Book Reviews
| Date | 01 December 1965 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1965.tb01663.x |
| Published date | 01 December 1965 |
Book
Reviews
The
Art
of
Judgment
:
A
Stu@
of
Policy
Making
By Sir Geoffrey Vickers. Chapman
&
Hall,
1965.
Pp.
242.
25s.
This is an extremely important book
-
for several reasons.
It
is highly relevant
to current discussions on economic
planning. Except K.C.Wheare’s
Government
by
Committee,
I
do not
know
of
any other analysis in such
depth
-
and breadth
-
of the actual
processes
of
management, administra-
tion and policy making. Books on
these subjects
-
at
least
those
COII-
cerning the public sector in Britain
-mostly deal, not
so
much with the
processes themselves, but with the
organizations and structures within
which the processes operate, in other
words with the anatomy. In this boolc
we have rather the physiology (and
some pathology, too). For this sort of
thing, we have hitherto been largely
dependent on the scraps of information
and wisdom we could pick up from
articles, memoirs and occasional
obiter
dicta.
The relatively few case studies
we have are more valuable, on the
whole, in telling in detail what people
did than why they did it.
Sir Geoffrey Vickers speaks from an
unusual breadth of experience
-
infantry officer, V.C., City solicitor,
Head of Economic Intelligence
at
the
Ministry of Economic Warfare, member
of the former London Passenger
Transport Board and later of the
National Coal Board and the Medical
Research Council, director for ten years
of an important group of engineering
companies, and Visiting Fellow
of
Nuffield College, Oxford.
Of
course,
he is not simply
a
practical man
recording his expericnces for others
to
analyse. This book embodies some
very deep and original thinking which
makes fascinating but not always
easy reading. He has thought, read,
written and lectured on the borderlands
of psychology, sociology, economics
and management theory. More
important still, he can draw very
meaningful analogies from the natural
sciences and the technologies. In short,
he possesses
-
in Fayol’s special sense
-
cultuve ginirale.
His very profound
chapter on ‘Appreciation’ begins with
a
careful description
of
the automatic
pilot and navigational aids systems on
a
large ship. He makes an impressive
case for the synthesist and the non-
specialist. ‘Even the dogs may eat of
the crumbs which
fall
from the rich
man’s table; and in these days, when
the rich in knowledge eat such
specialized food
at
such separate
tables, only the dogs have
a
chance
of
a
balanced diet.’
From this wide background Sir
Geoffrey Vickers gives
us
a
series
of
comprehensive pictures and insights,
taking his examples, not only from local
authorities, manufacturing companies
and public corporations, but also
voluntary societies, independent insti-
tutions and committees of enquiry.
Indeed, he challenges the normal
classification of organizations on the
basis
of
ownership. (‘The distinction
once
so
serenely drawn between the
private sector in which the individual
could do as he pleased, and the public
sector in which common choices must
be made, is shrinking towards vanishing
43
7
PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION
point.’) He prefers to distinguish
institutions by their purposes and
sources of financial support
-
for
instance, ‘member-supported’, ‘user-
supported’ and ’public-supported’.
Perhaps he does not emphasize
sufficiently the differences between
policy-making in the public and the
private sectors owing to the fact that
in the public sector there is a
so
much
greater multiplicity and complexity of
policy objectives
to
pursue and
standards to maintain. Nevertheless,
his chapter on ‘Political choice and
market choice’
is
most penetrating.
‘The market never did or could supply
or
express all the needs of men or
arbitrate between all their priorities.’
He emphasizes ‘the need to devise
a regulative system for
our
basically
political choices, more sensitive and
more powerful.
. .
and
.
. .
to
understand the nature and limitations
of
our present regulators.’ However,
he brings out with great clarity
the fact that policy making consists
sometimes
of
pursuing objectives and
sometimes of maintaining norms
-
more often of both. He calls these
the ‘balancing’ and the ‘optimising’
functions. He also has sonic very
interesting comments
on
how far and
where growth, as such, is an objective
or
measure of success. He does not
actually mention either Neddy
or
Professor Parkinson,
but
clearly implies
that growth is neither always a virtue
nor always a disease. He discusses its
effect on institutions and their policy-
making processes, drawing an analogy
from biological growth, healthy and
diseased.
This is a book which it is impossible
to summarize
or
to skim.
It
needs to
be read and much of
it
re-read. We
have analyses and real and imaginary
examples
of
policy making, including
the Robbins, Buchanan and Gowers
(Capital Punishment) Reports, and
discussions about how situations affect
organizations and organizations affect
decisions, and how
a
process
of
making decisions can in turn change
an organization and the people
in
it.
438
Sir Geoffrey emphasizes and explains
thc increasing need
for
long-term
planning despite the increasing
difficulty of the long-term forecasting
on which it must be based. (Some of
us
have been saying this for some
time, but the point needs constant
repetition, elaboration and discussion.)
There are quotable remarks on nearly
every page
-
‘.
.
.
the persistent cliche
that improved technology gives man-
kind greater control over
his
environ-
ment. This facile equating
of
power
with control has still to be dethroned
in the popular and the political mind,
even though scientists are now well
accustomed to think of regulation as
limited by the adequacy not of energy
but
of information’. ‘Our political
system is devised to curb the exercise
of irresponsible power over the citizen,
rather than to ensure the exercise
of
responsible power by the citizen; and
though we regard it as
a
school
of
political democracy, we must admit
that
it
is
still a very elementary one.’
This book leaves an abiding
impression of the subtlety, complexity
and inter-relatedness of institutions
and their purposes and environment,
their activities, their component parts,
the people in them and the way they
work and think
-
‘an elaborate and
closely woven structure
of
mutual
expectations and self-expectations
of
human agencies’. Here indeed is a
quality
of
thought which seems directly
or indirectly to reflect that
of
no
thinker
so
much as A.N.Whitehead,
despite the fact that the author never
cites him.
This seems to be one
of
the very few
books which can justify
a
reviewer
using the over-worked phrase that it
should be compulsory reading
for
everyone concerned with the study
or
practice of administration or policy
making
of
any kind -and indeed for
anyone who doubts the importance and
the complexity of the functions
of
administration and management.
K.J.S.BAKEK
Gt-rieral
Post
Oflcr!
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