
It permits a more rational It is often difficult for staff
approach to management of to understand this perspec¬
organizations that deal in tive because it may not be a
human problems and often familiar one.
find themselves buried in
value-laden issues. It aims
toward compromise and
negotiation.
It is an integrative perspec¬
tive that ties all the sub¬
systems together for a com¬
mon purpose of organiza¬
tional goal attainment.
76 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

NOTES

1. The perceptive reader will find that this chapter is based on Talcott
Parsons’s seminal contributions to sociological literature. See especially Par¬
sons et al. (1961).
2. Some readers might take objection to designating agency output as
service. “If the goal of service is some change in the consumer or client,
shouldn’t that change be designated as the output?” Hold your reservation.
We’ll deal with this issue in the next chapter.
Chapter 6

YOUR AGENCY IN INTERACTION WITH

ITS ENVIRONMENT

The agency’s adaptive system, when it is working well, makes

it possible to interact with various elements in the environment
in a relatively systematic and planned manner. But how does
the environment impact on the agency, its ability to survive
amidst turbulance, and to accomplish the missions for which
it was established? In this chapter we’ll examine two sets of
concepts that can be used to understand environmental in¬
fluences and then, based on that understanding, how an agency
charts a course through the environment. The first conceptual
approach is drawn from biology and is generally referred to
as human ecology. The second is drawn from social psychology
and deals with agency /organization-set relationships, which
parallel those we discussed in Chapter 2 when we examined
role/role-set relationships.

ECOLOGICAL INFLUENCES ON YOUR AGENCY

Ecologists refer to symbiotic and commensalistic in¬

terdependence between organisms and their environments. Sym¬
biosis presumes differences in both characteristics and aims,

77
78 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

yet these differences are essential for organisms to interact.

Bees in need of nectar and flowers in need of pollination
provide a familiar example. In systems terminology we would
say that one system’s output is another’s input.
Symbiosis can be used to describe many of the relationships
between agencies and within them. Interagency referrals or
purchase of service agreements are examples of symbiotic ex¬
changes between organizations. Exchanges between a secretarial
pool and the protective services staff in a public welfare agency
might serve as an internal example.
In contrast, commensalistic interdependence is based on
common characteristics or interests. These are expressed in
terms of common behavior and shared goals. A union, a fund¬
raising group, or a child advocacy league are typical examples
of commensalistic associations. These are single organizations.
For an example of commensalistic cooperation between organiza¬
tions, consider six child welfare agencies cooperating on a
volunteer recruitment or public awareness campaign. The type
of cooperation established will generally be the result of a
variety of environmental forces impacting on the organism
(your agency), but the specific impact those forces have will
be mediated by the technology available to and used by the
agency. An examination of the mental health system may
clarify the point.
The mental hospital in your community can be viewed as
the product of centuries of effort to control the threatening
behavior of some members of society (referred to as social
deviants or defined as mentally ill or incompetent), in such
a way as to protect the rest of society. So long as society
does not change its perception of the mentally ill, and so
long as the technologies used for treatment and control do
not change, we would expect that the system would not be
subject to pressures to modify its behavior or structure.
As newer technologies were developed, particularly those
involving drugs, it was possible to treat patients differently.
But so long as the community was not ready to accept the
INTERACTING WITH ENVIRONMENT 79

mentally ill within its own midst, or so long as effective methods

of community management were not developed, it was not
possible to discharge large numbers of patients. Thus, many
of the earlier modalities of treatment remain commonplace:
physical restraints, shock, involvement of patients in some
form of therapeutic work or self-help. To understand this
in ecological terms, let’s consider the hosptial and its environ¬
ment as an ecosystem.
All ecosystems tend toward the maintenance of an equilibrium
state; that is, without any internal or external pressures, systems
will tend to remain in a steady state with no need to change.
But if there are pressures to change (say in the form of public
protest or through the infusion of new funds to establish a
new service), such changes will take place in some part of the
system, through modifying the functions of a particular depart¬
ment, enlarging it, or establishing a new program. Once such
change has been initiated, there is internal pressure for other
departments to change. The system is no longer in a steady
state, and to correct for the internal pressures, the organism
(mental hospital) tries to make adjustments that will lead it
to a new equilibrium.
Ecosystems tend to be relatively permeable or impermeable,
or in less technical terms, relatively open or closed. So long
as persons defined as mentally ill were committed to mental
hospitals and those hospitals provided all needed services to
their patients, the system was relatively closed. The hospital
depended on the outside primarily for a steady infusion of
funds and for the referral or commitment of patients. But
when the preferred treatment shifted to community care (based
on new public perceptions or definitions of mental illness as
mediated by new technology—primarily chemical treatment),
mental hospitals found themselves involved in a wide variety
of new symbiotic and commensalistic relationships with other
organizations. As the hospital’s success in rehabilitating pa¬
tients (not just warehousing them) depended more and more
on the availability of community support systems, a larger
80 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

number of staff members began to perform boundary func¬

tions, interacting with various elements in the community.
Whereas at one time the hospital’s superintendent or its medical
director may have had exclusive responsibility for relating to
the environment, now such repsonsibiity is broadly shared.
The sheer number of needed external relationships, their
complexity and variety, require that many members of the
staff develop and maintain relationships with suppliers and
collaborators. Rehabilitation and treatment are no longer possible
within the hospital itself. Often, they require cooperative ar¬
rangements with many other social and health agencies. In
ecological terms the hospital has become a relatively open
system, its boundaries increasingly permeable. A better term
might even by “diffuse.” The more open an organization
and diffuse its boundaries, the less importance is placed on
those boundaries (where the organization stops and another
one begins), and the more emphasis is placed on improving
the nature of the functional interdependence the organization
has developed with key elements it its environment. It may
even become difficult to tell where one agency ends and another
begins. In community mental health, for example, it is not
uncommon to find consultants and others employed by a men¬
tal health center, functioning as staff members of a high school,
senior citizen’s center, or city recreation department. Whatever
boundaries might exist must be redrawn continuously if any
organization chart is to remain current.

THE TASK ENVIRONMENT

AND THE ORGANIZATION-SET

Let’s now reexamine these same processes using a somewhat

different set of concepts. The entire array of agencies, people,
and groups with which an agency interacts to provide services
and to survive is called a “task environment” by some sociologists
INTERACTING WITH ENVIRONMENT 81

and an “organizational set’’ by others. See Chapter 2 for

a discussion of the “role-set” concept from which the notion
of organization set is drawn. The task environment includes
all those elements in the organization’s environment that have
the potential to influence its performance or survival. One
way to examine the task environment is to look for those
places where the organization engages in some form of ex¬
change with elements in the environment. Exchange can be
defined as any voluntary or mandated act in which one party
gives something in return for something else.
Agencies exchange clients, staff time, and expertise or ser¬
vices such as the conduct of surveys or the management of
information. These exchanges need not be equal; it is only
necessary that all parties to an exchange feel they benefit from
it. When Agency A purchases the services of Agency B for
some of A’s clients, for example, the exchange may be totally
unequal, yet of benefit to both. Agency A might also have the
option to buy what it needs from a third agency, C. But Agen¬
cy B may be totally dependent on A for its survival. But, the
power relationship shifts if there is no C, and A has no alter¬
native but to go to B.
Subtleties exist in this exchange process. Funders, for exam¬
ple, typically have a great deal of perceived power, but funders
are also dependent on the agencies they fund. The United Fund
may raise money for agencies that provide services. Through
its allocating committees it may press a family agency to per¬
form up to certain standards, but it may not be able to press
too far. If those agencies it funds are not capable or willing
to abide by United Fund guidelines, it will be in trouble. The
United Fund, after all, is dependent on contributions from
people who may like the family agency the way it is. The Fund
has its own environment to worry about.
To understand the task environment, it is necessary to iden¬
tify the key elements that affect your agency and its ability
to perform all four functions described in Chapter 5. These
82 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

elements need not interact with your agency directly. Their in¬
teractions with each other can result in an outcome that im¬
pacts on your agency.
The six elements of an agency’s task environment are its
(1) beneficiaries; (2) funders; (3) providers of nonfiscal
resources; (4) providers of complementary services; (5) com¬
petitors; and (6) legitimators.
(1) Beneficiaries are those who receive services in direct and/or
indirect ways. Clients in a hard drug treatment program
who receive services are examples of direct beneficiaries.
Families of ex-convicts who are using a job placement ser¬
vice are indirect beneficiaries of the service. They benefit
from it, but only through the service provided the ex¬
prisoners.
(2) Funders provide money. Some funders provide an ongoing
source of agency funds. These need not provide the largest
amount of funding, however. A one-time grant may be larger
than any allocation from a regular source.

(3) Non-fiscal resources vary from agency to agency. For ex¬

ample, free rent may be supplied by someone willing to
donate space. In the second case, the agency is dependent
upon volunteers to supply time and effort, and upon other
agencies for referrals of those volunteers.
(4) Providers of complementary services are those individuals
and organizations which provide other services to your agen¬
cy’s clients. A crisis center which refers to aged to protective
services, to medical clinics, and to a mental health center,
is using a number of complementary services. The detox¬
ification unit in a hospital provides complementary services
for an alcohol counseling center.
(5) Competitors are those programs outside your agency that
need the same funds, legitimation, clients, or support from
influentials in order to operate. They may provide the same
service as your agency, or compete for funds from the
same funding sources for different purposes.
INTERACTING WITH ENVIRONMENT 83

(6) Legitimation comes from legislation, governmental bodies

or your agency’s board of directors. These may license
an agency, give it accreditation, or an informal seal of
approval. Sometimes, legitimation comes from individuals
or organizations in the community. A judge, by referring
offenders to an agency, implies its legitimacy. When profes¬
sional associations endorse or certify agency staff, the
legitimacy of that agency is increased in the public eye. Good
public relations and a good press provide additional
legitimation.
Interorganizational exchanges may take place between more
than one organization at a given time. Exercises A and B
are designed to help agency staff identify elements in its task
environment and analyze the extent to which it is dependent
on these elements. The exercises can be used to assess the
power each element has over the agency. If, for example,
an element of the task environment appears several times and
in several categories, it is likely to be very important for your
agency’s survival or for the accomplishement of its goals.
Task environment elements with high scores on the exercise
are the organizations with whom your agency’s relationships
are most critical.
Read the instructions carefully. Then turn the page and
carefully consider the illustration provided. Involve other staff,
particularly those who peform “outward facing’’ tasks. Some
knowledge of the environment or system of servies is necessary
to complete the exercise. The more information you can bring
to bear, the more complete the final picture will be.
84 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

EXERCISE A:
Managing the Organization’s Environment
INSTRUCTIONS:
Examine the diagram of the elements in an agency’s
environment, its organization set. There is also a blank
form for you to fill in.
1. Put your agency in the middle of the blank form.
2. List the organizations, groups, and individuals
(units) with whom you or your agency interacts as the
organization provides services or strives to maintain
itself.
3. Place each organization, group or individual element
under the appropriate major heading, for example,
competitor, funder, and so on. It may appear in more
than one place.
4. For each element (organization, group, individual),
assess the amount of influence you think it has on the
service delivery of your program or agency.
Assign a score to each unit from 5 points (equaling
high influence) to 1 point (equaling low influence).
How many times and under which categories does an
element appear on your picture? The more it appears,
the more critical it may be.
Total the points accrued by each unit. Those with the
highest scores will be the most critical elements in
your environment.
Now, take this exercise, place your work unit in the
middle, and do the same thing for the subunits within
your agency.
Identify the organizational elements that have the
greatest influence over your work unit within the total
agency.
 BENEFICIARIES-- 4---FUNOING SOURCES

i-a
.§

85
86
BENEFICIARIES

sunoao
SUPPLIERS

orn
OF

no
OTHER

U3N7S
ao
RESOURCES

sniivmixi 03i-
Figure 8 Sample of the Connections Between an Agency and Elements in its Task Environment
INTERACTING WITH ENVIRONMENT 87

EXERCISE B:
Alternative Strategy Selection
INSTRUCTIONS:
Review the diagram you completed in Exercise A on a
separate sheet of paper.
— List those units receiving high scores for frequen¬
cy and importance.
— Think about which other groups could be alter¬
natives to those on your list.
— Consider whether these alternatives might be
reached in a short time frame and with minimal
effort or disruption. Are there others that require
a long-range developmental effort?
If immediate: What do you need to do to make the
substitution? If long range; consider what you
might do to effect the change, consider a potential
time table; weigh the long-term gain against the
short-term investment of resources.
Try out your ideas on other agency staff.

Now consider our earlier discussion on ecosystems. Identify

at least three elements in the task environment in which the
exchange relationship might be called symbiotic; three others
in which the environment is clearly commensalistic. Are the
relationships between your agency and others in its environ¬
ment both commensalistic and symbiotic at the same time?
How so? Describe.
88 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

If you focus on your agency’s interaction with elements

in its task environment, you should be able to
— identify alternative sources of funds and legitimacy;
— be able to think through a variety of exchanges with potential
providers of complementary services and providers of non¬
monetary resources;
— identify potential competitors for resources and legitimacy;
— anticipate changes in your agency’s environment, and identify
those changes that are crucial to your agency’s survival and
accomplishment of its service missions;
— identify those elements in the environment that need your
services as you need theirs (symbiosis) and those which have
similar or identical missions and methods that might be better
met through cooperation with your agency (commensalism);
— specify those internal and external factors that, when mediated
by new technology, are likely to create significant pressures
(and opportunities) for change.
INTERACTING WITH ENVIRONMENT 89

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

It defines an entire network Relationships may be seen as

of services. competitive, when in fact
they may only be
uncoordinated.
It allows an agency to
analyze its position with
regard to other agencies,
groups, and individuals.
It may lead to identifying It focuses on organizational
potentially rewarding in¬ interaction rather than ser¬
ter organizational exhanges. vice delivery to clients.
It makes possible (and may
even promote) the coordina¬
tion of services to clients.
It can help an agency iden¬
tify where community
resources are located and
who needs or competes for
these resources.
It can define potential
trouble spots with outside
agencies and allow for plan¬
ning for the change in im¬
pact this will have on your
agency.
Chapter 7

YOUR AGENCY AS A PEOPLE-CHANGING

AND PEOPLE-PROCESSING SYSTEM

In Chapter 5 we spoke of resources as “inputs” and services

as “products” or “outputs!’ We referred to the functions
of each of the agency’s subsystems in relation to these inputs
and outputs. For example, we described the production sub¬
system’s function as taking such resources as money and per¬
sonnel and transforming these into services. In this chapter
we will explore a rather different perspective. Resources will
be expanded to include the agency’s “raw materials!’ those
persons who are to be processed or changed. The output will
be defined as their changed status and position or their changed
behavior. Put more accurately the agency’s output is “people
with changed statuses or behaviors!” Thus, those people we
have been accustomed to thinking of as recipients or consumers
(clients, students, members, patients) will now be defined as
raw materials to be shaped or otherwise acted upon. Lest
the term “raw materials” seem a bit crass, let me point out
that by shifting to this orientation, we also shift our definition
of product from services to outcomes, from means to ends.
In so doing we elevate rather than denigrate the individuals
who pass through our agencies.

91
92 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

STAFF-CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS

For simplicity’s sake we’ll refer to all those people who

are processed or shaped by a social agency as clients. These
include students, welfare recipients, hospital patients, com¬
munity centers members, prison inmates, persons subject in
one way or another to court rulings, and the like. We’ll refer
to those persons assigned to working with them (providing
some form of agency service) as staff. Staff-client relationships
are at the core of all activities in social agencies; they are
central to the agency’s missions; they are its definition of
what it is in business for.
These relationships are aimed, from the staff’s point of
view, at either categorizing the client and his or her needs,
or at changing the client in some way. The more critical the
need or the more significant the change sought, the more
important the nature of the relationship and the demands
made of the client. From the client’s point of view the agency
and his or her relationship to a member of its staff is aimed
at securing some sought after benefit: a change in status or
position; greater access to needed resources; more control over
his or her circumstances; perhaps even the instrinsic value
inherent in the relationship, one that increases the client’s
sense of belonging, self-esteem, or pleasure in social inter¬
course. If the client perceives the nature of the relationship
to be less than beneficial, even punitive, he or she may attempt
to manipulate it somewhat, controlling the degree of informa¬
tion provided, refusing to cooperate or circumventing agency
rules, perhaps opting out of the relationship altogether.
Clients are, after all, people, each with his or her own
identity, only a part of which is connected in some way to
the agency. Clients have their own values, characteristic pat¬
terns of behavior, goals, and objectives. If they are not forced
to accept agency services (for example, by court order or out
of desperation), they can always resist the agency’s efforts
to categorize them or to change them.
The agency is always limited in its ability to coerce or de¬
mand compliance. For example, a university may set up rules
PEOPLE CHANGING AND PROCESSING 93

and procedures for satisfactory completion of academic re¬

quirements, but short of refusing to award a degree, it can
do little to force students to comply. A physician on a hospital
staff can recommend surgery, but short of emergency pro¬
cedures, cannot force the patient to accept the recommenda¬
tion. The more important the agency’s service is to the client
and the less likely he or she can find a substitute elsewhere,
the more likely that the client will comply. The greater the
need for the client’s willing compliance, the more likely the
agency will accommodate to the client’s perception of ap¬
propriate demands and services. This is especially true if clients
represent or are affiliated with prestigious or influential social
groups.
These limitations on the agency’s authority require that it
establish procedures to minimize conflict in staff-client rela¬
tionships and increase staff control over those relationships.
This they can do by appealing to common values (“We both
want you to get well’’ “Education is important!’ “If we work
together we can make this center the kind of place we want
it to be”), by pointing out the benefits of compliance (“If
you register, we can assure you that the checks will keep coming
on a monthly basis”), or by threatening dire consequences
for noncompliance (“If you don’t attend group sessions, I’ll
have to report you to the probation department... sorry, but
those are the rules”)? Staff can also control the relationship
through the establishment and maintenance of a set of pro¬
cedures that keep the client at a certain distance and with
limited access to information (“We’ll meet here every Wednes¬
day at 3!’ “Sorry, that’s priviledged information!’ or “When
you’ve been here a while, you’ll get to understand”).

PEOPLE PROCESSING

People processing organizations (or processing units within

a more comprehensive service organization) are in the business
of turning people into clients (such as students, members,
recipients, patients, graduates, and so on). Their principle func-
94 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

tions are to classify people and to confer on them new statuses.

For example, a welfare office or social security office might
classify potential clients as having the rights to certain services
or benefits. A university admissions office might classify a
student for regular or conditional admissions or for advance
standing. A community referral center might diagnose a client’s
problems and refer the client to the appropriate agency or practi¬
tioner for service. A placement office might certify a trainee’s
completion of training and refer him or her to one or more
jobs. In each of these examples the processing results in a
particular classification or status that others (who might then
provide benefits or services) would understand.
Of necessity, such processing can deal with only some aspects
of the total person. And in practice it is done through a number
of stages common to most social agencies. These include (1)
assessment of the client’s attributes and circumstances to decide
whether he or she can legitimately be served by the agency
or by others on whose behalf the agency is working; (2) explor¬
ing both those attributes and circumstances to determine ap¬
propriate action alternatives; (3) choosing between those alter¬
natives; and (4) referring or placing the client in a location
where his or her classification or altered status will result in
requisite services or benefits. These stages can be further reduc¬
ed to a set of steps: (1) reception; (2) recording; (3) labeling;
(4) routing; (5) treating; and (6) referral or discharge!
In this process the client often feels as if he or she has
been turned into “nothing but a piece of paper!’ Becoming
a client is, in fact, becoming an artifact of the agency. Regardless
of rhetoric or ideology, the agency is never interested in the
whole person. The agency is interested in those characteristics
of the person that make it possible to serve or refer the person
(change the person or process the person); in other words,
to transform the person into a client. And this invariably
requires paper (or a computerized substitute).
Paper is used to record client characteristics, progress,
diagnosis (labels), recommendations, and so on. Staff access
to these papers and their ability to withold or to make them
PEOPLE CHANGING AND PROCESSING 95

available to scrutiny or to use them to issue reports gives

staff considerable control over clients. For their parts, clients
are likely to reveal only what they perceive will yield them
a net benefit. They often attempt to present those characteristics
that are most likely to result in favorable treatment. Think
of how you have filled out college application forms, job
applications, or applications for membership in an organiza¬
tion, and you will know what I mean. If you are on the
staff side, you know how bothersome it can be when forms
are relatively ambiguous or when they include information
that you don’t need (information that may be very significant
to the client, but not relevant in terms of the services that
your agency is ready or able to dispense). In fact, asking
for irrelevant information is often perceived as an unjustified
intrusion into the individual’s privacy. Thus both worker and
client may conspire (agree) to a procedure that reduces the
client to the characteristics recorded on paper.

EXERCISE A
People Processing
Identify the steps or procedures that are linked together
in the processing of a client in an agency with which you
are familiar. Spell out what happens in each step:
—reception (who, by whom, when, where)
—recording (what, for what purpose)
—labeling (describe categories)
—routing (by whom, to whom)
—treating or educating (describe briefly)
—referral or discharge (when, how)

Feel free to modify the steps to reflect the situation in the

agency you are describing.
96 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

PEOPLE CHANGING

In addition to these processing functions, many social agen¬

cies also engage in a program of people changing through
education and socialization or through some form of treat¬
ment. As noted, the end product of the agency’s service is
a changed (generally improved) person. That improvement
may include being better educated or competant to practice
a profession, cured of a disease, rehabilitated, financially self-
sufficient, able to live independently, and so on. Thus the
service provided is defined as part of the agency’s throughput
system rather than as its output. The client who is to undergo
change is perceived as raw material to be molded, refined,
or otherwise improved and supported in some way.
Vinter (1963) distinguishes socialization oriented organiza¬
tions such as schools, youth agencies, senior centers, settlement
houses from treatment agencies such as mental hospitals, child
guidance clinics, training programs for the chronically
unemployed, drug maintenance programs along three di¬
mensions. These are the clients they serve, the nature of the
changes sought, and the assessment of each accorded by the
larger society.
Socialization and education organizations such as schools
and universities generally receive considerable legitimation in
part because of the populations they serve, and in part because
it is assumed that their clients are willingly involved in the
process of change towards some socially acceptable goal—
getting a degree or getting a job. Persons served in some
treatment oriented agencies, such as general hospitals, are also
presumed to want to get better, but in any case are not to
be blamed for their problems or defects. They are, after all,
only victims of ill health. And any of us could, and probably
will, spend time in a hospital.
The same is not necessarily true of those in mental hospitals
and in other agencies perceived as being in the business of
changing people because of some moral defect—their deviation
from the norms of behavior society imposes on them. In addi-
PEOPLE CHANGING AND PROCESSING 97

tion to the mentally ill, delinquents, criminals, the poor, and

the chronically unemployed are regarded by society as being
improperly motivated or possessing otherwise defective attributes.
Those organizations charged with changing them are regarded
by the general public with some of the same disapproval as
their clientele, Yet paradoxically these agencies are given much
greater latitude in the methods, and in particular the coercive
methods they can use to promote compliance with behavioral
norms. Thus the agencies with the toughest jobs may get the
least public approval for doing their work unless they, too,
“get tough!’

MOVING FROM RAW MATERIALS

TO THE FINAL PRODUCT

There are some real conceptual and programmatic advan¬

tages to looking at an agency’s clientele as its raw material
to be processed or changed in some way. Focusing on the
outcome (of either processing or socialization and treatment)
rather than on the services an agency provides makes it possible
to address the purposes for which the agency was established.
Nevertheless, the implied parallel between a factory or pro¬
duction unit that utilizes raw materials and social agencies
does not hold 100 percent. First of all, the agency’s raw material,
as we have seen, interacts with agency staff and others to
determine the final outcome. That outcome is never solely
the result of the agency’s efforts, even when there is full com¬
pliance on the part of the client. The process of change (whether
in desired or undesired directions), continues throughout the
former client’s lifetime, often long after processing or treat¬
ment has ceased.
Second, the agency’s technology, the methods it uses, is
likely to be much less precise, repeatable, and effective than
those employed in a manufacturing plant. We generally know
what to expect when we apply heat or force to an inanimate
98 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

material. We have very little knowledge of cause and effect

relations when it comes to human behavior. In fact, the com¬
plexity of the tasks faced by most agencies causes them to
limit what they do and how. That very limitation, while increas¬
ing some degree of efficiency, is likely to result in some loss
of effectiveness. Because these limited means may be applicable
only to certain clients, they may require a screening process
in which those most likely to succeed are screened in and
others screened out. This is what vocational rehabilitation agen¬
cies often referred to as “creaming” or “skimming the cream
off the top!’
A third problem lies in the ambiguity of most agency goals
and in particular the treatment goals they set for their clients.
Because goals are statements of intent, they specify values.
Often these are values around which there is no universal
agreement. In fact, there are likely to be multiple and conflic¬
ting expectations of the agency by various elements in what
we have earlier described as the task environment (see Chapter
6). The lack of consensus on goals is also found within the
agency; different professional groups and different depart¬
ments may hold views that are at variance with each other.
Finally, as we have seen, both clients and staff are apt to
seek different outcomes from their relationship. Their percep¬
tions of appropriate outcomes may change over the course
of that relationship.
These problems make it exceedingly difficult to develop
useful outcome measures. If goals are ambiguous and technology
is indeterminate, it becomes almost impossible to define the
criteria for measurement of effectiveness. And if there are
variables that can effect the client’s behavior during and subse¬
quent to the agency-directed change process, then it becomes
virtually impossible to measure, with total validity, the impact
of the agency’s efforts to change the client.
PEOPLE CHANGING AND PROCESSING 99

EXERCISE B
People Changing (Treatment or Education)
1. Who changes whom in an agency you are familiar
with? List all the possibilities.
2. To what extent is this change effort empirically based?
ideologically based? Explain.
3. How does the agency try to control client-worker
interactions (rules, procedures, schedules, location,
etc.)? Explain.
4. How do clients influence the process? How central are
they to its outcome? What can they do to facilitate or
subvert it?

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

If you hold that the agency is involved in people changing

and people processing and that its clients are the raw materials
of this process, then you might

— redirect your focus from agency activities to the outcomes

of those activities;
— examine what the client brings in terms of aspirations and
capacities to the staff-client relationship;
— tailor paper work and recording to the client’s needs and less
to those of the agency and the other consumer of its services
(those to whom it refers clients, those who provide other needed
resources);
— differentiate between socialization ;and treatment in the design
of agency programs, and involve the client more fully in both
processes;
— work on increasing public support for both the clientele and
the methods used with agency clients, particularly if the public’s
perceptions are counter-productive because of misperceptions
and biases.
too UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

Viewing clients as “raw The term “raw material” if

materials” puts the focus on used without heed to the fact
where it ought to be: on the that clients are human beings,
people whose personal aspira¬ may lead to viewing them as
tions, vested interests, neutral and inanimate objects
capacities, and needs are the whose resistance is to be
raison d’etre of the agency’s overcome rather than perceiv¬
operations. ed as a legitimate part of the
goal setting and growth
processes.

A focus on people processing A premature or overly rigid

brings with it the recognition labeling process may preclude
that diagnosis and categoriza¬ examination of the range of
tion should lead to seeking alternative goals and means
alternative socialization and that should be used.
treatment modalities.

Understanding that processing Over-concern with “marketing

leads to referral increases the the product” may result in
likelihood that agency person¬ serving the needs of those
nel will engage in negotiations who subsequently work with
with elements in the environ¬ the client, rather than the
ment to whom clients may be client himself or herself.
sent, leading to a more ap¬
propriate or comprehensive
service program.

Recognizing that people

changing activities include
both socialization and educa¬
tion, a more appropriate mix
of the two may be developed.
PEOPLE CHANGING AND PROCESSING 101

Strengths Limits

This perspective also makes it Concern with outcomes may

likely that agency staff will obscure the fact that both the
focus on outcomes in terms technology used and the goals
of client statuses and sought may be indeterminate
behaviors, rather than on the and ambiguous.
process by which these take
place.

NOTES

1. I am indebted for many of these concepts to my colleague, Yeheskel

Hasenfeld, of the University of Michigan.
2. Amitai Etzioni (1961), a sociologist from Columbia University, has
referred to these as normative, utilitarian, and coercive compliance systems.
3. For a detailed analysis of these steps, and for further discussion of
turning people into paper, see Prottas (1980).
Chapter 8

YOUR AGENCY AS THE CONTEXT WITHIN WHICH

TECHNOLOGIES ARE APPLIED

The work “technology” refers to a complex of activities per¬

formed by individuals on some object to be changed or process¬
ed. It generally requires a well-developed knowledge base that
anticipates the consequences of one action or another. It may
or may not require mechanical devices, but it always requires
some form of tool. For example, in computer technology we
employ software (or the program, which is essentially a com¬
plex of ideas and instructions) and hardware (the physical
computer itself and related devices).
Organizations provide the context within which technologies
are applied to a variety of objects. In fact they employ many
technologies in order to do their business more efficiently
and with a certain degree of rationality, the presumption being
that by doing X, we get Y. These technologies are related
to each of the functions of an organization we explored in
Chapter 5: production, adaptation, boundary maintenance,
and management. In both the management and adaptive sub¬
systems, for example, we employ a variety of budgeting and
accounting technologies, social indicators, operations research,
and other information gathering and processing technologies

103
104 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

(often organized into management information systems refer¬

red to as MIS), and personnel management technologies (in¬
cluding task analysis and job design, staff development, and
training). In boundary maintenance we may use public rela¬
tions, fund raising, and contracting of a variety of interagency
linkages.
But the central or core technologies, those with which our
agencies are identified and which provide them with their “social”
or “human service” identities, are those associated with the
production subsystem. And it is these, interestingly enough,
that provide us with the greatest difficulties. The precision
aimed for in other technologies is hard to come by in our
efforts to serve people. Although clients may be defined as
an agency’s raw materials, they are not without wills of their
own. Many human service technologies, in fact, require that
agency clientele be regarded as subjects and full participants
in the service program, rather than as objects to be worked on.

TECHNOLOGY IN THE HUMAN SERVICES

James D. Thompson (1967) a seminal thinker among organiza¬

tional theorists, described organizational technologies as being
long-linked (such as on the assembly line), mediating (as in
negotiations or information dissemination), and intensive (as
in teaching or treatment). These concepts will serve us well
in our examination of your agency as the context within which
technologies are applied.
The reason that teaching and treatment are defined as inten¬
sive is that a variety of techniques may be used independently
or in concert to effect change in the object; in this case, in¬
dividual or collectivities of human beings. Moreover, these
“objects” of the actions taken are, in fact, “subjects;5 persons
who, through their reactions, responses and initiatives, provide
feedback to those applying the technology, often shaping the
way in which it is applied.
TECHNOLOGIES 105

The intensiveness of human service work is directly related

to two variables. One is the nature of the work being done.
For example, treatment or “people changing” tends in general
to be more intensive than intake or referral (which we referred
to in Chapter 7 as “people processing”). The individual being
treated is likely to be acted upon in more ways than the person
being processed. When that person, in turn, acts on the process,
he or she becomes an integral partner to it. The second variable
is related to the prevalence of “exceptional” cases; that is,
the extent to which each client or client system presents prob¬
lems to be worked on that are unique and that require a
specially tailored complex of intervention activities.
If the nature of the agency’s work with clients is such that
a great deal of reaction is expected of the client (as in rehabilita¬
tion counseling, family treatment, child guidance, and some
forms of job training), then considerable discretion may be
given the worker with regards to how to respond and to shape
the client’s behavior. The same is true if the client’s reactions
are likely to be unpredictable (as in psychotherapy). The worker,
or the department, may be given considerable latitude in the
design of interventions and in the techniques used. Idiosyn¬
cratic and unpredictable behavior, after all, requires nonroutine
responses. But the lack of routine response runs counter to
the logic of organization, and for this reason most social agen¬
cies attempt to develop routine ways of responding to nonroutine
events.
They do so in two ways. First, social agencies create routines
that are based on specific tasks, to be performed by specially
designated staff in set ways; and, second, they create ideological
frameworks that guide the social worker in his or her interac¬
tions with clients.

DEVELOPING ROUTINE RESPONSES

Social agencies, like all formal organizations, find it hard

to live with uncertainty. Thus they establish sets of rules and
106 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

procedures that determine who they will serve (what kinds

of clients with what kinds of problems), who will provide
the service (needed training or other qualifications), the kinds
of service or other activities they will perform, and at what
level of intensity. They engage in a deliberate structuring of
the client-staff relationship. Sometimes this is accomplished
by “departmentalizing” services and related activities. Various
aspects are broken down into component parts; each of these
is assigned to different work units or departments. A hospital
is a good example of an organization that provides intensive
care through various substructures: radiology, pathology,
surgery, social work, and so on.
This is characteristic of many agencies that engage in people
changing activities. Other organizations serialize service, much
as is done on an assembly line. A client first goes through
intake, then through assessment, then is routed for service
(sometimes in a number of different units for different pro¬
blems or needs), and finally is referred elsewhere or is discharg¬
ed. This is most characteristic of people processing organizations.
The greater the breakdown of tasks and their assignment
to specialized units, the more the need for coordination and
related administrative supports. Because service tasks are general¬
ly concrete and specific, the worker’s judgments are limited
to specific issues, and the staff-client relationship is set within
bounds. Moreover, formalized relationships are also establish¬
ed between staff and between departments as ways of suppor¬
ting the controls and limitations on staff-client interactions.
You will find that such organizations tend to go by the rules
or follow the book on procedures. They tend to have formal
communication patterns and tall structures with numerous layers
of supervision so as to assure compliance with the rules. This
is especially necessary when the staff are narrowly trained,
each prepared to perform only limited tasks. In such organiza¬
tions both rules and structure are designed so as to assure
a modicum of uniformity in activity or outcome.
In contrast, there are other types of social agencies (such
as women’s crisis centers or psychiatric clinics) in which uncer-
TECHNOLOGIES 107

tainty cannot easily be controlled for. The same may be true

of subunits within a more formal organization. This uncertain¬
ty is often present when client responsiveness is integral to
the treatment technology. In such circumstances a good deal
of discretion may be given to each staff person who is expected
to perform many tasks with or on behalf of the client.
Because much less coordination is needed when multiple
responsibilities are vested in a single worker, such agencies
or subunits are characterized by a much flatter structure and
less bureaucracy, by which is meant less administration and
fewer layers between top management and worker. These
organizations are further characterized by a colleagal manage¬
ment style. Workers tend to be more highly trained in expecta¬
tion that such training will enable them to make independent
judgments professionally, (i.e., based on knowledge and
guided by an ethical code).

IDEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS

But rules are easily subverted, and a profession’s knowledge

base may not be adequately grounded empirically. Some other
means of assuring compliance with what the agency considers
to be good practice may be required. This can be achieved
through commitment to an ideology, a belief system about
what is morally correct and what works. Such norms might
be developed outside the agency (as in a professional school)
and borrowed with some adaptation. They can also be the
result either of a conscious decision within the agency or the
result of joint experience over a period of years. Often such
norms or belief systems are imbedded in the practice methodology
employed. Thus, in social work, a number of norms are build
into the training of caseworkers, group practitioners, com¬
munity organizers, and others. These include commitments
to client self-determination, confidentiality, participation in
treatment and change, and so on. And these commitments
are expressed in the treatment modalities employed.
108 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Although the agency can to a certain degree assure com¬

pliance with desired norms through the employment of staff
who are trained in the appropriate professions, there may
be times when professional norms and agency norms are in
conflict. In such cases, if the agency does not institute bureaucratic
rules and procedures to assure compliance with desired norms
of behavior, it may attempt to develop service ideologies of
its own. This becomes especially important if the service
technology cannot guarantee desired results; that is, if the
knowledge base upon which it is founded does not show direct
relationships between the means used and the outcomes desired
(cause and effect). This is certainly true in most psychotherapies
and in many other areas where intensive treatment of the
client is required. Such ideologies are composed of beliefs
about the client, the causes of the problem that brought the
problem to the agency, and the consequences of prescribed
actions.
Because beliefs are often based on value commitments rather
than empirical evidence, they tend to provide the rationale
for methods that cannot be justified technically. And for this
reason, too, they tend to be emotionally binding. Because
they give coherence to the agency’s methodologies, any challenge
of the belief system tends also to be seen as a challenge to
the agency itself. Accepting these beliefs is demonstration of
identification with the agency. A commitment to the agency
is interpreted as a commitment to its ideal of service. The
stronger the belief system, the more self-confirming and dif¬
ficult to challenge. Neverless in the absence of more empirically
grounded technologies, and in response to the sometimes over¬
ly bureaucratized and fragmented (some say “dehumanized”)
approaches of other agencies, those with strong ideological
commitments may be well received by both clients and the
general public.
TECHNOLOGIES 109

EXERCISE A
Intensive and Long-Linked Technologies

1. Examine an intensive treatment technology in

your agency or in another agency you may be
familiar with. Now break it down into serial
steps so that is is organized in a long-linked
manner. Refer to Exercises A and B in
Chapter 7, if you wish.
What are the advantages and disadvantages to
the agency of such restructuring? to the
worker? to the client?
2. Now take a long-linked technology and redesign
it as an intensive process.
What are the advantages and disadvantages to
the agency? to the worker? to the client?
3. What are the implications of such changes for:
— the agency’s formal structure;
— staff training or professional background;
— the agency’s relationships to key publics
(clients, funders, auspice providers,
cooperating or competing agencies)?

THE PROBLEM OF
INCOMPATIBLE TECHNOLOGIES

No agency is limited to a single, inclusive technology. In

most situations a great number of technologies operate side
by side; sometimes they operate in near total concert, more
often with considerable strain in their relationships. This strain
may be due to (1) ideological incompatibility; (2) an inap¬
propriate effort to import and transform to the human services
110 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

technologies developed for other purposes; (3) the challenges

imposed by the rigor of technologies not belonging to the
human services also used in the agency; (4) the fact that knowledge
available through everyday means may prove more useful for
some interventions than knowledge gained from some form
of professional or occupational training (we’ll call this the
“challenge of nontechnologies”); and (5) incompatibility with
the clients themselves.
Ideological incompatibility seems to be greater in those situa¬
tions where competing technologies are the most indetermi¬
nant; that is, when they deal with difficult social psychological
problems for which no clear criteria for the measurement of
success exist. In fact, the closer they are to each other in
substance, the more difficult it may be for practitioners to
arrive at some accommodation with each other. That is why
some of the proponents of various neo-Freudian schools of
psychotherapy are in such violent disagreement with each other
(as were Freud’s disciples).
Technological incompatibility may be even more visible,
at least after the fact, when methods borrowed from other
fields are applied to the human services without an understand¬
ing of the basic differences in their foundations. For example,
in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s there were serious
efforts to shape, bend, and even impose program planning
and budgeting systems (PPBS) on the operations of social
agencies. PPBS was developed in the Department of Defense,
and based on an industry model. It had its difficulties even
there because it requires prior consensus on goals and opera¬
tional objectives. These are perhaps the most difficult to define
in the human services. As we will see in the next chapter,
it may not even be appropriate to seek total clarity, much
less consensus. Even those technologies borrowed from one
human service endeavor and applied to another may not fit.
Thus, efforts to apply behavior treatment technologies to agen¬
cy management and to community work may be totally misguid-
TECHNOLOGIES 111

ed, because so little in the environment is subject to the control

of those attempting the intervention.
The challenges imposed by technologies not developed for
human services used in human service agencies may be even
more difficult to accommodate. For example, the new infor¬
mation processing technologies, computer based as they are,
required reporting of inputs, throughputs, and outcomes in
such a way as to seriously challenge human service ideologies
and to force them to report only that which is clearly measurable.
New accounting and budgeting procedures require shifting focus
from what money is spend on (as in line-item budgeting) to
what it is spent for (as in performance budgeting, which often
focuses on the cost of achieving a given objective). Program
evaluation and other operations research efforts may likewise
focus on outcomes, often obfuscating or ignoring immeasurables
the program staff believe are central to their efforts. Such
challenges are not necessarily bad. To the contrary, uncomfor¬
table as they may be, they are frequently the stimulus needed
to eliminate wasteful effort and to sharpen the focus of social
intervention. But they are difficult to accommodate.
By the challenge of nontechnologies I mean those common
sense, everyday methods that may be much more appropriate
than high-cost therapies or other methods that require intensive
professional training. Thus the loneliness of the aged might
better be treated by a volunteer home visit network than through
pyschotherapy in a physician’s or social worker’s office.
Finally, we come to the issue of the interdependence of
human service technologies and the attributes of the client.
Many of the methods of intervention developed by human
service professions are based on insight, psychological under¬
standing, the ability to communicate—a repertoire of skills
that have a clear middle-class bias, especially when used by
middle-class practitioners who may be tuned into the psyches
of their clients, but not to their class ethnic, social, or cultural
lifestyles and the repertoire of skills that accompany those
112 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

patterns of behavior and response. This bias leads to blaming

the client, defining him or her as unresponsive, hostile, or
unmotivated.

EXERCISE B
Technological Incompatibility

1. Describe briefly one or more agency

technologies that are incompatible with (a)
strongly held beliefs of the staff (ideologies);
(b) human service objectives borrowed un¬
critically from some other field; (c) clients and
their needs, interests, or capacities.
2. Could these technologies be made more com¬
patible? How? If not, what alternatives exist?

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

When you view the agency as the context within which

a number of technologies are applied, you might

— focus on those technologies that are core to the agency’s pur¬

poses, that give the agency its identity as a human service
organization; and distinguish these from others that are intend¬
ed to facilitate (rather than shape or redefine) the human service
function;

— distinguish between those technologies that are long-lihked,

mediating, or intensive, and design the agency structure to
accommodate these differences, rather than the other way around
(adapting technology to fit the agency structure);
TECHNOLOGIES 113

— recognize the unique contribution that the client as subject

can make to the processing or treatment activities the agency
engages in, so that the client is not perceive of and acted
upon solely as an object (with all the dehumanization implied);
— sharpen up the knowledge base of the core technologies used
(in particular cause and effect relationships); but when this
is not possible because of the inherent indeterminacy of the
technology, recognize the limitations of both the rules and
the ideologies used to impose control and standardization on
those technologies, perhaps through setting up an evaluation
and review process that looks not only at individual cases,
but that challenges the basic assumptions that underly those
technologies.
114 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

It permits focus on the core It can be diverting, focusing

activities for which the agency on nonproduction related
was established and its pro¬ technologies, because these are
grams created. more controllable and seem to
yield more precise and predic¬
table outcomes.

It recognizes the indeter¬ By focusing on the technology

minacy of many human ser¬ itself, it may obscure the
vices technologies and so client as subject, focusing in¬
reduces the likelihood of in¬ appropriately on the client as
appropriate expectations. object, without will and
personality.
By identifying those
technologies that require long-
linked, mediating, or intensive
actions, it makes it possible
to divide or consolidate tasks
appropriately and to design
the agency structure
accordingly.

By recognizing that ideology In an effort to “objectify”

is not only a way of assuring practice and to reduce the im¬
quality for responsible portance of ideology the
behavior on the part of the agency may establish a set of
practitioner, but also tends to procedures intended to assure
be self-confirming, it increases quality services and efficiency,
the likelihood that emotionally but in fact further reducing
binding beliefs about practice the client to an object.
will be subject to review and
reassessment.
Chapter 9

YOUR AGENCY AS A
GOAL-SEEKING ORGANIZATION

Organizations are goal seeking enterprises, designed and built

to achieve specified ends. It follows that if there is consensus
on goals and if these goals are realistic and precise, it should
be possible to properly engineer an organization to achieve
its goals. Unfortunately, in most social agencies goals are not
necessarily realistic or precise, nor is there universal consensus
about their appropriateness. These difficulties are in the nature
of both social agencies and goals. The reasons for such dif¬
ficulties will become clear as we examine the nature of goals,
their functions, and the ways in which they are developed.

GOALS AND THE FUNCTIONS THEY PERFORM

According to Etzioni (1964), goals provide (1) the directions

or aims that organizations must have in order to be purposive;
(2) the standards against which the agency and its activities
are evaluated; and (3) legitimacy for both directions and ac¬
tivities. Organizations have stated goals, those that indicate
officially what they intend to accomplish. They also have unof¬
ficial, sometimes hidden, but “real” goals; those toward which
most of their significant resources and energies are directed.

115
116 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

When referring to the total organization, in contrast with

more specific operations, goals are framed in the most general
terms and always reflect the organization’s sense of mission—
that which legitimates its efforts. These may include advance¬
ment of knowledge (a university); strengthening family life
(a family service agency); or providing dignity for the aged
(a community center). At this level of generality, goals are
“safe” and relatively uncontroversial. They can energize, as
any symbol might, but they are not sufficiently precise to
provide operational guidelines or to serve as standards against
which achievements can be evaluated. Efforts to make overall
goals more precise would lead to disagreements among an
agency’s staff and supporters and limit the agency’s ability
to shift gears. Nevertheless, the elaboration of ends and means
is essential when we move from the general to the more opera¬
tional levels of the organization. I’ll explain.

ENDS AND MEANS ELABORATION:

A RATIONAL APPROACH

Suppose you wanted to establish your own agency, or a

program within an existing organization. If you were using
rational and purposive design approach, you might employ
a procedure to

(1) examine all aspects of the situation in which you find

yourself—the needs or problems to be addressed, the
available resources, the extent to which there is support
for action;
(2) select a general goal or goals to aim for;
(3) list all the possible means for achieving each goal; check
to see if the necessary resources are available or if the
costs are too high for each; examine the consequences
of pursuing one course of action or another; and
GOAL-SEEKING ORGANIZATION 117

(4) select the means that are the most feasible, acceptable,
or desirable.

The means selected then become subgoals, and their identifica¬

tion leads to further listing of means. The process continues
from the most general of goals to those that are the most
specific. This has sometimes been called the “branching tree”
or “root” method of planning (Lindblom, 1959). At the end
of the process we get to the most operational goals, those
that provide specific guides to action and are measurable in
terms of outcome. At these levels the operative goals are generally
called “operational objectives!’ In turn, these can be phrased
in terms of operations, activities, and outcomes.
For example, suppose one of the subgoals of a family service
agency (whose generally goal is the “enhancement of family
life!’ a goal that is hardly subject to controversy or to evalua¬
tion), is to “reduce family violence” (both a means toward
the more general objective and a subgoal in its own right).
Here are what some operational objectives might look like:

— operations objective—Thirty volunteers will be recruited, train¬

ed, and assigned to monitor and answer telephone and walk-in
requests for help of an emergency nature, in sufficient hours
to cover all requests.
— activity objective—By the end of the first year, four self-help
groups will have been organized to operate with minimal
assistance from the agency, and between four and six others
will be in various stages of development.
— outcome objective—The rate of reported incidents of family
violence in the south/central district will be reduced by 25%
within a twelve-month period.

Clearly, each of these is a means toward achieving more

general goals, but each is also a subgoal. The following exercise
will give you a better idea of how the branching tree process
works. It begins with a general problem and progresses to
118 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

the specification of intervention approaches. In the example

given, the general problem and the goals identified presume
some more overarching and even more general goals that sanc¬
tion and define the purposes of the agency. At the lower
level of the tree, the intervention alternatives and even the
program components might also be phrased as subgoals.
Schematically, the process is presented in the following figure.

General Problem 1 /* 2

-
Specific Problems
/I
P^n
Pf.
P,2. s'
2.1
r 2.2
\
r 2.3

Goals
-
G,
/ 7\
G/ G,
w
G, G2.
T
Operational Objectives A ^
/O. 0,^0, '°2'°3

Intervention Alternatives A, A2 A, A2
/>\
Intervention Components ICt IC2 IC3

SOURCE: Lauffer (1983: 124).

Figure 9 The Branching Tree Process

Now try the exercise.

EXERCISE
The Branching Tree

(1) Start with one or more general problems. For example:

P, Many of the elderly in Corktown have difficulty with personal

management. This is especially severe with the single aged.

(2) Then break it down into its component parts; make the problem
more specific in relation to targeted groups of the elderly. These
specific problems might include:

P,., Nutritional Deficiencies

P1 •2 Poor management of personal budgets.

GOAL-SEEKING ORGANIZATION 119

Pl •3 Inability to do basic housekeeping or to perform household

repairs.

PI •4
Difficulty in getting about for purposes of shopping or getting
to service providers.

(3) Use these more specific problems to establish your goals. For example,
“nutritional deficiencies” might result in your determining
that:

G, Older people, particularly those isolated in rural areas, will be

fed nutritiously.

(4) Now it is time to define your operational objectives.* * The following

might be included:

O, Eighty percent of the persons in the target area will receive

information about diets and how they can manage nutritious
eating programs on a limited budget.

o2 Prepared foods, at an affordable cost will be available close to

home to 500 people by the end of the second year of the
project’s operation.

(5) How might these objectives be reach? Let us take the second objective.
Service alternatives might include:

A, Meals-on-Wheels Home Delivery.

A2 Congregate meal sites at local schools and churches.

a3 Cooperative cooking programs in conjunction with the Coop

Food Buying program.

(6) Each of these requires a number of service components. The meals-on-

wheels alternative, for example, might require:

IC, Outreach and case finding of potential elderly participants.

IC2 Sites at which food can be prepared.

IC3 A nutritionist who can design menus and supervise meal

preparation.

IC4 Volunteers for food preparation and transportation to homes.

SOURCE: Adapted from an approach developed by Yeheskel Hasenfeld

and originally published in Lauffer (1983: 124-125).
* Review earlier discussion of operations, activity, and outcome objectives.
120 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Goal setting, when described in this way, is both purposive

and rational. Unfortunately, while goal setting is always a
more or less purposive process, it is rarely all that rational.
First of all, we can never be certain we have considered all
the possible means. Second, even for those considered, we
seldom have sufficient information to assess properly the con¬
sequence of selecting one means or another. As you will recall
from our early discussion of organizational technologies (Chapter
8), the understanding of cause and effect relationships in the
human services (and social sciences in general) is skimpy at best.
Even more important, means have a way of shaping goals,
perhaps more than the other way around. John Dewey used
to say that we set up targets to “facilitate the act of shooting”
rather than “shoot to hit the target!’ Thus we expand hospital
facilities to be able to install more advanced technology, or
we declare high sounding research and service missions for
our universities to provide the organizational supports for and
structure through which faculty and others can perform the
work they have trained for.
Some administrators and program planners argue that rather
than proceding from the most general to the most specific
along the branching tree, the procedure should be reversed.
Once the agency has decided what it is going to do or taken
stock of what it is doing, it must justify those activities. A
particular affirmative action program may generate controver¬
sy, but most citizens would agree to the legitimacy of “increas¬
ing access to opportunity.” Open classrooms might be con¬
troversial, but “improving the quality of education” is not.
To the contrary, these more general goals are such that all
of us can rally to them. They promise much and so serve
not only to define the overall purposes of our agencies, but
to legitimate their activities, and to provide the energizing
concept around which support for those activities can be
emergized.
The vagueness of these goals are both their advantage and
disadvantage. Because high sounding goals can never be fully
achieved, they rarely have to be changed, so they provide
GOAL-SEEKING ORGANIZATION 121

stability over time. An oft-quoted exception to this rule is

found in the example of the March of Dimes. After polio
was nearly wiped out, the organization no longer had a func¬
tion. A new set of goals had to be found in order to give
the agency a purpose around which its superb machinery could
be focused. It now raises money for the study of birth defects
and related development disabilities. The disadvantage of
vagueness, however, is that it makes it virtually impossible
to measure results. The further one moves along the branching
tree to concreteness of means and objectives, the more goals
are subject to measurement and evaluation.

MEASURING GOAL ATTAINMENT

Two measures are generally used: effectiveness and efficien¬

cy. Effectiveness refers to how close end results are to stated
goals and objectives. Efficiency refers to what it costs in resources
(time, personnel, money) to achieve the goal. Here, one should
be careful. First, for each objective pursued, others may have
been neglected or set aside, and these others may have been
more relevant to the overall stated on official goal of the
agency. Second, in the human services as in other “industries”
one should recognize that efficiency is a relative term.
Etzioni (1964) points out that a light bulb converts only
5 percent of the electrical energy it consumes into light. The
rest is dissipated as heat. Should we then disgard light bulbs
because they are inefficient; or should we compare one manufac¬
turer’s light bulbs against another’s, perhaps valuing one that
converts 5.5 percent of its energy into light in contrast with
a less efficient product that manages only 4.5 percent efficien¬
cy? Should social agencies be evaluated on more stringent
criteria? Are they to be judged inefficient if they do not achieve
90 or 100 percent of the objective sought? Or should we not
establish goal achievement scales on which we can make
judgments on a comparative basis?
122 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

I want to point out a danger in measuring goal attainment.

If attainments are measurable, we are likely to measure them.
We are less likely to attempt to measure those that are not
easily subjected to evaluation. Thus, measurement focuses at¬
tention on some goals and not on others. And those that
are the center of attention are often valued above others.
The clearer the goals are, the greater the propensity to engage
in activities directed at those goals, because rewards and penalties
for achievement can be attached to them. For this reason,
highly programmed tasks, those governed by hard and fast
rules, tend to drive out more ambiguous ones that are harder
to justify (unless as you will recall from the chapter on technology,
they are envigorated by a strong belief system). This may
result in spending more time and energy on activities that
are less directly related to the more general goals or purposes
of the organization, or focusing on some goals to the exclusion
of others.

GOAL DISTORTION, DISPLACEMENT,

AND SUCCESSION

For example, focusing on the improvement of math or reading

scores in the fifth grade may result in neglect of character
development and group problem solving. Measuring job train¬
ing programs on the basis of numbers of formerly unemployed
persons placed on jobs may result in drawing the cream off
the top or in a neglect of the trainee’s other needs (e.g., job
satisfaction, career opportunity, status, and pay). Likewise,
an emphasis on placing “hard-to-place” children in adoptive
homes may ignore the suitability of those homes for children
with special needs.
Insidious as this process of goal distortion may be, it is
more easily corrected than goal displacement. For example,
when agency management becomes more concerned with staff
satisfaction than with serving the needy or when faculty become
GOAL-SEEKING ORGANIZATION 123

more concerned with gaining recognition for their scholarship

from colleagues than with the education of students (which
happens when promotions are geared to scholarship), then
original goals are displaced. In bureaucracies, rules that were
established to ensure quality control often become ends in
themselves, with client outcomes sacrified on the alter of pro¬
cedural regularity. Perhaps even more common is the shift
from concern with program goals to organizational survival
and maintenance goals. This may be appropriate if the original
goals have been somehow met (as in the March of Dimes
example), but it is hardly so when displacement leads to organiza¬
tional sterility. Edward Banfield (1962) once pointed out that
organizations are not like salmon, perishing in order to give
birth to a new generation. They “much prefer sterility to death! ”
Goal succession, expansion, and multiplication, on the other
hand, may indicate signs of health, particularly when such
changes are in response to new needs and opportunities. For
example, when confronted with severe budget cuts in recent
years, many community mental health centers shifted from
heavy reliance on highly paid professional staff to community
based on volunteer managed services. This often resulted in
new forms of care and greater client involvement as both
producers and consumers. Self-help, which had once been
a goal of service, now became a means. Settlement houses
and community centers, which had once perceived themselves
as being in the business of Americanizing new immigrants
(although they may have phrased it more delicately) are now
directing many of their programs to building ethnic pride.
The times have changed; and so have community perceptions
of what is legitimate and what is not.

WHOSE GOALS?

Organizations, like all social systems, are shaped by forces

in their external and internal environments. And these forces
124 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

are often activated by parties with particular, even vested in¬

terests. Thus when federal or state policies and funding priorities
shift, local agencies often modify their programs and services
in the same directions to maintain legitimacy and to secure
the resources they need to survive. If consumers can find alter¬
native or better and cheaper services elsewhere, or if they
are organized into advocacy groups, they too can exert pressures
directly or indirectly through the market. If staff members
can themselves legitimate the organization through the prestige
associated with their professional status or technical skills,
they too exert an influence on the organization’s goals. There
is much evidence of this in the medical field and in public
education where prestigous practitioners set policy despite of¬
ficial authority being vested in boards and trustees representing
community interests.
This suggests that organizations are likely to have multiple
goals. Often these are associated with various organizational
constitiences, each of which may be associated with particular
functions; for example, those associated with boundary
maintenance, production, management, and adaptation. Fre¬
quently, the goals arising from each function complement each
other, although the danger always exists that the goal of one
functional unit may come to inappropriately dominate those
of other units. Thus, an inordinate focus on maintenance
will divert resources and energy from production (service goals),
whereas emphasis on current or original service goals may
detract from an agency’s ability to adapt to new conditions.
It is important to remember what the agency originally set
out to do, but we generally do so from the limited perspective
of our own current interests in the organization. Oscar Wilde
once pointed out that “conscience makes egotists of us all!’
To understand an agency’s real goals, in contrast with its
stated goals, requires that we examine its operative goals. And
that means looking near the bottom of the ends-means con-
tinum we described in our discussion of the branching tree
approach. An agency’s real goals are best uncovered by ex-
GOAL-SEEKING ORGANIZATION 125

amining what it does, where resources are allocated, and who

benefits from it all. I teach at the University of Michigan.
A few miles down the road is Washtenaw Community College.
Both have excellent reputations. Both define their general goals
as contribution to knowledge, the education of students, and
service to the society. But when we examine what they do,
we discover that they are very different institutions indeed.
Scholarship at Michigan is paramount. Teaching is impor¬
tant, but easily takes a back seat to faculty research and publica¬
tions. Service activities, if they generate research grants and
student scholarships or larger state appropriations, may get
some attention. Otherwise service receives only “lip service!’
At the community college, on the other hand, teaching and
community service are paramount. Scholarship, if it is found,
comes out of the individual instructor’s hide.

GOALS AS THE DETERMINANT

OF AGENCY STRUCTURE

Goal analysis can also be useful in uncovering real versus

presumed agency structure. If you cluster operative goals and
means at the bottom end of the branching tree, you will find
that they tend to parallel what we described in Chapter 4
as the agency’s formal structure. But the fit won’t be perfect.
Look more closely, and you will find that each cluster also
includes functional subsystems with the input and output rela¬
tionships discussed in Chapter 5. Try charting these relation¬
ships. You may find yourself drawing ellipses around and
across multiple clusters. If focusing on structure seems a bit
static after our discussion of goals, keep in mind that structure
is no more than agency processes viewed in a stable state.
Process and activities are the organization structure viewed
in a fluid state.
Before we conclude the discussion of organizational goals,
A.A. Milne and I want to leave you with one thought. “Bump,
126 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

bump, bump, came Edward Bear, on the back of his head

behind Christopher Robin. As far as he knew, this was the
only way of coming downstairs. But sometimes he felt there
really was another way, if only he could stop bumping for
a while, to think of it!’

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

Among other things, if you view the agency as a goal seeking

enterprise, you might:

— examine its operative goals so as to discover what relationships

exists, if any, between the agency’s stated and real goals;
— seek those places where important goals have been distorted
or displaced;
— cluster goals and compare these clusters with the agency’s for¬
mal structure, so as to make adjustments where needed to
improve effectiveness and efficiency;
— identify those goals that continue to be functional as legitimators
and guides to action and those that have become redundant
and obsolete;
— find out whose goals really run the organization, and determine
ways in which key interests (and interest groups) might better
balance each other for the good of those who would suffer
the most if the agency were to cease operating. Might these
be its clients?
GOAL-SEEKING ORGANIZATION 127

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

Looking at the means-end Focusing on what the agency

continuum makes it possible does may obscure what it
to discover the real purposes does not do.
of the agency.

Clarity about goals increases Those goals that are the most
the likelihood that agency clear are likely to supersede
resources will be appropriately other because rewards and
directed. penalties can be attached to
achievement.
Clustering goals makes it
possible to map both formal
and functional relationships
within the agency.

Examination of environmental Overconcern with the environ¬

(internal and external) ment may detract from ongo¬
pressures on agency purposes ing commitment to the goals
increases likelihood of shifting for which an agency or pro¬
goals in response to changes gram was established.
in resources, expectations, and
demands.
Chapter 10

YOUR AGENCY AS A LOCUS OF POWER

AND EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIPS

Throughout the book we have examined a variety of activities

that individuals and organizations engage in order to achieve
personal and organizational goals. These all involved some
form of exchange, in which costs were borne and benefits
sought. For social agencies to operate effectively, they must
engage in multiple exchanges with their staff, with their clients
and other consumers, and with those who provide legitimacy
and other resources. To maintain an exchange relationship
or to build on it requires a perception on the part of all concern¬
ed that the benefits outweigh the costs.

THE EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIP

Exchange is generally thought of as a rational process in

which one party gives up something to another in order to
gain a desired benefit to reward. This is true of economic
exchanges in which both the costs and benefits can be measured.
For example, in a simple economic exchange you might pur¬
chase a toaster, a course, or a program of counseling. You

129
130 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

know what you are paying in time and money and you are
presuming that the value of what you will receive will be
worth the investment. The “seller” also has an investment
in time, materials, and perhaps in opportunities lost (to sell
to other customers or provide services to other clients). But
the benefit in terms of income or satisfaction from fulfilling
one’s business or professional obligations is also perceived
to outweight the costs. Thus, both parties to the exchange
perceive some benefit, even though the benefits to each are
not the same or even perhaps of equal weight. Moreover,
the benefit gained need not be in the present. The course
you have decided to enroll in may only pay off in new skills
or new income earning ability some time in the future.
Exchanges occur between organizations as well as between
people. In the chapter on environmental interactions we looked
at interagency exchanges of an economic nature: the payments
of fees for services by one organization to another, grants
and contracts, joint efforts at assessment and program evalua¬
tion procedural integration, and the like. As in economic ex¬
changes between individuals and between individuals and in¬
stitutions (social agencies, retail stores), the costs are relatively
easy to measure yet the benefits may not be. Social agencies,
after all, are not in business to make profits. While cost reim¬
bursement and containment are goals, other benefits are not
likely to be so easily evaluated. If this is true of economic
exchanges, it is all the more so of social exchanges.
The rewards and costs involved in social exchanges are rarely
unambiguous. Social benefits do not have an exact price, since
the utility of a given benefit cannot be clearly distinguished
from that of other rewards derived from a particular relation¬
ship. For example, one can gain prestige and status from
associating with prestigious people, but there may also be
other rewards that have even greater meaning: the warmth
of the friendship involved or the sense of well-being at being
able to contribute to that relationship.
LOCUS OF POWER 131

In the dating process, both parties involved may be seeking

a rewarding relationship as well as some extrinsic benefits.
In fact those extrinsics may be the basis upon which initial
attraction was based: the prestige associated with being seen
with an attractive person of the opposite sex; an opportunity
to ride in a fancy car; the gratification expected from a good
dinner; the cultural experience gained from attending a concert
or play one would be embarrassed to attend on one’s own. But
as the parties to the exchange get to know each other, they
may come to find the emerging relationship intrinsically
rewarding.
At least part of the reward may come from relationships
with third parties. A coed may initially be motivated to date
a college football hero by the desire to “show the other girls
what I can do” or to gain entry to a group of males with
whom she would like to be associated. Thus there are some
instrumental reasons for entering into the relationship, or,
as we have termed it earlier, the expectation of some economic
(clearly measurable) gains. This suggests a rather complicated
set of relationships between economic and social exchanges
that are both direct and indirect.
If you have engaged in fund raising or have contributed
to the United Way or some other charitable organization,
you will recognize what I am referring to. For example, if
you have given a sizeable contribution to the UW, you may
get some thanks from your solicitor, but you do not expect
gratitude from the agencies who are to be the recipients of
your gift (the real beneficiaries) or the clients of those agencies
(the ultimate beneficiaries of this exchange process). Never¬
theless, you are entitled to expect and to receive some return.
That return may be in the form of a tax exemption (in¬
strumental or economic), an invitation to join the board (if
you gift is especially big and consistently large from year to
year), and the gratitude we spoke of earlier from the solicitor.
That solicitor may be pleased, not only because of his or
132 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

her concern for the agencies that will be more fully funded,
but be also because “catching a big fish” accrues some prestige
and recognition among fellow solicitors and campaign leaders
(an expressive or social reward). You may benefit in the same
way, increasing your prestige among colleagues and others
who may be aware that you are one of the pacesetters in
the community.
I’ll cite another example that may be even closer to home.
We all know big tippers whose motives are rarely what they
claim (getting better or quicker service or “helping the waiter
get a living wage”). The big tip may be more a function
of impressing others at his or her table than of getting a
return from the waiter.
These process are typical of all interactions between people
and between people and other social units. Virtually all the
interpersonal relationships we engage in within the agency and
on its behalf are built around similar exchange processes. And
all of them are based, at least initially, on some form of
attraction. Think back on your first day at the agency. To
whom were you attracted and what attracted you?

ATTRACTION AND ATTRACTIVENESS

AS SOURCES OF POWER

The concept of attraction bears some examination. It is

generally used to explain the first stages of an exchange rela¬
tionship. Attractive associates are persons who have impressed
others as being rewarding to associate with. Such rewards
may be perceived as extrinsic or intrinsic. Initially, the attrac¬
tion of individuals to each other tends to rest more on extrinsic
than on intrinsic factors. An interest in dating someone may
be stimulated by how that person looks and with whom that
person is associated, as well as by assumptions about impress¬
ing one’s friends with having been seen with someone attrac¬
tive. To get the first date the interested party may have to
LOCUS OF POWER 133

make him or herself attractive too. To make themselves attrac¬

tive, people try to display those distinctive traits that are likely
to impress others with the qualities that command admiration
and respect. In any given situation these qualities might include
such diverse elements as modesty, smart dress, intellectuality,
suaveness, professional competence, curiosity, dominance,
fragility, athletic prowess, and so on. It may even be expressed
in terms of a need for help.
Coming back to your first day at the agency: Which of
these qualities did you display? To whom? Did you sense
a secretary had a need to do some mothering, so before her
or him you appeared a bit flustered, in need of help? Did
you sense that your supervisor expected a certain degree of
self-confidence and professional know-how, so you made
yourself appear on top of things? That would have been a
natural and, in many circumstances, an appropriate response.
Consider also an experience you may have had in working
on a staff committee or intergency task force. When the group
was forming, did not at least some of the members attempt
to impress others with their superior know-how, connections,
previous accomplishments, or commitments to the group’s
mission, or perhaps with their willingness to do a great deal
of work, even the group’s dirty work? Nearly everyone needs
to be appreciated. These people were trying to make themselves
attractive to others, reasoning that by making themselves more
attractive, they were likely to attract others, and with that
attraction, meaningful exchanges might be possible.
You will have noticed that some members of the group
may have been reluctant to appear overly attractive. Those
impressive qualities that make one person particularly attrac¬
tive may constitute a drain on their own personal resources
and a status threat to others in the group. It is not unusual
for those others to develop defensive postures, not allowing
themselves to become too easily impressed. If one person (or
one organization) possesses those qualities or resources that
others need or desire, it gives them considerable power. Power
134 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

is the potential to influence, and it is derived from exchange

relationships. If one needs something, such as social recogni¬
tion or help with performing unfamiliar tasks on a new job,
one may have to be willing to subordinate oneself to another
in order to receive the required service. Having accepted help,
one becomes obligated to the helper.
By obligating another through an act of helping, one in¬
creases one’s dominance over the other. That is why some
individuals may resist certain exchange relationships, particularly
those in which they seem to gain disproportionately. Never¬
theless, the willingness of some participants in an association
to subordinate themselves to an elected, appointed, or other¬
wise designated leader suggests their readiness to give up some
of their own individual power for something else, perhaps
the collective power that is the result of concentration.
This, as Weber (1933) pointed out in his classic work on
bureaucracy, is one of the prime motivators in establishing
complex organizations. Although power can be shared and
concentrated, it tends always to be unevenly distributed because
of the very nature of the exchange process. The concentration
of power depends to a certain extent on the origins or deriva¬
tion of that power (what it is based on) and in part on the
extend to which others feel it is legitimately associated with
certain individuals or organizations. Such legitimacy is depen¬
dent on the agreement of subordinates that more powerful
individuals and organizations should hold power and that they
are using it in a fair and equitable manner. Both the delegation
of power and the acceptance of a subordinate position must
be perceived as more beneficial (rewarding) than some other
arrangement. Otherwise that legitimacy may be brought into
question and the power relationships modified.

UNDERSTANDING POWER

Power is a value-laden term. For that reason, some persons

shy away from its analysis. To have power or to be perceived
LOCUS OF POWER 135

Chart 4

as powerful is to have the potential to influence others. Power

refers to all the means by which individuals, groups, or institu¬
tions can exert controlling influence over others. And that
reason it is sometimes suspect. For good reason; it can be
corrupting if unbalanced or based on inappropriate sources.
But power can be and generally is, used more positively. Like
any other outcomes of an exchange relationship, power need
not be defined in zero-sum terms; that is, a situation in which
one party gains to the extent the other loses. When social
workers, physicians, attorneys, and others band to establish
a new service agency or a public interest campaign, they are
concerting their potential to influence in ways that exceed
their capacities as individuals working alone. When power
is concerted and orchestrated, all sides can come up winners.
The following two charts will help you to understand a
power differential in a relationship. When we say one person
has power over another we do not mean that one person
has power and the other person has none. We simply mean
that one person has MORE power over the other person than
the second has over the first.
In a win-lose situation, power is viewed as a fixed pie.
The first chart indicates this and represents the amount of
total power available. Person B has power since he or she
has more power than A. The dotted line represents an increase
in A’s power that B will resist since any increase for A is
a decrease in B’s power.
136 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Chart 5

But power is described more accurately in the next chart

in which it is viewed as a series of concentric circles. Viewed
in this way, as new situations develop and A increases his
or her power, B also increases his or her power. Thus, even
giving up some power usually increases the amount B (in this
case) has as well. B, after all, now has influence over A in
the new situation as well as the remaining influence from
what B previously maintained.
This perspective can be considered as complementary to
the perspectives discussed earlier. For instance, developing rela¬
tionships among elements in an environment involves con¬
sideration of the types of influence desired and the strategies
used to attain them. Power or the potential to influence others
is also used within an agency. It does not necessarily stem
from one’s status, nor is it restricted to one’s role.
People lower in the hierarchy often have power over those
higher up. Secretaries are excellent examples since they often
have tremendous power over their bosses. People who have
access to important information have the potential to influence
others, even those above them in the hierarchy. Moreover,
people who have access to important people can influence
others. For example, the appointment secretary to the boss
can often determine whether or not an individual is seen or
heard. In interacting with that secretary, do so very carefully!
Finally, people who have access to specific equipment tend
to have power. Special physical therapy equipment may be
LOCUS OF POWER 137

needed to fulfill a client’s needs. Whoever has access to it

determines if your client’s needs will be satisfied. These types
of power tend to relate to position or location in an organization.
Power can emanate from personal characteristics as well.
For example, a staff member who is a therapist but who is
also a strong emotional leader in an agency may have a very
different (and perhaps more respected) kind of power than
a program director who is efficient, but somewhat distant.
The physical therapist has power to influence those seeking
therapeutic assistance, and the client is willing to accept such
influence because he or she perceives the therapist as having
some knowledge or expertise from which a gain is possible.
But the client is not without power. He or she can accept
or reject help or reward or penalize the therapist through
behavioral responses and affective relationships. Each person
in your agency, and each of the actors in its environment
(other agencies, funders, consumers as individuals or organized
collectivities), can use power in some form to influence the
behavior of others. To understand this more fully, it may
help to describe different sources of power as they are used
within social agencies and between them and others in the
environment.
Keep in mind that these types of power are defined by
the perceptions of the person being influenced, not the person
with the alleged power. It really doesn’t matter what type
you think you have. The type of influence attributed to you
depends on others’ perceptions of you, of what they think
you have (no matter how accurate).
The sources on which power is based include the ability
to reward or to coerce, position in a hierarchy of authority,
expertise, and mutual obligations. Let’s take one at a time.

(1) Reward power is the potential to provide a desired benefit:

a salary increase or promotion; a letter of recognition; referrals
of clients; a grant or contract; the right to be associated with
the person or organization giving the reward.
138 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

(2) Coercive power derives from the ability to withhold rewards

or to apply negative sanctions. Social agencies can withhold
benefits if clients do not comply with agency rules; some may
even be able to apply legal sanctions (e.g., those associated
with the courts or other elements in the justice system).
(3) Positional authority may derive from one’s place on a hierar¬
chy (e.g., department heads have authority over unit super¬
visors, federal courts have authority over district courts). Such
positions are often derived from law or from organizational
rules and regulations. They are generally formalized and clearly
spelled out in agency manuals and the like.
(4) Expert power derives from technical competence or skill, which
is presumed superior to those who are involved with the expert
as subordinates in an exchange relationship. Clients presume
expertise on the part of the caseworker: parents expect it of
the school teacher; administrators of the management consul¬
tant, and so on.
(5) Power based on mutual obligations (sometimes called “referent
power”) is derived from personal relationships that over time
generate a feeling of trust. One permits oneself to be influenced
or is induced to act in certain ways if one knows that one
can depend on the other to keep his or her side of a bargain
or to provide a benefit when one is in need sometime in the
future. It implies a sense of security that one can always call
in one’s cards at a future date. Trust grows with each successive
and successful exchange.

Different circumstances may require different kinds of power.

It would not be appropriate to use coercive tactics when ap¬
proached for one’s presumed expertise. The use of referent
power in situations where positional authority is more ap¬
propriate might generate accusations of favoritism and nepotism.
Whenever the wrong kind of power is used, its legitimacy
comes into question. In part this is because inappropriate use
of power suggests that one may not really have the power
that was assumed. This is an important point to keep in mind.
The type of influence attributed to you and your ability to
use it is dependent on other’s perceptions. Each of the types
LOCUS OF POWER 139

of power described above is determined by the perceptions

of the persons subject to influence, not the persons with the
alleged power.
The foregoing discussion is not meant to imply that only
one kind of power should be applied in a given situation.
To the contrary. It may be appropriate to use a combination
of approaches: rewards, coercion, expertise, positional authority.
Moreover, if one type does not seem to work (for example,
mutual obligations in relating to a funding source), it may
suggest that expert power would have been more appropriate
all along. Take a few moments now to assess your own under¬
standing of power relationships.

EXERCISE
Analyzing Power Relationships
Recall several situations at work in which you may
have had influence over others because of your
position, your ability to coerce or reward them,
your expertise, or the mutual obligations you have
built up over time. Describe one of these in detail.
Could you have reached your objective better if you
had used a different tactic (power source) or by
using a mix of tactics?
Now do a similar assessment of a situation in
which someone used an inappropriate power source
in an effort to influence your behavior. How did
you react? How might you have reacted to in¬
fluence their behavior in return? Would this have
necessitated a direct transaction (exchange) with the
offering party? Or would an indirect approach,
working through others, have made more sense?
140 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

WHERE DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE LEAD YOU?

When you utilize this perspective, you might

— recognize what makes you attractive to others and what makes
them attractive to you; engage in exchange relationships that
are both direct and indirect, intrinsically and extrinsically
rewarding;
— pay closer attention to lines of communication. All organiza¬
tions find that they have people who control the flow of infor¬
mation. Pay particular attention to the use of referent power
when coming into contact with them. Haul out your organiza¬
tional chart. Mark points where you think communication
occured and where it is blocked. Remember the person who
controls the flow of information may not be the one who
sits at the “top of the heap!’
— pay close attention to people who control or have access to
various key people or to key equipment;
— use what you have to get what you want. Everyone has some
power. Be sure you understand what influence others have
over you. KNOW the exchange and maximize it.
— transform a lack of power, especially as a representative of
an organization, into a strength. This can be done by being
unable to accept an influence attempt since your “constituents”
in the agency won’t accept that position.
LOCUS OF POWER 141

STRENGTHS AND LIMITS

OF USING THIS PERSPECTIVE

Strengths Limits

It allows for an honest assess¬ Relationships may be seen as

ment of influence types and competitive or even hostile
sources and for rational prob¬ when in fact they may only
lem solving in situations of be uncoordinated or interac¬
competition that often lead ting in unproductive way.
to impulsive, irrational
actions.

Power analysis can help iden¬ When used without other

tify sites of influence within perspectives as contexts, it
which leverage can be ap¬ may lead people to see their
plied; understanding types of world being one in which
power can help determine power struggles are constantly
what problem-solving attempts occurring.
will be most effective.

Especially in times of scarce It can emphasize the competi¬

resources, it can help max¬ tion for scant resources rather
imize the resources available than cooperative and
to an agency. developmental strategies.

Being able to identify key

power people, both within
your agency and in other
organizations in the task en¬
vironment, is important if
you want to avoid red tape
and get work done.

NOTE

1. I am indebted to Matt Lampe whose original draft of this chapter appeared in the first
edition of Understanding Your Social Agency. The types of power discussed in this chapter
are drawn from the work of John French and Bertram Raven (1968).
Chapter 11

A CONTINGENCY APPROACH TO
PROBLEM-SOLVING IN THE AGENCY

We have concluded each of the preceding chapters with the

question, “Where Does This Perspective Lead You?” and
with a partial listing of the strengths and limits of each of
the approaches described. In this chapter we’ll explore how
you might use each of these perspectives, alone or in tandem,
to analyze an organizational problem and to design a solution
to that problem.
We’ve looked at your agency as

(1) a career arena in which different worker-agency fits lead

to alternative career styles;
(2) a system of roles;
(3) a system of norma and small groups;
(4) a system of formal structures that can be depicted on
organizational charts;
(5) an input-output processing system that is functionally
interdependent;
(6) interacting with key elements in its environment;
(7) a people processing and people changing system;
(8) the context within which technologies are applied;
(9) a goal seeking organization; and
(10) the locus of exchange and power relationships.

143
144 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Our discussion of the strengths and limits of each perspective

suggests that no one perspective will be useful in every situa¬
tion. By using more than one perspective you can view an
organizational problem from a number of vantage points.
Alternative perspectives lead to alternative approaches to prob¬
lem solving. This in itself may constitute an additional prob¬
lem. You will now have to choose among perspectives and
among alternative solutions to the problems you see.
If we could list every possible problem you are likely to
encounter, it might be possible to indicate the most appropriate
perspective to use. Of course this is not possible. No two
human service agencies are exactly alike. A problem in one
agency is not identical, although it may be similar to a problem
in a second agency. For these reasons, I suggest using a
“contingency approach.” The contingency approach permits
you to use more than one perspective for any given situation.
As the situation changes, the perspectives used should also
change.
To help you think through which perspectives might be
appropriate to a given situation and in which order you might
apply them, I’ve selected several fairly typical organizational
problems to examine. Although each comes from a real life
situation, I’ve chosen to describe each in fairly general terms
so as to increase their universality. I think you will recognize
these problems. All agencies face them. Discuss them with
colleagues at your agency. They may agree or disagree with
you on the perspectives you have chosen to apply. They may
help you identify similar problems in your own agency. Collec¬
tively you may be able to arrive at some consensus regarding
which perspectives to use and which of our alternative ap¬
proaches to problem resolution make most sense.
Illustration 1: Not Reaching the Agency’s Goals. Many agen¬
cies are faced with problems related to goal achievement. If
your’s is one, start by examining its goal structure. Are the
operative goals related to the more general stated goals, those
that legitemate the agency’s efforts? Has there been goal displace-
A CONTINGENCY APPROACH 145

ment, distortion? Whose goals are dominant? How are en¬

vironmental factors responded to? Do staff career interests
or patterns impact on goals? Are the technologies used a major
shaping factor? Have agency concerns with input and output
processing (adaptation, boundary maintenance, management)
distorted program goals?
This perspective may lead you to determine whether there
are adequate resources and/or clients available to the agency
or a department within it to accomplish desired goals. Focus
on the effectiveness of the boundary system. What about the
adaptive subsystem’s ability to monitor changes in the environ¬
ment. Have external elements in the task environment (e.g.,
new legislation, competitive services available from other
agencies, changing client needs or demands) conspired to
require an alteration of either goals or technology?
Assuming that you find the goals to be appropriate, you’ll
want to find out what it is that blocks goal attainment. Look
inside the organization. Consider whether one of the following
three perspectives is applicable. Viewing the organization as
a career arena can provide you with information regarding
leadership style, work climate, motivation, and the behavior
of staff members in general. Do people know what is expected
of them? Is there adequate feedback for staff on how they
are progressing in relation to the organization’s or work unit’s
goal? Is the leadership style employed consistent with the ex¬
pectations of people working toward this goal?
Look also at the formal structure of your organization.
Does the work or information flow in a manner that is consis¬
tent with requirements for goal attainment? By examining
overlapping work groups the presence or absence of an in¬
tegrated approach can be determined. Has the goal been prop¬
erly transmitted downward? Has there been a mix-up in the
reporting procedure? Are job descriptions sufficient to provide
for task completion?
Finally try the input-output analysis. Look at the manage¬
ment, production, and boundary subsystems. Is the manage-
146 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

ment subsystem providing the integrative and supportive

assistance required? Is the survival of the agency still assured?
Has the boundary subsystem provided all necessary resources?
Is the production subsystem sufficiently efficient in the way
it provides the services necessary to reach the goal?
Assuming you’ve made the correct internal adjustments,
but the agency’s goals are still not being reached, another
look outside the agency may be required. Examine the boun¬
dary and adaptive subsystems and the changes occurring in
the environment of the agency. Understanding how the boun¬
dary subsystem works is as crucial as understanding how feed¬
back works for the individual. Just as some staff members
may not know what is expected of them, some organizations
do not know exactly what is required of them. Is the organiza¬
tion fully aware of client needs or interests? Of funding
requirements?
Illustration 2: Failure to Attract Clients. Consider the case
of an agency that is unable to attract new clients at the same
time it is facing a decline in demand by its existing client
population. Survival may become a critical issue. Everybody
agrees that the key person involved is the outreach worker
(a boundary subsystem staff member) whose job it is to generate
new clientele. He or she feels that the agency’s rules and regula¬
tions are too restrictive and prevent fulfillment of assigned
tasks. Besides, he or she is only one person and not a very
powerful one at that. Having some expert power but no reward
power with outside agencies from whom referrals might come
is not very comforting. Nor is it easy to be without power
over staff within the agency who might have to change the
way in which they provide services if new clients are to be
attracted.
At first, other staff members were inclined to agree that
more outreach and intake staff were needed. Then they recogniz¬
ed that the source of the problem could be found mainly
in the formal structure. After all, wasn’t it the formal rules
and procedures which put obstacles in the way of admitting
A CONTINGENCY APPROACH 147

clients to the agency? If this were true, the logical move is

to alter agency rules, that is, to change the formal structure.
But other possibilities exist.
Assume for the moment that rules are hard to change,
that the formal structure is difficult to tamper with. Focus
instead on the task environment. Perhaps a change can be
made in that environment so as to alter the expectations of
potential clients or increase their interest in the agency’s ser¬
vices. Do clients select agencies on the basis of the perceived
expert power of staff members? If so, promote that expertise.
Help clients understand what agency staff workers can do
for them.
The solutions suggested by this analysis is very different
from the one originally proposed. Yet, both solutions follow
logically from the perspective used. The perspective you choose
has a tremendous impact on the way you define a problem
and the alternative solutions you may find. This will be evident
in the next illustration.
Illustration 3: Conflict. No organization can avoid conflict.
It occurs both internally between members, groups or depart¬
ments, and externally between an organization and others in
its environment. When conflict is detrimental to the organiza¬
tion’s ability to reach its goals, or to maintain itself, it requires
some intervention.
An internal conflict occurred in a department of one agency
which initially involved a superior and his subordinates, and
ultimately the superior’s boss. Using the “career arena perspec¬
tive” and the “exchange and power perspective” adds more
clarity than using the first perspective that may occur to you—
the formal structure.
As subordinates, staff members could do very little through
the formal hierarchy. Communication channels and reporting
procedures indicated that all of the upward flow of information
from the staff members was to go through the supervisor.
The problem was that as a subordinate to the manager at
the next level, he never transmitted the feelings and concerns
148 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

of the staff members upward. Likewise, he communicated

only a very distorted picture of top level directives to his subor¬
dinates. As the concerns of staff members increased, conflict
increased until it was no longer tolerable either to the staff
or the organization.
All staff members questioned his expertise (“expect power”)
His position was so threatened that few perceived him as having
any reward power. Nevertheless, he was perceived as having
both legitimate and coercive power. Using the personal perspec¬
tive indicated that a tense climate existed and that an inap¬
propriate leadership style was being applied by the manager.
In addition, as the analysis progressed, it became obvious
that the supervisor, a zealot who demanded personal loyalty
to his sacred policies, had caused a division in his staff. One
group became the “ins” and one the “outs!’ He would be
confidential with the “ins” who supported his policies and
almost totally exclude the other group from even limited
communication.
What perspectives would you apply to this situation?
Some conflicts are induced externally. To better understand
their origins, three perspectives seem to be especially helpful.
The first examines the system’s interaction with its environ¬
ment. The set of organizations with which it interacts can
determine, if not a solution, at least the likely sources of
the conflict. Assuming this conflict is disadvantageous to the
agency, having the adaptive subsystem monitor these organiza¬
tions very closely can provide valuable information regarding
an appropriate strategy to resolve the conflict.
Power relationships constitute a second way of looking at
the problem. What sources of power is the agency perceived
to have, and how can these be utilized to impact on the conflict
situation? Who do you know in these other organizations
who have access to people, equipment, or information? How
can you influence these people?
The role perspective is also applicable, especially after isolating
and identifying key people through the power perspective.
A CONTINGENCY APPROACH 149

Use role set analysis to find an intervention approach. If you

cannot influence these key people directly, how can you in¬
fluence them indirectly? In other words, how can you influence
the members in the role sets of those people whose behavior
you want to modify?
Illustration 4: Implementing Change. Problem situations
often emerge out of attempts to implement changes in an
agency. As indicated in Chapter 6, the pressures for change
are often generated by elements in the environment. Hence,
using the environmental perspective and looking at the adap¬
tive subsystem can be helpful in detecting where those pressures
may come from. All of the remaining perspectives can also
be brought into play. This is a situation where you have to
look to all of them to determine which is the most productive
in leading to a resolution of the problem. Take the larger
problem and break it down into its subparts.
The major problem, for example, may be to overcome
resistance to change. Looking into the people dimension allows
you to categorize the persons most resistant. Are they con-
servers or zealots? Most people think that a conserver will
be impossible to change because of his or her commitment
to the status quo. But the conservers tend to do only what
they are told. This means that they are unlikely to deviate
from directions from above or from agency rules and pro¬
cedures. By changing the rules and by getting the conserver’s
supervisor to instruct the conserver to abide by the new rules,
resistance can be overcome.
Resistance to change may also stem from the fact that a
change may break up a social group or put new and inap¬
propriate demands on its members. Group members may fear
that the proposed change will require that new services will
have to be provided by the members. By coopting the group
leader to support the proposed changes, resistance can be reduced.
Getting group members to participate in the design of a conver¬
sion process (from current practices to those to be instituted)
may lead to higher commitment to the new situation, thereby
150 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

further reducing resistance. To get change accepted and im¬

plemented, you may have to go around an individual who
is blocking the path for change. Examination of role sets and
power relationships may be helpful.
One would not want to overlook the impact of new or
changing technologies on the implementing of change. Which
ones are available? Around which have vested interests con¬
solidated? How are these technologies related to operative
goals, the ones lower down on your branching tree?

USING THE CONTINGENCY APPROACH

Clearly, no single approach is adequate in fully understand¬

ing a problem or designing a solution for it. What I am sug¬
gesting is the progressive application of different points of
view to a particular organizational problem. Each leads you
to see a part of the problem that is otherwise hidden from
view. Each may suggest a problem solution or a way of reduc¬
ing the possible impact of that problem on the agency’s survival
and on the accomplishment of its service missions. Some pro¬
blem solutions, however, may be blocked. Others may not
be fully effective. Still others, when applied, may open up
new problems.
In conclusion, I d like to offer you the following tipsr

(1) Use whatever perspective seems to shed some light and suggest
one or more alternatives to overcoming or reducing the impact
of a problem. If a perspective is not helpful after a point,
drop it. Try another.
(2) Two or more perspectives are often applicable in any particular
situation; so don’t limit yourself to one at a time.
(3) For a particular situation, the use of different perspectives
may lead to others. Don’t press for a solution that has no
chance of being implemented.
A CONTINGENCY APPROACH 151

Now let’s try to put it all together in a single exercise.

It will help you be more systematic in your approach to organiza¬
tional problem solving. Follow the steps outlined below.

STEP 1. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

Identify a problem at work that is troubling you or

the agency. Specify what it is, who is affected by
it, where it is located, when it takes place (now,
sometimes, all the time, in the near future, etc.),
and who else is concerned or should be.
Leave some space to flesh out your description as
you begin the contingency approach to problem
analysis.
152 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

STEP 2. TENTATIVE PERSPECTIVE SELECTION

Which of the following perspectives do you think

might most appropriately lead you to a solution of
the problem or amelioration of the situation. Check
all those that apply, giving a double check
to the ones you think may be the most useful.

_ 1. career arena
_ 2. roles
_ 3. small groups
_ 4. formal structures
_ 5. input-output
_ 6. environment
_ 7. people processing and people changing
_ 8. technologies
_ 9. goals
_10. exchange and power
A CONTINGENCY APPROACH 153

STEP 3. ANALYZE THE PROBLEM USING DOUBLE-

CHECKED PERSPECTIVES

Starting with the perspectives you double-checked,

analyze the problem in such a way as to lead you
to a better understanding of its causes and conse¬
quences. Jot your notes down in as precise a man¬
ner as you can, using the language (concepts) you
have been introduced to in the previous chapters.
154 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

STEP 4. ANALYZE THE PROBLEM USING ALTER¬

NATIVE PERSPECTIVES

Now do the same using the other perspectives you check¬

ed. If these are not sufficient, which of the others you
did not check might apply? Use them now.
156 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

STEP 5. SELECTING FROM ALTERNATIVE PERSPEC¬

TIVES AND REFINING ANALYSIS

Which of these perspectives do you find most helpful?

Using them, describe the problem (from Step 1) in opera¬
tional terms (drawing on your notes from Steps 3 and
4). Again, be as concrete as possible. And be brief. This
is the form you might use in describing the problem
in a proposal for action.
A CONTINGENCY APPROACH 157

STEP 6. SPECIFYING OPERATIONAL OBJECTIVES

Describe your change objectives in operational terms.

Refer to the relevant discussion in Chapter 9.
158 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

STEP 7. SPECIFYING ACTION ALTERNATIVES

Now specify the action alternatives that might be taken

to reach each of the objectives listed.
A CONTINGENCY APPROACH 159
160 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

STEP 8. SELECTING FROM AMONG ALTERNATIVE

ACTIONS

Finally, design a realistic action program. Select from

among the alternatives listed under each objective in Step 7.
Select those alternatives on the basis of the following criteria:

— acceptability (to those most directly affected);

— resource availability (to implement the action);
— effectiveness (most likely to lead to goal achievement);
— least likely to have negative impact on other aspects
of the agency’s operations (and thus generate
resistance).
A CONTINGENCY APPROACH 161
162 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Nice work! You’ve taken your first stab at organizational

analysis and problem solving using the contingency approach.
WHERE HAS THIS APPROACH LED YOU? WHAT ARE
ITS STRENGTHS AND LIMITS? Which of these perspectives
will you explore further? Put together a beginning reading
list (check the references at the end of the book). With understan¬
ding comes responsibility. We all share it together in our efforts
to improve our social agencies and the programs and services
they provide.
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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ARM AND LAUFFER is Professor of Social Work at the

University of Michigan, where he teaches courses in administra¬
tion, staff development, and community planning. He received
his doctorate at Brandeis University and has spent several
years on the faculties of the Hebrew University and Haifa
University in Israel as a visiting professor.
Editor of the Sage Human Service Guides, Lauffer has
written a number of other professional books.

For Sage:
Grantsmanship and Fundraising, 1984
Grantsmanship (2nd edition), 1983
Assessment Tools, 1982
Getting the Resources You Need, 1982
Health Needs of Children (with Roger Manela), 1979
Resources for Child Placement, 1979
Volunteers (with Sarah Gorodezky), 1977
Understanding Your Social Agency (1st edition, with Lynn
Nybell, Carla Overberger, Beth Reed, and Lawrence Zeff), 1977
Grantsmanship (1st edition), 1977

Other books in print:

Strategic Marketing for Not-for-Profit Organizations, 1984
Community Organization for the 1980s (ed. with Edward
Newman), 1982
167
168 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

Doing Continuing Education and Staff Development, 1978

Social Planning at the Community Level, 1978
The Practice of Continuing Education in the Human Services,
1977
The Aim of the Game, 1973
Community Organizers and Social Planners (with Joan L.
Ecklein), 1972.
 r

3 0000 056 672 938

Additional Sage Human Services Guides
by Armand Lauffer . . .

GRANTSMANSHIP 2nd Edition

by ARMAND LAUFFER
As practical and readable as the popular 1st Edition—but completely
revised and updated! With additional chapters, vignettes, and exercises,
incorporates the lessons and insights of the past decade, presenting
vital guidelines that grantseekers need in today’s social service market¬
place.
Volume 1 ISBN-0-8039-2022-9 softcover

VOLUNTEERS
by ARMAND LAUFFER and SARAH GORODEZKY
"A brief, dear, and pradical introduction to recruiting and using
volunteers."
—Group & Organization Studies
Volume 5 ISBN-0-8039-0884-9 softcover

RESOURCES
by ARMAND LAUFFER
Covers such resources as service programs, people, and funding, offer¬
ing a series of activity guides to developing potential resources and
creating a strategy tailor-made for your agency.
Volume 6 ISBN-0-8039-1218-8 softcover

GETTING THE RESOURCES YOU NEED

by ARMAND LAUFFER
Provides agency members with clear guidelines for solving today's
resource development and management problems.
Volume 26 ISBN-0-8039-0788-5 softcover

ASSESSMENT TOOLS
For Practitioners, Managers, and Trainers
by ARMAND LAUFFER
Offers vignettes, exercises, and field-tested guidelines for applying these a
major assessment tools: eco mapping, task analysis, the nominal group '
technique, force field analysis, still photography, simulation and gaming *
techniques, and Delphi questionnaires.
Volume 30 ISBN-0-8039-1007-X softcover

SAGE PUBLICATIONS
The International Professional Publishers
Newbury Park London New Delhi