Organisation Theory and Behaviour: An African Perspective Peter Blunt Longman, 1983, 195 pp.
| Published date | 01 April 1985 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230050214 |
| Author | Eric Newbigging |
| Date | 01 April 1985 |
182
Book
Reviews
first-generation sites and services projects and the difficulties associated with upgrading:
leakage to higher income groups, failure of co-operatives, the limitations and difficulties
of
land tenure as an incentive. and
of
cost recovery as a financial strategy, the constraints on
participation in decision-making, insistence on high standards, and complicated bureaucratic
procedures. But this book also looks on the hopeful side, which
it
is essential to do, because
there really is no practical long-run alternative to these twin strategies.
Perhaps the key message of the book is that the public sector has to adjust itself far more
realistically to a partnership role with the informal settlement and house-building process to
which the successful experience
of
Indonesia and Thailand clearly point. Large-scale formal
plot provision matching the scale of urban settlement may be easier in the land systems found
in Africa, but only Malawi and Botswana have
so
far been successful beyond the pilot project
stage. and significantly in the case of the former without long-term tenure,
without
public
sector housing finance and with only minimal cost recovery.
Conventional donor-sponsored approaches are also found to be
a
misfit in the context of
the indigenous land and political environments
of
several Asian countries.
The book is good on charting the constraints, but also points to the potentials and
promising innovations that can lead to real progress. Some good points are made on
institutional and organizational factors throughout the book, but
it
would have been helpful
to have a more substantial chapter to focus on these, as there is for the topic of community
participation.
I
would make the book compulsory reading for any course dealing with urban development
and housing, and it can also be highly recommended to practitioners as a readable and
constructive review of sites and services and upgrading.
DAVID PASTEUR
Development
A
dm inistration Group
Institute
of
Local Government Studies, Birmingham
ORGANISATION THEORY AND BEHAVIOUR: AN AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE
Peter Blunt
Longman,
1983, 195
pp.
The first thing after reading this book was to recommend each
of
the dozen African students
on
our
Master’s course in Manpower Studies to buy a copy.
Apart from the book’s intrinsic merits-and it packs
a
great deal in its
200
pages-it
represents a bold,
if
not the first, attempt to help those who have tried to teach and study
organizational behaviour in Africa and who have ‘come up against the frustration
of
having
to
use alien, usually American texts. Virtually everything contained in these books is foreign
to the African student. The language, is
at
times incomprehensible
...
and names and events
and the contexts in which they appear are unfamiliar’.
The book also reinforces the simple message which should be implicit in all management
courses that the key skill
of
the manager is to
locate,
i.e. to test theoretical concepts by seeing
how far they help him to resolve the issues in his own organization.
The book is divided into three parts. The first chapter
of
Part One deals with the study of
organizations in Africa. This examines such key external influences upon African
organizations as the population-resource imbalance, rural-urban migration and
unemployment, ethnicity, industrialization and employment structure, and trade unions.
The first part of the second chapter is derived from Burrell and Morgan’s four organization
paradigms (‘Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis’) based on the two sets
of
dimensions: subjective-objective and radical change and regulation. The major content
of
the
book falls in the fourth quadrant (objective-regulation)
of
the paradigms broadly classified as
functional.
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