Social Welfare, Dependency and Social Development

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT ISSUES Alternative Approaches to Global Human Needs

The journal of The University of Iowa School of Social Work published in cooperation with the

Inter-University Consortium for International Social Development

EDITORIAL BOARD The University of Iowa School of Social Work

Martin B. Tracy, Editor Wayne D. Johnson, Managing Editor

John F. Else Thomas H. Walz

Janice Wood Wetzel

The Inter-University Consortium of International Social Development

Richard J. Estes Howard J. Karger Mary Martin Lynch

Caryl Abrahams Ralph E. Anderson Gary Askerooth Malim Baginda Ruth A. Brandwein Rosanna Chan Joseph Davenport David Gil Eileen Hart George Helling C. David Hollister G. Michael Jacobson Yoko E. Karjala Shanti Khinduka Armand Lauffer

Roland Meinert C.K.Omari Dania! S. Sanders

Members at Large

GaryR.Lowe Harry J. Macy Emilia E. Martinez-Brawley R. L. McNeely James Midgley J. F. X. Paiva Howard A. Palley Christina Pratt Arline Prigoff John R. Salter Peter T. Simbi Susan Sung Jay Weinstein James Winship

Copyright 1987, by The University oflowa. All right~ reserved.

Social Welfare, Dependency and

Social Development

Richard S. Bolan

Concern for the Welfare State rose dramatically in the 1980s. Attacked by the political right and impoverished by an increasing allocation of world resources to militarism, the Welfare State today is in decline. This paper argues, however, that the critical origins of its decline lie in inadequate conceptions of institution building and inadequate designs of welfare delivery. Three variables are identified as fundamental: hierarchy, scale and complexity. Each offers distinct advantages in effectiveness and efficiency but only within limits. When limits are exceeded, systemic capacity to deliver social development breaks down and system dependency becomes pathological for both givers and receivers of welfare. The paper is primarily theoretical and suggests a framework for further research that can develop the insight necessary for a more just and effective means of social welfare development. The conclusion notes the vital and co"osive relation between the Welfare State and the Armed State.

Introduction

The Welfare State is currently besieged. In the fust half of the twentieth century. government became the principle institution expected to provide for the social welfare of all citizens. Other institutions--family, church, corporation-had proven inadequate to the broad task of aggregate social welfare. The nation-state came to be seen, in the industrialized world, as the institution that cared for people and compensated for the shortcomings of other institutions.

Much is at stake in this view of government as the Welfare State. Historically, social welfare and peace have been closely interwoven. Poverty, malnutrition, oppression and inequity are critical elements in understanding the root causes of violence and armed conflict (Brock-Utne, 1985). This paper explores fundamental problems facing nation-states trying to overcome poverty, malnutrition, and inequity. The principle focus of the exploration is an

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4/Social Development Issues

examination of institutional structures that work to undermine the promise of the Welfare State. However, it is also important to keep in mind that these institutional structures are embedded in larger international structures, many of which (such as the inequitable international economic order) have profound effects on the success of any given Welfare State. One critical problem in the contemporary world is the profound contradiction between the Welfare State and the Armed State.

This relationship is seldom acknowledged and the last decade, marked by increasing levels of arms production, has also seen the Welfare State increasingly denounced. State benevolence, it is argued, has its limits; social welfare policies actually yield perverse effects (Gaylin, et al., 1978) and public assistance to the needy increases dependency, stifles initiative, and creates a permanent "culture of poverty" (Meyer, 1982). On the basis of such arguments the death of the Welfare State has been announced.

Increased dependency and stifled initiative is indeed pervasive in the modem world. Its origins, however, cannot be attributed to any given institution. In fact, it can be argued that the modem corporation, whose reach is global, generates a more widespread condition of dependency than the nation-state (Barnett and Muller, 1974). Dependency has become far more pervasive than simply an affiiction of the needy, the handicapped, the lazy or the unfit As Morris (1977) has argued, everyone in modem society is vulnerable. Dependency is the product of some key processes of modernization and I will seek to explore the underlying dynamics of these processes in the hope of suggesting new and more beneficial approaches to international social development

My argument will examine three key factors in the creation of dependency-factors, it is argued, that highlight inadequacies in our perception of institutionalization processes; public or private, religious or secular. It is argued these factors dynamically interact and, together, operate to dehumanize both agents of any given institution and the recipients of its benevolence. When these factors are pushed beyond their practicable limits, any human being-employee or citizen--has profoundly inadequate capacity to perceive and grasp the institution and its warp and woof of rules, offices, procedures, forms, files and its inscrutable ethical structure. At the extreme, the three factors, in ensemble, strike at the very identity of the self. Human beings become completely frustrated and defeated in what should be the ordinary, simple tasks of everyday life. The result is the "Catch-22," the "no-win" situation.

The presentation is speculative. It seeks to suggest an alternative theoretical approach to understanding institutionalization and its role in social development. It is more the setting of a future research agenda than it is a report on research concluded. Thus, what follows can best be described as the argumentation for a series of hypotheses for investigation.

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The discussion starts with key assumptions, followed by a description of the three variables that underlie virtually every effort of institution-building. From this, I will examine how these variables impact processes of dependency and passivity and create institutional systems that dehumanize and foster alienation. Finally, I suggest potential approaches to a research program that can help to point the way to the optimal conditions under which broad-scale social development and social welfare might flourish.

Institutionalization

The ftrst assumption is about institutions and institutionalization processes. The forces for creating institutions are secular in character. By that I mean that they are not found in nature or given by God but result from the intentions, actions, practices, and nonns of human agents. My guide for this assumption is Berger and Luckman's highly influential book, The Social Construction of Reality (1966) where they graphically depict how mutually agreed divisions of labor develop. These might include ways of hunting, preparing food, constructing a shelter. As practices evolve through repetition into predictable actions, the practices also become normative in character; that is, they produce an agreement on which both parties build their expectations. These agreements form the base of incipient institutions.

With new generations, agreements that were heretofore negotiable become more rigid, more objective--"this is the way things are done." For a child, norms and practices form a certain objective reality. Children are socialized into a world of historically produced norms and practices and, at least into adulthood, accept them and carry them forward. That they are not immutable, however, is clearly evident We can and do impact the world of norms and practices; institutions change, develop and evolve by our actions--both individually and in the aggregate. Institutions, then, are humanly created, humanly shaped and humanly modified.

Anthony Giddens (1979) has carried this further in his recent theory of "structuration." Beginning with linguistic models, he analyzes how the dynamics of creating social systems and social structures evolve from very primitive practices to complex social systems. As practices are produced and reproduced through processes of combination, pennutation, and transformation, new meanings are continually evolved and new social arrangements created, forming the base from which actions are guided. Each time we act we have an impact, however slight, on the original arrangements, modifying them even as we reproduce them. Process and structure are intertwined and, from this, we can


conclude all institutions--governments, economies, families--are in a continual state of being produced and reproduced. As with people, institutions are in a state of becoming.

From this, if it can be said the Welfare State has failed, I would argue it is not a failure whereby liberal ideology was in some fashion contrary to nature, as many conservatives would have it. It is a failure in our capacity to invent the institutional framework--the patterns of regularized action--which would enable us to achieve the goals of the Welfare State. Social development is the product of our theories of institutionalization as much as it is the product of our conceptions of the good life.

My second major assumption is that altruism is still very much a part of human nature. Human beings are indeed self-serving: they seek to serve their needs and they will on occasion go further and act in selfish or harmful ways. There is ample evidence, however, that the impulse for altruism remains. This tendency goes beyond helping one's neighbor in one's immediate life-world; it reaches out to distant peoples one might never meet Richard Titmuss' wellknown study of voluntary blood donors (1971) is one concrete, and well researched, scholarly example.

Historians may argue that the thrusts toward altruism may wax and wane like a swinging pendulum over time, but altruism still remains a fundamental facet of the human personality. I further assume that aggregate social welfare and the conditions for its enhancement, growth and development, are basically desired by people of all political persuasions save the most fanatic.

Basically, modem efforts to produce a successful welfare state suffer from three flawed perspectives of organizational and institutional development. The first is that hierarchy is a necessary condition of social order; the second is that bigger organizations are better than smaller; and the third is that specialization and complexity are superior to simplicity. These propositions served us well in the past However, with the growth of the world's population and with the rise of superpower nations and massive global corporations, we are running into the real limits of these propositions. They are propositions based on a mechanical world view, typically derived from 18th and 19th Century science. They are based on Taylor's (1911) notions of "scientific management" and flawed precepts of administrative theory (see, for example, Gulick, 1945).

Debate has centered around two issues: (1) how to best deliver welfare (the technology of social development) and (2) which of the major institutions are the most appropriate for assuming responsibility for carrying it forward (the market versus the nation-state). The designs of social organization, regardless of institution, have always been taken for granted and these I suggest are now most in need of rethinking and research.

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Hierarchy

~e frrst concern lies in the notion of organizational hierarchy. Hierarchical social order has been so dominant in the history of mankind that it would almost seem to be in the natural order of things.

Indeed, Herbert Simon, in The Sciences of the Artificial (1981, pp. 193-209) takes such a stance as he describes what he calls the "architecture of complexity" (more on complexity below). For Simon, evolution favors the hierarchically organized. Complex natural phenomena, for Simon, almost alwa_ys have such ~ unde~lying hierarchy. It is the perceived "natural" presence of hierarchy that gtves Stmon faith that complex phenomena can be simply described.

Can this be said for humanly constructed social systems? There is much evidence that suggest that it can. Armies, corporations, churches as well as govemmen~ have been hierarchically ordered almost since the beginning of recorded htstory. Even Christian conceptions of heaven are hierarchically ordered. Max Weber, while an avowed critic of hierarchical bureaucracy (he termed it the "Iron Cage"), still affords it great respect in his examination of ~ial a~d economic order. His analysis of the efficiencies and advantages of hterarchical bureaucracy over kinship or charismatic forms of social organization have been instrumental in the success of capitalism and the industrial revolution (Weber, 1947).

Modem times also provide evidence that hierarchy has its limits. Research from. the fields of education (such as Lippitt, 1940), group dynamics (such as Leavttt, 1951; Luft, 1970), and management (for example, Argyris, 1970 and S~hon, 1978) suggests that for certain types of tasks, or in certain kinds of c~cumstances, other forms of social order produce more effective results. Hierarchy works well for simple, routine tasks; but for unusual and difficult tasks calling for responsiveness and creativity, a social framework where hierarchy is absent is more effective (Arieti, 1976, Ch. 14).

Hierarchy, both in theory and in practice, assumes an environment of stability--of equilibrium. Today social change is both pervasive and rapid (Toffl~r 1970). "Environmental turbulence," to use Emery and Trist's (1965) !erm_, !s now _more L:he rule rather than the exception. In many situations, the tnabiltty of hterarchically ordered systems to respond with sufficient rapidity has_ mean~ that some modem organizations have had to experiment with radically dtfferent forms of social organization (Galbraith, 1977).

Another dimension is equally important Hierarchical social order assumes stability and ac:ce_ptance of form_ally circumscribed power relationships. Each mem~r has hmtted power, wrth some viewed as superior and others as subordinate. Power, in principle, is presumed to be based on demonstrated merit or worth. However, with the modem, world-wide push for


democratization, power is increasingly a subject for negotiation. Power relationships are generally less stable today then they were at the tum of the century.

In sum, there are limits to the efficacy of hierarchical, bureaucratic social order. This is hardly new--there is a whole range of literature that has pointed this out from a variety of perspectives. Most governments in the world, however, seem either oblivious or unable to respond to such limits. They continue to proliferate an almost endless chain of offices where deputies, deputy deputies, assistant deputies and associate deputies persist. The agencies of those governments who saw themselves as modem welfare states attempted to fulfill that role with organizations based on concepts and theories of public administration where, in the end, no matter how noble or lofty the policy, the petit functionnaire ruled.

One consequence of the increase in hierarchy is the increasing diminishment of the power of human agents to exercise any form of rounded or balanced human judgment Decisions are made within the strict confines of office, where each official takes care not to infringe on the jurisdiction of another office. Coordination among offices becomes increasingly difficult as offices and officials multiply. Thus, any given official is severely constrained, discretion is highly circumscribed and soon every official learns that it is easy to shift responsibility to almost any other official. This produces the commonly experienced frustration, helplessness and anger of the client, customer, or patient who seeks to transact business with such a hierarchy.

Thus, my ftrSt hypothesis is that increasing hierarchical organization is effective to an observable and measurable limit, after which further hierarchical differentiation yields diminishing and negative returns on the responsibility of the organization.

Size

One of the curious features of modem organizational life is the attitudes held toward the notion of size. There seems to be a "bigger is better" fvcation that persists despite the presence of much contrary evidence. In the world of large scale multi-national corporations, the market place yields stark evidence of this. Chandler (1962), twenty years ago, showed how the decentralization of such companies as General Motors and Sears Roebuck had been necessary to avert their failure. More recently, the lure of wider control provided by modem information and communication technology led many corporations to mergers and acquisitions of heretofore unprecedented scale. Yet today, many companies are divesting themselves of businesses acquired perhaps only three or four years

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ago. The business world seems to go through cycles where lessons concerning the cost of being too big are learned again and again.

These lessons seem to be learned not at all by governments, whether capitalist or communist; whether advanced or less developed. 'Throughout the world the evidence mounts that central bureaucratic planning fails, yet we learn of few instances where governments are abandoning it The United States has recently sought to diminish the size of its government but in reality, agencies of domestic policy have grown smaller but only to be exceeded by the growth of agencies of military policy. In spite of the reductions, welfare agencies in the United States are still huge by any standard.

What makes this particularly ironic is the presence for many years of a concept derived from micro-economic theory: the "Law of Diminishing Returns." While fixated on the "Law of Economies of Scale"--that argues increasing size enhances efficiency and profitability--its counterpoise suggests limits are seldom taken into account (see: Samuelson, 1964, p. 26). Such concepts, however, are limited to calculations of marginal costs and revenues.

As organizations grow in size, their information channels swell with added messages to accommodate the enlarged numbers and kinds of transactions. Increasingly there is reliance on mechanical media for sharing, transmitting, recording, and interpreting information. Face-to-face interaction and the spoken word become diminished as the means of communication. Written documents become dominant. With new technology, even written documents are supplanted by computerized data processing systems and, with the linkage of computers and the telephone, communication has changed enormously in the amount and speed of information that can be processed and transmitted. This includes symbols of all kinds--words, numbers, charts, graphs.

As the enlarging organization faces the pressure of the growing numbers of ttansactions, increasingly its means of communication relies less on human faculties and becomes more dependent on mechanical or electronic media. In small organizations each transaction can be judged not only on its typical qualities but its idiosyncratic character as well--on its utilitarian and emotional qualities. In large organizations, with the number of transactions multiplied many times, each must be dealt with as routinely and predictably as possible. More and more communication takes place that is absent of any human interpretation or judgment at all.

My second hypothesis, then, is that increasing the scale of an organization increases its effectiveness up to an observable and measurable limit, after which further increases in scale result in diminishing and negative returns on efficient allocation of resources and the quality and character of intended goal achievement.


Complexity

The third factor is complexity. As with hierarchy and size, there are limits to complexity impacting system effectiveness.

Complexity is a word in common usage, but it has only recently been taken seriously as a concept of scientific or philosophic interest Complexity is often taken for granted when the scale of a system increases. This is not always the case. An organization or system can increase in scale without any increase in complexity if no new divisions of labor are devised. Additional functions or tasks mean an increase in complexity. On the other hand, increases in complexity may be the driving force behind both increases in scale and in hierarchical differentiation.

Complexity is driven by the specialization of labor. Expanding specialization is a function of a wide variety of social and technological change. Complexity, as with hierarchy and scale, is not limited to capitalism or the product of markets; it exists as well in communist or socialist states. Indeed, information theorists argue that systems of all kinds evolve toward more complex states.

Scientific interest in complexity has arisen in a number of contexts. Advanced work in mathematics, physics, chemistry, ecology and information theory has progressed to the point that certain generalizations can be kept in mind when thinking about advanced social systems.

Warren Weaver, a mathematician and information theorist, noted in 1948 that complexity is of two forms. He called the first "disorganized complexity," the second "organized complexity" (reported in Warsh, 1984, pp. 4-5). The f1rst referred to random events such as demographic phenomena (e.g., the number of motorists using a highway at any given point, or the number of patients queuing up in a health clinic). The patterning of such events have proven to be amenable to statistical probability theory and, thus, even though "disorganized," are describable and have been a central focus of social scientists.

Organized complexity, however, is another matter. This has to do with the way in which complex but integrated phenomena can be explained. The prime example is organic living matter; the secret of DNA, for example. Large scale economic, social and political systems would seem to fall in the category of "organized complexity." The parts of such systems exist in strong and intricate interrelationship. The number of such parts is an indicator of the complexity of the system. As the parts of a system increase, its complexity increases.

An illustration lies in a modem health care system. The state of medical knowledge in the 19th Century was such that physicians interacted with patients with relatively few intermediaries. The "parts" of the system were small in number and relatively undifferentiated. Today's health system involves not only a great many new kinds of specialist physicians, but also specialized nurses, physical therapists, and dozens of other "allied health professions." Also

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involved is a system of accrediting and licensing bodies, multi-national pharmaceutical companies, bio-technology flrffis, various specialized hospitals, university and private research centers, government regulators, lobbyists, fundraisers, insurance companies, and an entire malpractice subsystem consisting of specialized lawyers, liability insurers, etc. (See Leblebici, et al., 1985, for a similar depiction of the radio and television industry.) What is important from our perspective is that the nation-states of advanced societies have necessarily been going through these same processes of transformation towards increasing complexity.

Emerging from this new attention to complexity is a changing world view that has profound implications. The work of physicists, mathematicians and logicians seems to be lending a new credence to some of the central concepts of mid-century phenomenologists. As Erich Jantsch has described it in The SelfOrganizing Universe, the new world view "emphasizes process over structure, no equilibrium over equilibrium, evolution over permanency and individual creativity over collective stabilization" (quoted in Warsh, 1984, p. 16).

Perhaps the key observation, from the point of view of this presentation, is that noted by Von Neumann, the originator of game theory. Failure is a natural part of complex systems; the more complex the system, the greater the probability that one or more of its parts will fail (reported in Warsh, 1984, pp. 10-11). Ecological mathematical models have demonstrated the greater the complexity, the more vulnerable a system is to perturbation. Again, using the economists' language, there would appear to be a point in the evolution of specialization and complexity of social systems, that the marginal utility of adding one more specialized task to a complex social system yields a negative benefit; a point where one additional specialty increases the probability of system failure beyond tolerable levels.

What are the principle consequences of the drive for specialization and complexity? There are many of concern. Agents of highly complex social systems are increasingly specialists who would view the world from a narrow specialists' lens. Trained to see in specific ways, specialists treat all problems as being defmable in their terms of their training. They lose the capacity to see a problem in its wider context. As their specialized knowledge becomes further enhanced, they increasingly resort to a specific and highly technical language.

At a broader level, increasing complexity means that fewer and fewer people can grasp any given problem holistically. Equally important, fewer and fewer people can grasp and understand the organization or the system. The problems of people not fitting within the purview of any given specialty simply cannot be dealt with. Finally, highly complex systems lose their capacity to correct or adapt to failure. Blame for failure is shifted to the customer or client. Humans, rather than systems, are required to adjust so that ultimately the failure of the system becomes accepted as the norm of system operation.


Thus, my third hypothesis: specialization and complexity suggest greater effectiveness in the quality of goal achievement in any given organization or social system up to a limit which is both observable and measurable, after which there are diminishing and negative returns on the capacity of human beings to acquire a conceptual and perspectival grasp of the organization or system and an increasing risk of system failure.

The Pervasiveness of Dependency

Human beings, even in individualistic societies, are social beings and are intrinsically bound up in communities that are assumed to be extensions of the nurturing and caring found at the family level. Historically, altruism and a concern for hwnan welfare has never been limited solely to kin. In fact, the modem world could not have developed without an intuitive grasp of the essential interdependency of its various human endeavors. Indeed, the growth of complexity described before assumes interdependency.

Today, we are all dependent. Probably, one is most conscious of this in an isolated, yet urban community such as found in Hawaii. For those living on these islands in the middle of the Pacific, the promise of a dock strike some years ago graphically demonstrated how dependent they were--for food, for oil, even for toilet paper. In short, the emergence of a complex modem society with large-scale economic enterprise makes all of us far more dependent on the corporated institutions of that enterprise than on any nation state for our welfare. As the complexity and scale of world economic systems increases, each of us becomes more dependent. Local and regional economies that once might have been relatively self-sufficient now are deeply embedded in a global economy overwhelmingly dominated by multi- and trans-national manufacturing and financial organizations.

Unfortunately, this also includes economic enterprise devoted to the manufacture of arms. As the complexity and scale of warfare and the technologies of explosive power enlarges, each one of us becomes vulnerable and dependent in an even more profound sense. The arms race, in the first instance, makes us deeply beholden to the military decision-making systems to functions without failure and in rational fashion. In a second sense, the geopolitical military~industrial system so dominates world markets that economies are beholden to it for jobs and income.

The question is thus not whether dependency exists, because it clearly does; nor is it that dependency is necessarily evil or bad, since it is at least implicitly entailed in all of our major institutions and implicitly embraced by the powerful in the political, military, and economic spheres. The issue comes down to when

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is dependency pathological? At what point is a given individual or group of individuals so dependent that they fall into a state of passivity-unable to do anything for themselves. At what point does dependency mean the death of the human spirit

A key proposition of my argument is that the human spirit is killed only when it cannot perceive how to solve a problem and that no escape from the situation is conceivably available. One is, in effect, cornered or trapped--not necessarily in a physical, life-threatening sense, but rather in a psychological sense. In a transaction with a large-scale system, one's welfare (and often in the bargain one's dignity and integrity) has been eroded and one has no conception of why or what could have been done to prevent it or what might be done in the future to avoid further erosion.

This inability to escape is dramatically illustrated if we return to the example of the threatened dock strike in Hawaii. Not only is social welfare directly threatened, even those who might desire to leave find all avenues of escape closed off since the very oil that would power the ships and planes that might take one to safety is also cut off. The very fabric of life would be seriously threatened and each individual would be powerless to do anything about it. This, I submit, is dependency in the extreme and would give rise to widespread pathology if continued over extended time. Just as Calhoun's experiments on the crowding of rats in the 1960s showed various resulting forms of pathology, humans cut off over time from products of our modem economic engine would also revert to an animalistic, pathological "behavioral sink" (Calhoun, 1962). One reaction may be violence, another is utter passivity, a resignation that one's welfare is up to fate and that nothing one does would make any difference.

Thus, my primary thesis is that when one has become dependent on ~ organization (or system of many organizations) that is continually increasing m hierarchy, scale and complexity, one encounters the following:

a) a system more prone to failure, as Von Neumann argued; b) a system where the sources of failure become harder and harder to

fmd (or failures are harder and harder to repair); c) a system less and less responsible, either to clients or employees; d) a system whose employees are as dependent as its clients; e) a system poorly coordinated so that the total ensemble of ever

changing rules, regulations. policies, and practices become more and more contradictory or counter-productive;

f) a system oriented to regularity and unable to cope with ambiguity, subtlety, or unique circumstances; and

g) a system unresponsible to change.


For the client of such a system. the hierarchy becomes like an inchoate. shadowy, invisible college of officials that one can never meet or speak with who yet have the power of deciding one's welfare and fate. The client who seeks to make a personal plea for his or her needs encounters almost insurmountable obstacles in finding exactly the right person who can be responsive.

Government systems directly designed to be concerned with social welfare tend to exhibit these circumstances in a most pronounced fashion. If there is one virtue of capitalism, when competitive market forces are truly at play. excessive system failure arising from hierarchy. scale. and complexity tends to be checked and economic enterprise reorganizes, divests, and otherwise seeks to set corrective forces in motion. Businesses that lose the ability to coordinate and become too large and too complex do not stay in business long, unless they enjoy a monopolistic or near monopolistic position in their industry. Government systems, on the other hand, seem to have no motivation to place limits on these variables. This includes the private contractors of government systems, as illustrated by the recent excesses of weapons systems manufacturers.

This in not a defense of a laissez-faire. free market stance. There are many important ways in which free markets fail (Klosterman. 1985). But the way in which we create organizations, systems. and institutions that are intended to serve the public interest and provide for a widescale social development and welfare offer no basis for checking on when they become counter-productive. Our modes of social organization inevitably imply power relationships. Most of our administrative and organizational theory either explicitly or implicitly tends to enhance the power of the power holders and I suspect this may be the true underlying motive of why we cannot discipline ourselves about hierarchy. scale and complexity.

Research and Theory in the Delivery of Social Welfare

The foregoing offers a beginning sketch of a framework for better understanding underlying dynamics of recent experience with the welfare state. The structural variables--hierarchy, size, and complexity--form points of departure for a research program. Such a program would also have to take account of new conceptual approaches to institutional design and development which would transcend the purely bureaucratic structural character that these three variables represent. New thinking about the delivery of the Welfare State will have to incorporate both the positivist tradition of structural-functional

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analysis as well as new views of process and contingency found in Jantsch's remarks noted earlier. Past difficulties in institutional development have arisen from the effort to divorce the normative dimensions of social welfare from its delivery and administration. By pursuing a mythological separation of politics from administration, the agents who were to deliver the Welfare State camouflaged covert normative and ethical systems that thereby escaped inquiry in purely structurally oriented analyses. For any policy. for example. the ethics of its delivery can differ markedly from the values espoused in its original formulation. Future research needs to address the full array of both political and administrative social practices that produce and reproduce command over rules and resources (Giddens, Chapter 2). Conceptually, a framework for research might follow along the lines set forth in the following diagram that incorporates two dichotomies of theory building: the distinction between structure and process, and the distinction between descriptive and normative theory (See Figure 1).

Each cell of the diagram brings to mind familiar theoretical traditions, each of which evokes a particular history of concern about the problems of social order. In keeping with Giddens• "theory of structuration," it now seems necessary to more closely examine the interactions of these four traditions. In the creation of structures for the delivery of social welfare, and in the processes of actually carrying out the delivery, all four of these traditions come together as a gestalt. The agents of the Welfare State cannot act neutrally in administering the politically chosen national goals. Similarly, structure. and the power relations it entails, enables process, but process in turn acts back and modifies structure and power. The mailing of a transfer payment or the delivery of an hour of counselling incorporates the altruism of the society. the efficiency and effectiveness of societal uses of resources. and the quality and character of the culture or society. The agents of societal welfare are not automations--as flesh and blood human actors. they necessarily incorporate values, agreements. understandings. and affective facets as well as objective knowledge in all transactions.

Within the context of this gestalt, it should be possible to examine issues involving hierarchy, scale, and complexity in the light of their underlying social practices, norms and understandings as a way to discern the limits of their effectiveness. Modern contingency theory in organizational studies suggests there may likely be no universal calculus of such limits but rather they would likely be contextually determined.

From this stance, such investigations would necessarily involve a broad program of comparative research in different cultural and normative settings. Further, those nations whose delivery of welfare are viewed as effective need to be examined in comparison with those whose success is more limited.


Historically, there would seem to be enough experience throughout the world that research efforts could begin to establish some of these key parameters of institution-building. Once we begin to do this, I am confident that social welfare, while still a concern for ideological debate, can, nonetheless be debated on its intrinsic worth and in terms of the goals to be achieved rather than on the ground that it can't be done. Such a research agenda is rather large in scope, probably beyond a given individual or given research center. It would probably need a coordinating organization international in outlook. A world network of scholars concerned with the serious study of effective institution-building would become a strong force for the enhancement of social welfare in all parts of the world.

Welfare and Peace

The Welfare State has floundered on the language and conceptual baggage of bureaucratic social order--an order that traces its historical origins to ancient views of dominance and submission. The human design of hierarchical order begins with the organization of military enterprises--with conceptions as to how best to maintain the public order and to wage war. Even today, theories of peace are extremely scarce while there are many alternative theories of war.

Thus, the very ideas with which we have attempted to construct the Welfare State have their linguistic and conceptual beginnings in the Armed State. This may be traced to the principal origins of the nation-state as the institution that controls and legitimizes violence. In the name of social order, the legitimation of state violence is seen as the police function; in the name of power, conquest, dominance, and defense, state violence is legitimized as an expression of national purpose in war.

Ultimately, as noted previously, a successful Welfare State rests upon peace. This is true not only in the sense of preventing the shift of economic resources away from welfare services. Social welfare depends on a climate of peace, a culture of peace, a "dominant social paradigm" focused on peace (Pirages, 1977, p. 6). Such a milieu can only emerge from a strong theory of peace and such a theory can only be constructed from a language of peace. The metaphor of war permeates everyday discourse. Even a debate or argument is described in warlike terms --she "attacked" my position; I "countered" with ... (Lackoff and Johnson, 1980, pp. 4-6). The metaphor of war enlists energetic images--power, dominance, control, violence. Ironically, however, a theory of peace can only come from an equally vigorous vocabulary of peace and a new perspective that is based in action, in agency as well as in structure; in ethics as well as in

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positivistic science--in short, only in full recognition of the gestalt of all four theoretical traditions noted above.

Today science as a way of knowing dominates the mind set of both the Armed State and the Welfare State. The purposes of science have been seriously distorted and shaped by the exigent needs of warmaking. Much of what is viewed as "high technology" in the world today is directed toward ever more sophisticated weapons systems. Under the misguided view of the logical positivists, science has come to see values merely as opinions or prejudices and thereby discounts or fails to understand its own moral purpose. Science has become a priesthood without morality. Having created the nuclear age, scientists now show an all too ready eagerness to turn outer space into the battlefield of the twenty-first century.

This perspective has spilled into the social sciences and related disciplines of operations research and decision theory. Positivistic social science has actively sought neutrality and has eschewed moral analysis. From this stance, the circle is complete in what Marcuse has termed the rationalization of irrationality. In this climate we find contemporary cost-benefit analysts conceiving an elaborate calculus determined to answer such questions as "how much should be spent to save a life?" as though such a question were totally bereft of moral content (Rhoades, 1978). It is this framework of social policy based on social science and social "engineering" that connects the Welfare State with the ancient traditions of the Armed State.

The success of the Welfare State rests heavily on freedom from· the stresses of the Armed State. Even were such freedom achieved, however, the design of institutions for delivery of human welfare must rest on new theories of social organization whose precepts are also constructed from a vocabulary of peace rather than dominance; that is, a vocabulary resting on moral action aimed at organizational forms that can link effectiveness and efficiency with the integration of public philosophy and individual compassion. Such organized human welfare efforts would then become the masters rather than the slaves of hierarchy, scale and complexity.


Figure 1

1----------------------------------------------------------------, 1 I Descriptive I Normative I l--------------------l--------------------l---------------------1 I I 1 I Structural- I utopian Theorv 1 1 functional Theory 1 Political Theory !Structure 1 Organizational I societal Goals 1 1 Boundaries and I Living Standards 1 1 Environments 1 Educational 1 I I Attainments 1 1 Resources I Industrial 1 I I Productivity l--------------------1--------------------l---------------------l I I 1 I Interactive- I 1 I Gr. ovnamics Theory I 1 Agency 1 Organizational I 1 I Processes and I 1 1 Technologies I I I 1 I I I

Ethical Theorv Professional Codes Goals for the

Individual Client Welfare Delivery

standards Rules and Procedures

----------------------------------------------------------------Each cell of the diagram brings to mind familiar theoretical

traditions, each of which evokes a particular history of concern about the problems of social order. In keeping with Giddenst "theory of structuration," - it now seems necessary to more closely examine the interactions of these four traditions. In the creation of structures for the delivery of social welfare, and in the processes of actually carrying out the delivery, all four of these traditions come together as a gestalt. The agents of the Welfare State cannot act neutrally in administering the politically chosen national goals. similarly, structure, and the power relations it entails, enables process, but process in turn acts back and modifies structure and power. The mailing of a transfer payment or the delivery of an hour of counseling incorporates the altruism of the society, the efficiency and effectiveness of societal uses of resources, and the quality and character of the culture of society. The agents of societal welfare are not automatons -- as flesh and blood human actors, they necessarily incorporate values, agreements, understandings, and affective facets as well as objective knowledge in all transactions.

Within the context of this gestalt, it should be possible to examine issues involving hierarchy, scale and complexity in the light of their underlying social practices, norms and understandings as a way to discern the limits of their effectiveness. Modern contingency theory in organizational studies suggests there may likely be no universal calculus of such limits bu·c: rather they would likely be contextually determined.

( I

Bolan/19

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Documents

Social Welfare, Dependency and Social Development