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Seventh class

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What is Design Thinking Anyway? : Observatory: Design Observer

What is Design Thinking Anyway? : Observatory: Design Observer.

Kids Count

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State of America's Children

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A THEORY OF JUSTICE

John Rawls is Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He is the author of the well-known and path breaking A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971) and the more recent work Political Liberalism (Columbia, 1996). These excerpts from A Theory of Justice provide a skeletal account of Rawls's project of using social contract theory to generate principles of justice for assigning basic rights and duties and determining the division of social benefits in a society. Rawls argues that the two principles that would be reached through an agreement in an original position of fairness and equality are 1) each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others and 2) social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage; and b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

1. The Role of Justice

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human

activities,  truth and justice are uncompromising. These propositions seem to express our intuitiveconviction of the primacy of justice. No doubt they are expressed too strongly. In any event I wish to inquire whether these contentions or others similar to them are sound, and if so how they can be accounted for. To this end it is necessary to work out a theory of justice in the light of which these assertions can be interpreted and assessed....

2. The Subject of Justice

Many different kinds of things  are said to be just and unjust: not only laws, institutions, and social systems, but also particular actions of many kinds, including decisions, judgments, and imputations. We also call the attitudes and dispositions of persons, and persons themselves, just and unjust. Our topic, however, is that of social justice. For us the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation. By major institutions I understand the political constitution and the principal economic and social arrangements. Thus the legal protection of freedom of thought and liberty of conscience, competitive markets, private property in the means of production, and the monogamous family are examples of major social institutions. Taken together as one scheme, the major institutions define men's rights and duties and influence their life-prospects, what they can expect to be and how well they can hope to do. The basic structure is the primary subject of
justice because its effects are so profound and present from the start. The intuitive notion here is
that this structure contains various social positions and that men born into different positions have different expectations of life determined, in part, by the political system as well as by economic and social circumstances. In this way the institutions of society favor certain starting places over others. These are especially deep inequalities. Not only are they pervasive, but they affect men's initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert. It is these inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply. These principles, then, regulate the choice of a political constitution and the main elements of the economic and social system. The justice of a social scheme depends essentially on how

fundamental rights and duties are assigned and on the economic opportunities and social conditions in the various sectors of society ...

3. The Main Idea of The Theory of Justice

My aim is to present a conception of justice which generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract as found, say, in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. In order to do this we are not to think of the original contract as one to enter a particular society or to set up a particular form of government. Rather, the guiding idea is that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original agreement. They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association. These principles are to regulate all further agreements; they specify the kinds of social cooperation that can be entered into and the forms of government that can be established. This way of regarding the principles of justice I shall call justice as fairness. Thus we are to imagine that those who
engage in social cooperation choose together, in one joint act, the principles which are to assign basic rights and duties and to determine the division of social benefits. Men are to decide in advance how they are to regulate their claims against one another and what is to be the foundation charter of their society. Just as each person must decide by rational reflection what constitutes his good, that is, the system of ends which it is rational for him to pursue, so a group of persons must decide once and for all what is to count among them as just and unjust. The choice which rational men would make in this hypothetical situation of equal liberty, assuming for the present that this choice problem has a solution, determines the principles of justice. Injustice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of the social contract. This original position is not, of course, thought of as an
actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as
a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice? Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances. Since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favor his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain. For given the circumstances of the original position, the symmetry of everyone's relation to each other, this initial situation is fair between individuals as moral persons, that is, as rational
beings with their own ends and capable, I shall assume, of a sense of justice. The original position is, one might say, the appropriate initial status quo, and the fundamental agreements reached in it are fair. This explains the propriety of the name "justice as fairness": it conveys the idea that the principles of justice are agreed to in an initial situation that is fair. The name does not mean that the concepts of justice and fairness are the same, any more that the phrase "poetry as metaphor" means that the concepts of poetry and metaphor are the same. Justice as fairness begins, as I have said, with one of the most general of all choices which persons might make together, namely, with the choice of the first principles of a conception of justice which is to regulate all subsequent criticism and reform of institutions. Then, having chosen a conception of justice, we can suppose that they are to choose a constitution and a legislature to enact laws, and so on, all in accordance with the principles of justice initially agreed upon. Our social situation is just if it is such that by this sequence of hypothetical agreements we would have contracted into the general system of rules which defines it. Moreover, assuming that the original position does determine a set of principles(that is, that a particular conception of justice would be chosen), it will then be true that whenever social institutions satisfy these principles those engaged in them can say to one another that they are cooperating on terms to which they would agree if they were free and equal persons whose
relations with respect to one another were fair. They could all view their arrangements as meeting the stipulations which they would acknowledge in an initial situation that embodies widely accepted and reasonable constraints on the choice of principles. The general recognition of this fact would provide the basis for a public acceptance of the corresponding principles of justice. No society can, of course, be a scheme of cooperation which men enter voluntarily in a literal sense; each person finds himself placed at birth in some particular position in some particular society, and the nature of this position materially affects his life prospects. Yet a society satisfying the principles of justice as fairness comes as close as a society can to being a voluntary scheme, for it meets the principles which free and equal persons would assent to under circumstances that are fair. In this sense its members are autonomous and the obligations they
recognize self-imposed. One feature of justice as fairness is to think of the parties in the initial situation as rational and mutually disinterested. This does not mean that the parties are egoists, that is, individuals with
only certain kinds of interests, say in wealth, prestige, and domination. But they are conceived as not taking an interest in one another's interests. They are to presume that even their spiritual aims may be opposed, in the way that the aims of those of different religions maybe opposed. Moreover, the concept of rationality must be interpreted as far as possible in the narrow sense, standard in economic theory, of taking the most effective means to given ends. I shall modify this concept to some extent, as explained later, but one must try to avoid introducing into it any controversial ethical elements. The initial situation must be characterized by stipulations that are widely accepted.  In working out the conception of justice as fairness one main task clearly is to determine which principles of justice would be chosen in the original position. To do this we must describe this situation in some detail and formulate with care the problem of choice which it presents. These matters I shall take up in the immediately succeeding chapters. It may be observed, however, that once the principles of justice are thought of as arising from an original agreement in a situation of equality, it is an open question whether the principle of utility would be acknowledged. Offhand it hardly seems likely that persons who view themselves as equals, entitled to press their claims
upon one another, would agree to a principle which may require lesser life prospects for some simply for the sake of a greater sum of advantages enjoyed by others. Since each desires to protect his interests, his capacity to advance his conception of the good, no one has a reason to acquiesce in an enduring loss for himself in order to bring about a greater net balance of satisfaction. In the absence of strong and lasting benevolent impulses, a rational man would not accept a basic structure merely because it maximized the algebraic sum of advantages irrespective of its permanent effects on his own basic rights and interests. Thus it seems that the principle of utility is incompatible with the conception of social cooperation among equals for mutual advantage. It appears to be inconsistent with the idea or reciprocity implicit in the notion
of a well-ordered society. Or, at any rate, so I shall argue. I shall maintain instead that the persons in the initial situation would choose two rather different principles: the first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society. These principles rule out justifying institutions on the grounds that the hardships of some are offset by a greater good in the aggregate. It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper. But there is no injustice in the greater benefits earned by a few provided that the situation of persons not so fortunate is thereby improved. The intuitive idea is that since everyone's well-being depends upon a scheme of cooperation without which no one could have a satisfactory life, the division of advantages should be such as to draw
forth the willing cooperation of everyone taking part in it, including those less well situated. Yet this can be expected only if reasonable terms are proposed. The two principles mentioned seem to be a fair agreement on the basis of which those better endowed, or more fortunate in their social position, neither of which we can be said to deserve, could expect the willing cooperation of others when some workable scheme is a necessary condition of the welfare of all. Once we decide to look for a conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance as counters in quest for political and economic advantage, we are led to these principles. They express the result of leaving aside those aspects of the social world that seem arbitrary from a moral point of view....

The Original Position and Justification

I have said that the original position is the appropriate initial status quo which insures that the fundamental agreements reached in it are fair. This fact yields the name "justice as fairness." It is clear, then, that I want to say that one conception of justice is more reasonable than another, or justifiable with respect to it, if rational persons in the initial situation would choose its principles over those of the other for the role of justice. Conceptions of justice are to be ranked by their acceptability to persons so circumstanced. Understood in this way the question of justification is settled by working out a problem of deliberation: we have to ascertain which principles it would be rational to adopt given the contractual situation. This connects the theory of justice with the theory of rational choice. If this view of the problem of justification is to succeed, we must, of course, describe in some detail the nature of this choice problem. A problem of rational decision has a definite answer only if we know the beliefs and interests of the parties, their relations with respect to one another, the alternatives between which they are to choose, the procedure whereby they make up their minds, and so on. As the circumstances are presented in different ways,
correspondingly different principles are accepted. The concept of the original position, as I shall refer to it, is that of the most philosophically favored interpretation of this initial choice situation for the purposes of a theory of justice. But how are we to decide what is the most favored interpretation? I assume, for one thing, that there is abroad measure of agreement that principles of justice should be chosen under certain
conditions. To justify a particular description of the initial situation one shows that it
incorporates these commonly shared presumptions. One argues from widely accepted but weak
premises to more specific conclusions. Each of the presumptions should by itself be natural and
plausible; some of them may seem innocuous or even trivial. The aim of the contract approach is
to establish that taken together they impose significant bounds on acceptable principles of justice.
The ideal outcome would be that these conditions determine a unique set of principles; but I shall
be satisfied if they suffice to rank the main traditional conceptions of social justice. One should
not be misled, then, by the somewhat unusual conditions which characterize the original position.
The idea here is simply to make vivid to ourselves the restrictions that it seems reasonable to
impose on arguments for principles of justice, and therefore on these principles themselves. Thus
it seems reasonable and generally acceptable that no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged
by natural fortune or social circumstances in the choice of principles. It also seems widely agreed
that it should be impossible to tailor principles to the circumstances of one's own case. We
should insure further that particular inclinations and aspirations, and persons' conceptions of their
good do not affect the principles adopted. The aim is to rule out those principles that it would be rational to propose for acceptance, however little the chance of success, only if one knew certain things that are irrelevant from the standpoint of justice. For example, if a man knew that he was wealthy, he might find it rational to advance the principle that various taxes for welfare measures be counted unjust; if he knew that he was poor, he would most likely propose the contrary principle. To represent the desired restrictions one imagines a situation in which everyone is deprived of this sort of information. One excludes the knowledge of those contingencies which sets men at odds and allows them to be guided by their prejudices. In this manner the veil of ignorance is arrived at in a natural way. This concept should cause no difficulty if we keep in mind the constraints on arguments that it is meant to express. At any time we can enter the
original position, so to speak, simply by following a certain procedure, namely, by arguing for principles of justice in accordance with these restrictions. It seems reasonable to suppose that the parties in the original position are equal. That is, all have the same rights in the procedure for choosing principles; each can make proposals, submit reasons for their acceptance, and so on. Obviously the purpose of these conditions is to represent equality between human beings as moral persons, as creatures having a conception of their good and capable of a sense of justice. The basis of equality is taken to be similarity in these two respects. Systems of ends are not ranked in value; and each man is presumed to have the requisite ability to understand and to act upon whatever principles are adopted. Together with the veil of ignorance, these conditions define the principles of justice as those which rational persons concerned to advance their interests would consent to as equals when none are known to be advantaged or disadvantaged by social and natural contingencies. There is, however, another side to justifying a particular description of the original position. This is to see if the principles which would be chosen match our considered convictions of justice or extend them in an acceptable way. We can note whether applying these principles would lead us to make the same judgments about the basic structure of society which we now make intuitively and in which we have the greatest confidence; or whether, in cases where our present judgments are in doubt and given with hesitation, these principles offer a resolution which we can affirm on
reflection. There are questions which we feel sure must be answered in a certain way. For example, we are confident that religious intolerance and racial discrimination are unjust. We think that we have examined these things with care and have reached what we believe is an impartial judgment not likely to be distorted by an excessive attention to our own interests. These convictions are provisional fixed points which we presume any conception of justice must fit. But we have much less assurance as to what is the correct distribution of wealth and authority. Here we may be looking for a way to remove our doubts. We can check an interpretation of the initial situation, then, by the capacity of its principles to accommodate our firmest convictions and to provide guidance where guidance is needed. In searching for the most favored description of this situation we work from both ends. We begin by describing it so that it represents generally shared and preferably weak conditions. We then see if these conditions are strong enough to yield a significant set of principles. If not, we look for further premises equally reasonable. But if so,
and these principles match our considered convictions of justice, then so far well and good. But presumably there will be discrepancies. In this case we have a choice. We can either modify the account of the initial situation or we can revise our existing judgments, for even the judgments we take provisionally  s fixed points are liable to revision. By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted. This state of affairs I refer to as reflective equilibrium. It is an equilibrium because at last our principles and judgments coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation. At the moment everything is in order. But this equilibrium is not necessarily stable. It is liable to be upset by further examination of the conditions which should be imposed on the contractual situation and by particular cases which may lead us to revise our judgments. Yet for the time
being we have done what we can to render coherent and to justify our convictions of social justice. We have reached a conception of the original position. I shall not, of course, actually work through this process. Still, we may think of the interpretation of the original position that I shall present as the result of such a hypothetical course of reflection. It represents the attempt to accommodate within one scheme both reasonable philosophical conditions on principles as well as our considered judgments of justice. In arriving at the favored interpretation of the initial situation there is no point at which an appeal is made to self-evidence in the traditional sense either of general conceptions or particular convictions. I do not claim for the principles of justice proposed that they are necessary truths or derivable from such truths. A conception of justice cannot be deduced from self-evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its
justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view. A final comment. We shall want to say that certain principles of justice are justified because they would be agreed to in an initial situation of equality. I have emphasized that this original position
is purely hypothetical. It is natural to ask why, if this agreement is never actually entered into, we should take any interest in these principles, moral or otherwise. The answer is that the conditions embodied in the description of the original position are ones that we do in fact accept. Or if we do not, then perhaps we can be persuaded to do so by philosophical reflection. Each aspect of the contractual situation can be given supporting grounds. Thus what we shall do is to collect together into one conception a number of conditions on principles that we are ready upon due consideration to recognize as reasonable. These constraints express what we are prepared to regard as limits on fair terms of social cooperation. One way to look at the idea or the original position, therefore, is to see it as an expository device which sums up the meaning of these conditions and helps us to extract their consequences. On the other hand, this conception is also an intuitive notion that suggests its own elaboration, so that led on by it we are drawn to define more clearly the standpoint from which we can best interpret moral relationships. We need a

conception that enables us to envision our objective from afar: the intuitive notion of the original position is to do this for us.....

Two Principles of Justice

I shall now in a provisional form the two principles of justice that I believe would be chosen in the original position. In this section I wish to make only the most general comments, and therefore the first formulation of these principles is tentative. As we go on I shall run through several formulations and approximate step by step the final statement to be given much later. I believe that doing this allows the exposition to proceed in a natural way. The first statement of the two principles read as follows.

First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others.Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a)
reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all....
By way of general comment, these principles primarily apply, as I have said, to the basic structure of society. They are to govern the assignment of rights and duties and to regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages. As their formulation suggests, these principles presuppose that the social structure can be divided into two more or less distinct parts, the first principle applying to the one, the second to the other. They distinguish between those aspects of the social system that define and secure the equal liberties of citizenship and those that specify and establish social and economic inequalities. The basic liberties of citizens are, roughly speaking, political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and
seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law. These liberties are all required to be equal by the first principle, since citizens of a just society are to have the same basic rights. The second principle applies, in the first approximation, to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organizations that make use of differences in authority and responsibility, or chains of command. While the distribution of wealth and income need not be equal, it must be to everyone's advantage, and at the same time, positions of authority and offices of command must be accessible to all. One applies the second principle by holding positions open, and then, subject to this constraint, arranges social and economic inequalities so that everyone benefits. These principles are to be arranged in a serial order with the first principle prior to the second. This ordering means that a departure from the institutions of equal liberty required by the first
principle cannot be justified by, or compensated for, by greater social and economic advantages. The distribution of wealth and income, and the hierarchies of authority, must be consistent with both the liberties of equal citizenship and equality of opportunity. It is clear that these principles are rather specific in their content, and their acceptance rests on certain assumptions that I must eventually try to explain and justify. A theory of justice depends upon a theory of society in ways that will become evident as we proceed. For the present, it should be observed that the two principles (and this holds for all formulations)are a special case
of a more general conception of justice that can be expressed as follows.
All social values – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of
self-respect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of
these values is to everyone's advantage.
Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all. Of course, this conception
is extremely vague and requires interpretation.
As a first step, suppose that the basic structure of society distributes certain primary goods, that
is, things that every rational man is presumed to want. These goods normally have a use whatever
a person's rational plan of life. For simplicity, assume that the chief primary goods at the
disposition of society are rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth.
(Later on in Part Three the primary good of self-respect has a central place.) These are the social
primary goods. Other primary goods such as health and vigor, intelligence and imagination, are
natural goods; although their possession is influenced by the basic structure, they are not so directly under its control. Imagine, then, a hypothetical initial arrangement in which all the social primary goods are equally distributed: everyone has similar rights and duties, and income and wealth are evenly shared. This state of affairs provides a benchmark for judging improvements. If certain inequalities of wealth and organizational powers would make everyone better off than in this hypothetical starting situation, then they accord with the general conception. Now it is possible, at least theoretically, that by giving up some of their fundamental liberties men are sufficiently compensated by the resulting social and economic gains. The general conception of justice imposes no restrictions on what sort of inequalities are permissible; it only
requires that everyone's position be improved. We need not suppose anything so drastic as consenting to a condition of slavery. Imagine instead that men forego certain political rights when the economic returns are significant and their capacity to influence the course of policy by the exercise of these rights would be marginal in any case. It is this kind of exchange which the two principles as stated rule out; being arranged in serial order they do not permit exchanges between basic liberties and economic and social gains. The serial ordering of principles expresses an underlying preference among primary social goods. When this preference is rational so likewise is the choice of these principles in this order. In developing justice as fairness I shall, for the most part, leave aside the general conception of justice and examine instead the special case of the two principles in serial order. The advantage of this procedure is that from the first the matter of priorities is recognized and an effort made to find principles to deal with it. One is led to attend throughout to the conditions under which the acknowledgement of the absolute weight of liberty with respect to social and economic advantages, as defined by the lexical order of the two principles, would be reasonable. Offhand, this ranking appears extreme and too special a case to be of much interest; but there is more justification for it than would appear at first sight. Or at any rate, so I shall maintain. Furthermore, the distinction between fundamental rights and liberties and economic and social benefits marks a difference among primary social goods that one should try to exploit. It suggests an important division in the social system. Of course, the distinctions drawn and the ordering proposed are bound to be at best only approximations. There are surely circumstances in which they fail. But it is essential to depict clearly the main lines of a reasonable conception of justice; and under many conditions anyway, the two principles in serial order may serve well enough. When necessary we can fall back on the more general conception.
The fact that the two principles apply to institutions has certain consequences. Several points illustrate this. First of all, the rights and liberties referred to by these principles are those which are defined by the public rules of the basic structure. Whether men are free is determined by the rights and duties established by the major institutions of society. Liberty is a certain pattern of social forms. The first principles imply requires that certain sorts of rules, those defining basic liberties, apply to everyone equally and that they allow the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all. The only reason for circumscribing the rights defining liberty and making men's freedom less extensive than it might otherwise be is that these equal rights as institutionally defined would interfere with one another. Another thing to bear in mind is that when principles mention persons, or require that everyone gain from an inequality, the reference is to representative persons holding the various social positions, or offices, or whatever, established by the basic structure. Thus in applying the second principle I assume that it is possible to assign an expectation of well-being to representative individuals holding these positions. This expectation indicates their life prospects as viewed from their social station. In general, the expectations of representative persons depend upon the distribution of rights and duties throughout the basic structure. When this changes, expectations change. I assume, then, that expectations are connected: by raising the prospects of the representative man in one position we presumably increase or decrease the prospects of representative men in other positions. Since it applies to institutional forms, the second principle (or rather the first part of it) refers to the expectations of representative individuals. As I shall discuss below, neither principle applies to distributions of particular goods to particular individuals who may be identified by their proper names. The situation where someone is considering how to allocate certain commodities to needy persons who are known to him is not within the scope of the principles. They are meant to regulate basic institutional arrangements. We must not assume that there is much similarity from the stand-point of justice between an administrative allotment of goods to specific persons and the appropriate design of society. Our common sense intuitions for the former may be a poor guide to the latter. Now the second principle insists that each person benefit from permissible inequalities in the basic structure. This means that it must be reasonable for each relevant representative man defined by this structure, when he views it as a going concern, to prefer his prospects with the inequality to his prospects without it. One is not allowed to justify differences in income or organizational powers on the ground that the disadvantages of those in one position are outweighed by the greater advantages of those in another. Much less can infringements of liberty be counterbalanced in this way. Applied to the basic structure, the principles of utility would

have us maximize the sum of expectations of representative men (weighted by the number of persons they represent, on the classical view); and this would permit us to compensate for the losses of some by the gains of others. Instead, the two principles require that everyone benefit from economic and social inequalities. ...

The Tendency to Equality

I wish to conclude this discussion of the two principles by explaining the sense in which they express an egalitarian conception of justice. Also I should like to forestall the objection to the principle of fair opportunity that it leads to a callous meritocratic society. In order to prepare the way for doing this, I note several aspects of the conception of justice that I have set out. First we may observe that the difference principle gives some weight to the considerations singled out by the principle of redress. This is the principle that undeserved inequalities call for redress; and since inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for.' Thus the principle holds that in order to treat all persons equally, to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social positions. The idea is to redress the bias of contingencies in the direction of equality. In pursuit of this principle greater
resources might be spent on the education of the less rather than the more intelligent, at least over a certain time of life, say the earlier years of school. Now the principle of redress has not to my knowledge been proposed as the sole criterion of justice, as the single aim of the social order. It is plausible almost such principles are only as a prima facie principle, one that is to be weighed in the balance with others. For example, we are to weigh it against the principle to improve the average standard of life, or to advance the common good. But whatever other principles we hold, the claims of redress are to be taken into account. It
is thought to represent one of the elements in our conception of justice. Now the difference principle is not of course the principle of redress. It does not require society to try to even out handicaps as if all were expected to compete on fair basis in the same race. But the difference principle would allocate resources in education, say, so as to improve the long-term expectation of the least favored. If this end is attained by giving more attention to the better endowed, it is permissible; other-wise not. And in making this decision, the value of education should not be assessed solely in terms of economic efficiency and social welfare. Equally if not more important is the role of education in enabling a person to enjoy the culture of his society and to take part in its affairs, and in this way to provide for each individual a secure sense of his own worth.
Thus although the difference principle is not the same as that of redress, it does achieve some of the intent of the latter principle. It transforms the aims of the basic structure so that the total scheme of institutions no longer emphasizes social efficiency and technocratic values. We see then that the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a com-mon asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be. Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out. The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less
fortunate  is well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society. But it doesn’t follow that one should eliminate these distinctions. There is another way to deal with them. The basic structure can be arranged so that these contingencies work for the good of the least fortunate. Thus we are led to the difference principle if we wish to set up the social system so that no one gains or loses from his arbitrary place in the distribution of natural assets or his initial position in society without giving or receiving compensating advantages in return. In view of these remarks we may reject the contention that the ordering of institutions is always defective because the distribution of natural talents and the contingencies of social circumstance are unjust, and this injustice must inevitably carry over to human arrangements. Occasionally this reflection is offered as an excuse for ignoring injustice, as if the
refusal to acquiesce in injustice is on a par with being unable to accept death. The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. Aristocratic and caste societies are unjust because they make these contingencies the ascriptive basis for belonging to more or less enclosed and privileged social classes. The basic structure of these societies incorporates the arbitrariness found in nature. But there is no necessity for men to resign themselves to these contingencies. The social systems not an unchangeable order beyond human control but a pattern of human action. In justice as fairness men agree to share one another's fate. In designing institutions they
undertake to avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only when doing so is for the common benefit. The two principles are a fair way of meeting the arbitrariness of fortune; and while no doubt imperfect in other ways, the institutions which satisfy these principles are just. A further point is that the difference principle expresses a conception of reciprocity. It is a principle of mutual benefit. We have seen that, at least when chain connection holds, each representative man can accept the basic structure as designed to advance his interests. The social order can be justified to everyone, and in particular to those who are least favored; and in this sense it is egalitarian. But it seems necessary to consider in an intuitive way how the condition of mutual benefit is satisfied. Consider any two representative men A and B, and let B be the one who is less favored. Actually, since we are most interested in the comparison with the
least favored man, let us assume that B is this individual. Now B can accept A's being better off since A's advantages have been gained in ways that improve B's prospects. If A were not allowed his better position, B would be even worse off than he is. The difficulty is to show that A has no grounds for complaint. Perhaps he is required to have less than he might since his having more would result in some loss to B. Now what can be said to the more favored man? To begin with, it is clear that the well-being of each depend on a scheme of social cooperation without which no one could have a satisfactory life. Secondly, we can ask for the willing cooperation of everyone only if the terms of the scheme are reasonable. The difference principle, then, seems to be a fair basis on which those better endowed, or more fortunate in their social circumstances could expect others to collaborate with them when some workable arrangement is a necessary condition of the good of all. There is a natural inclination to object that those better situated deserved their greater advantages whether or not they are to the benefit of others. Atthis point it is necessary to be clear about the notion of desert. It is perfectly true that given a just system of cooperation as a scheme of public rules and the expectations set up by it, those who, with the prospect of improving their condition, have done what the system announces that it will reward are entitled to their advantages. In this sense the more fortunate have a claim to their better situation; their claims are legitimate
expectations established by social institutions, and the community is obligated to meet them. But this sense of desert presupposes the existence of the cooperative scheme; it is irrelevant to the question whether in the first place the scheme is to be designed in accordance with the difference principle or some other criterion. Perhaps some will think that the person with greater natural endowments deserves those assets and the superior character that made their development possible. Because he is more worthy in
this sense, he deserves the greater advantages that he could achieve with them. This view, however, is surely incorrect. It seems to be one of the fixed-point of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one's initial starting place in society. The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases. Thus the more advantaged representative man cannot say that he deserves and therefore has a right to a scheme of cooperation in which he is permitted to acquire benefits in ways that do not contribute to the welfare of others. There is no basis for his making this claim. From the standpoint of common sense, then, the difference principle appears to be acceptable both to the more advantaged and to
the less advantaged individual. Of course, none of this is strictly speaking an argument for the principle, since in a contract theory arguments are made from the point of view of the original position. But these intuitive considerations help to clarify the nature of the principle and the sense in which it is egalitarian....

The Basis of Equality

I now turn to the basis of equality, the features of human beings in virtue of which they are to be treated in accordance with the principles of justice. Our conduct toward animals is not regulated by these principles, or so it is generally believed. On what grounds then do we distinguish between mankind and other living things and regard the constraints of justice as holding only in our relations to human persons? We must examine what determines the range of application of conceptions of justice. To clarify our question, we may distinguish three levels where the concept of equality applies. Theirs is to the administration of institutions as public systems of rules. In this case equality is essentially justice as regularity. It implies the impartial application and consistent interpretation of rules according to such precepts as to treat similar cases similarly (as defined by statutes and precedents) and the like. Equality at this level is the least controversial element in the common sense idea of justice. The second and much more difficult application of equality is to the substantive structure of institutions. Here the meaning of equality is specified by the principles of justice which require that equal basic rights be assigned to all persons. Presumably this excludes animals; they have some protection certainly but their status in not that of human beings. But this out-come is still unexplained. We have yet to consider what sorts of beings are owed the guarantees of justice. This brings us to the third level at which the question of equality arises. The natural answer
seems to be that it is precisely the moral persons who are entitled to equal justice. Moral persons
are distinguished by two features: first they are capable of having (and are assumed to have) a
conception of their good (as expressed by a rational plan of life); and second they are capable of
having (and are assumed to acquire) a sense of justice, a normally effective desire to apply and to
act upon the principles of justice, at least to a certain minimum degree. We use the
characterization of the persons in the original position to single out the kind of beings to whom the principles chosen apply. After all, the parties are thought of as adopting these criteria to regulate their common institutions and their conduct toward one another; and the description of their nature enters into the reasoning by which these principles are selected. Thus equal justice is owed to those who have the capacity to take part in and to act in accordance with the public understanding of the initial situation. One should observe that moral personality is here defined as a potentiality that is ordinarily realized in due course. It is this potentiality which brings the claims of justice into play. I shall return to this point below. We see, then, that the capacity for moral personality is a sufficient condition for being entitled to equal justice. Nothing beyond the essential minimum is required. Whether moral personality is also a necessary condition I shall leave aside. I assume that the capacity for a sense of justice is possessed by the overwhelming majority of mankind, and therefore this question does not raise a serious practical problem. That moral personality suffices to make one a subject of claims is the essential thing. We cannot go far
wrong in supposing that the sufficient condition is always satisfied. Even if the capacity were necessary, it would be unwise in practice to withhold justice on this ground. The risk to just institutions would be too great. It should be stressed that the sufficient conditions for equal justice, the capacity for moral personality, is not at all stringent. When someone lacks the requisite potentiality either from birth or accident, this is regarded as a defect or deprivation. There is no race or recognized group of human beings that lacks this attribute. Only scattered individuals are without this capacity, or its realization to the minimum degree, and the failure to realize it is the consequence of unjust and impoverished social circumstances, or fortuitous contingencies. Furthermore, while individuals presumably have varying capacities for a sense of justice, this fact is not a reason for depriving those with a lesser capacity of the full protection of justice. Once a certain minimum is met, a person is entitled to equal liberty on a par with
everyone else. A greater capacity for a sense of justice, as shown say in a greater skill and facility in applying the principles of justice and in marshaling arguments in particular cases, is a natural asset like any other ability. The special advantages a person receives for its exercise are to be governed by the difference principle. Thus if some have to a preeminent degree the judicial virtues of impartiality and integrity which are needed in certain positions, they may properly have whatever benefits should be attached to these offices. Yet the application of the principle of equal liberty is not affected by these differences. It is sometimes thought that basic rights and liberties should vary with capacity, but justice as fairness denies this: provided the minimum for moral personality is satisfied, a person is owed all the guarantees of justice.

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THE CONCEPT OF FORMAL ORGANIZATION

Peter M. Blau and W. Richard Scott

Social Organization and Formal Organizations. Although a wide vari-
ety of organizations exists, when we speak of an organization it is gen-
erally quite clear what we mean and what we do not mean by this
term. We may refer to the American Medical Association as an or-
ganization, or to a college fraternity; to the Bureau of Internal Rev-
enue, or to a union; to General Motors, or to a church; to the
Daughters of the American Revolution, or to an army. But we would
not call a family an organization, nor would we so designate a friend-
ship clique, or a community, or an economic market, or the political
institutions of a society. What is the specific and differentiating cri-
terion implicit in our intuitive distinction of organizations from other
kinds of social groupings or institutions? It has something to do with
how human conduct becomes socially organized, but it is not, as one
might first suspect, whether or not social controls order and organize
the conduct of individuals, since such social controls operate in both
types of circumstances.

Before specifying what is meant by formal organization, let us
clarify the general concept of social organization. "Social organization"
refers to the ways in which human conduct becomes socially organized,
that is, to the observed regularities in the behavior of people that are
due to the social conditions in which they find themselves rather than
to their physiological or psychological characteristics as individuals.
The many social conditions that influence the conduct of people can
be divided into two main types, which constitute the two basic aspects
of social organizations: (1) the structure of social relations in a group
or larger collectivity of people, and (2) the shared beliefs and orienta-
tions that unite the members of the collectivity and guide their
conduct.

The conception of structure or system implies that the component
units stand in some relation to one another and, as the popular ex-
pression "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" suggests, that
the relations between units add new elements to the situation. ¹ This
aphorism, like so many others, is a half-truth. The sum of fifteen
apples, for example, is no more than fifteen times one apple. But a
block of ice is more than the sum of the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen
that compose it. In the case of the apples, there exist no linkages or
relations between the units comprising the whole. In the case of the
ice, however, specific connections have been formed between H and O
atoms and among H ₂ O molecules that distinguish ice from hydrogen
and oxygen, on the one hand, and from water, on the other. Similarly,
a busload of passengers does not constitute a group, since no social re-
lations unify individuals into a common structure. ² But a busload of
club members on a Sunday outing is a group, because a network of
social relations links the members into a social structure, a structure
which is an emergent characteristic of the collectivity that cannot be
reduced to the attributes of its individual members. In short, a net-
work of social relations transforms an aggregate of individuals into a
group (or an aggregate of groups into a larger social structure), and
the group is more than the sum of the individuals composing it since
the structure of social relations is an emergent element that influences
the conduct of individuals.

To indicate the nature of social relations, we can briefly dissect
this concept. Social relations involve, first, patterns of social interac-
tion: the frequency and duration of the contacts between people, the
tendency to initiate these contacts, the direction of influence between
persons, the degree of cooperation, and so forth. Second, social rela-
tions entail people's sentiments to one another, such as feelings of
attraction, respect, and hostility. The differential distribution of social
relations in a group, finally, defines its status structure. Each member's
status in the group depends on his relations with the others--their
sentiments toward and interaction with him. As a result, integrated
members become differentiated from isolates, those who are widely
respected from those who are not highly regarded, and leaders from
followers. In addition to these relations between individuals within
groups, relations also develop between groups, relations that are a
source of still another aspect of social status, since the standing of the

group in the larger social system becomes part of the status of any of
its members. An obvious example is the significance that membership
in an ethnic minority, say, Puerto Rican, has for an individual's social
status.

The networks of social relations between individuals and groups,
and the status structure defined by them, constitute the core of the
social organization of a collectivity, but not the whole of it. The other
main dimension of social organization is a system of shared beliefs and
orientations, which serve as standards for human conduct. In the course
of social interaction common notions arise as to how people should act
and interact and what objectives are worthy of attainment. First,
common values crystallize, values that govern the goals for which men
strive--their ideals and their ideas of what is desirable--such as our
belief in democracy or the importance financial success assumes in our
thinking. Second, social norms develop--that is, common expectations
concerning how people ought to behave--and social sanctions are used
to discourage violations of these norms. These socially sanctioned
rules of conduct vary in significance from moral principles or mores,
as Sumner calls them, to mere customs or folkways. If values define
the ends of human conduct, norms distinguish behavior that is a
legitimate means for achieving these ends from behavior that is ille-
gitimate. Finally, aside from the norms to which everybody is expected
to conform, differential role expectations also emerge, expectations
that become associated with various social positions. Only women in
our society are expected to wear skirts, for example. Or, the respected
leader of a group is expected to make suggestions, and the other mem-
bers will turn to him in times of difficulties, whereas group members
who have not earned the respect of others are expected to refrain from
making suggestions and generally to participate little in group dis-
cussions.

These two dimensions of social organization--the networks of so-
cial relations and the shared orientations--are often referred to as the
social structure and the culture, respectively. ³ Every society has a com-
plex social structure and a complex culture, and every community
within a society can be characterized by these two dimensions of social
organization, and so can every group within a community (except that
the specific term "culture" is reserved for the largest social systems).
The prevailing cultural standards and the structure of social relations serve to organize human conduct in the collectivity. As people conform more or less closely to the expectations of their fellows, and as the degree of their conformity in turn influences their relations with others and their social status, and as their status in further turn affects their inclinations to adhere to social norms and their chances to achieve valued objectives, their patterns of behavior become socially organized.

In contrast to the social organization that emerges whenever men are living together, there are organizations that have been deliberately established for a certain purpose. ⁴ If the accomplishment of an objective requires collective effort, men set up an organization designed to coordinate the activities of many persons and to furnish incentives for others to join them for this purpose. For example, business concerns are established in order to produce goods that can be sold for a profit, and workers organize unions in order to increase their bargaining power with employers. In these cases, the goals to be achieved, the rules the members of the organization are expected to follow, and the status structure that defines the relations between them (the organizational chart) have not spontaneously emerged in the course of social interaction but have been consciously designed a priori to anticipate and guide interaction and activities. Since the distinctive characteristic of these organizations is that they have been formally established for the explicit purpose of achieving certain goals, the term "formal organizations" is used to designate them. And this formal establishment for explicit purpose is the criterion that distinguishes our subject matter from the study of social organization in general.

Formal Organization and Informal Organization. The fact that an organization has been formally established, however, does not mean that all activities and interactions of its members conform strictly to the official blueprint. Regardless of the time and effort devoted by management to designing a rational organization chart and elaborate procedure manuals, this official plan can never completely determine the conduct and social relations of the organization's members. Stephen Vincent Benét illustrates this limitation when he contrasts the military blueprint with military action:

If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks

And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them. ⁵

In every formal organization there arise informal organizations. The constituent groups of the organization, like all groups, develop their own practices, values, norms, and social relations as their members live and work together. The roots of these informal systems are embedded in the formal organization itself and nurtured by the very formality of its arrangements. Official rules must be general to have sufficient scope to cover the multitude of situations that may arise. But the application of these general rules to particular cases often poses problems of judgment, and informal practices tend to emerge that provide solutions for these problems. Decisions not anticipated by official regulations must frequently be made, particularly in times of change, and here again unofficial practices are likely to furnish guides for decisions long before the formal rules have been adapted to the changing circumstances. Moreover, unofficial norms are apt to develop that regulate performance and productivity. Finally, complex networks of social relations and informal status structures emerge, within groups and between them, which are influenced by many factors besides the organizational chart, for example by the background characteristics of various persons, their abilities, their willingness to help others, and their conformity to group norms. But to say that these informal structures are not completely determined by the formal institution is not to say that they are entirely independent of it. For informal organizations develop in response to the opportunities created and the problems posed by their environment, and the formal organization constitutes the immediate environment of the groups within it.

When we speak of formal organizations in this book, we do not mean to imply that attention is confined to formally instituted patterns; quite the contrary. It is impossible to understand the nature of a formal organization without investigating the networks of informal relations and the unofficial norms as well as the formal hierarchy of authority and the official body of rules, since the formally instituted and the informally emerging patterns are inextricably intertwined. The distinction between the formal and the informal aspects of organizational life is only an analytical one and should not be reified; there is only one actual organization. Note also that one does not speak of the informal organization of a family or of a community. The term "informal organization" does not refer to all types of emer

gent patterns of social life but only to those that evolve within the framework of a formally established organization. Excluded from our purview are social institutions that have evolved without explicit design; included are the informally emerging as well as the formally instituted patterns within formally established organizations.

The decision of the members of a group to formalize their endeavors and relations by setting up a specific organization, say, a social and athletic club, is not fortuitous. If a group is small enough for all members to be in direct social contact, and if it has no objectives that require coordination of activities, there is little need for explicit procedures or a formal division of labor. But the larger the group and the more complex the task it seeks to accomplish, the greater are the pressures to become explicitly organized. ⁶ Once a group of boys who merely used to hang around a drugstore decide to participate in the local baseball league, they must organize a team. And the complex coordination of millions of soldiers with thousands of specialized duties in a modern army requires extensive formalized procedures and a clear-cut authority structure.

Since formal organizations are often very large and complex, some authors refer to them as "large-scale" or as "complex" organizations. But we have eschewed these terms as misleading in two respects. First, organizations vary in size and complexity, and using these variables as defining criteria would result in such odd expressions as "a small largescale organization" or "a very complex complex organization." Second, although formal organizations often become very large and complex, their size and complexity do not rival those of the social organization of a modern society, which includes such organizations and their relations with one another in addition to other nonorganizational patterns. (Perhaps the complexity of formal organizations is so much emphasized because it is man-made whereas the complexity of societal organization has slowly emerged, just as the complexity of modern computers is more impressive than that of the human brain. Complexity by design may be more conspicuous than complexity by growth or evolution.)

The term "bureaucratic organization," which also is often used, calls attention to the fact that organizations generally possess some sort of administrative machinery. In an organization that has been formally established, a specialized administrative staff usually exists that is responsible for maintaining the organization as a going concern and for coordinating the activities of its members. Large and complex organizations require an especially elaborate administrative apparatus. In a large factory, for example, there is not only an industrial work

force directly engaged in production but also an administration composed of executive, supervisory, clerical, and other staff personnel. The case of a government agency is more complicated, because such an agency is part of the administrative arm of the nation. The entire personnel of, say, a law-enforcement agency is engaged in administration, but administration of different kinds; whereas operating officials administer the law and thereby help maintain social order in the society, their superiors and the auxiliary staff administer agency procedures and help maintain the organization itself.

One aspect of bureaucratization that has received much attention is the elaboration of detailed rules and regulations that the members of the organization are expected to faithfully follow. Rigid enforcement of the minutiae of extensive official procedures often impedes effective operations. Colloquially, the term "bureaucracy" connotes such rule-encumbered inefficiency. In sociology, however, the term is used neutrally to refer to the administrative aspects of organizations. If bureaucratization is defined as the amount of effort devoted to maintaining the organization rather than to directly achieving its objectives, all formal organizations have at least a minimum of bureaucracy --even if this bureaucracy involves no more than a secretary-treasurer who collects dues. But wide variations have been found in the degree of bureaucratization in organizations, as indicated by the amount of effort devoted to administrative problems, the proportion of administrative personnel, the hierarchical character of the organization, or the strict enforcement of administrative procedures and rigid compliance with them.

 

 

The Organization and Its Publics

By Peter Michael Blau, W. Richard Scott

Formal organizations are associated with diverse publics. There is the larger society which permits the organization to operate (if only by default, as in the case of criminal organizations). There is the population of the society in its capacity as a pool of potential members. There are the other organizations with whom the organization competes, cooperates, or enters into various exchange relationships. There are, finally, two special publics which should be distinguished: the public in-contact, with whom or on whom the organization's members work, and the public served. Only in service organizations are the two identical, constituting the clientele--recipients of public welfare, students, or patients are both worked with and served by the organization.

What are the publics-in-contact in the other types of formal organizations? In business concerns, the main public-in-contact is, of course, the customer. While customers receive a service, they must look after their own interests; in this respect they differ decidedly from the clients of service organizations. In mutual-benefit associations the public-in-contact and acted on is those on whom depend the benefits sought by the membership. Thus, in the case of unions, the major public acted on is management, since negotiations with management are needed to improve the situation of the union members. In a like manner, the public-in-contact of the political lobby is the legislature, on whose action the lobby's success depends. In commonweal organizations the public-in-contact is frequently some source of danger to the community. In the interests of serving the larger public, these organizations must have direct contact with such threatening and disreputable elements as law violators, prisoners, and enemy soldiers. ¹

Many organizations have several publics-in-contact. For example, business concerns relate directly to customers, to suppliers of needed materials, to unions, to the government, and to other groups. The internal organization of such concerns frequently reflects these basic divisions; thus, an enterprise will have a sales department, a department concerned with purchasing, a labor-relations department, and a

legal branch to deal with government regulations. Some of the internal organizational conflicts which develop between departments result from their orientation toward different publics.

Which level in the organizational hierarchy deals with the major public-in-contact varies greatly. In unions, for example, it is the top level: leaders negotiate with management. But in prisons, it is the bottom level: guards have direct contact with inmates. Two main factors appear to determine the hierarchical level from which are selected the organization's representatives who work with a given public. The smaller the number of these representatives (compared to the entire organization), and the higher the status and power of the public with whom they deal, the higher will be their relative standing in the organization.

This chapter is broadly concerned with various aspects of the relations between organization members and their publics. In the first part we shall discuss the orientations of officials, concentrating on the contrast between professional and bureaucratic orientations. While these orientations have relevance for many aspects of organizational life, they are of particular importance in service organizations, where they vitally affect the worker-client relation. Following this discussion, we shall concentrate directly on the public itself and examine its orientation, its organization, and the repercussions of official-client relations on the social structures in formal organizations.

PROFESSIONAL AND BUREAUCRATIC ORIENTATION

Similarities and Contrasts. The professional form of occupational life and the bureaucratic form of organizational administration are two institutional patterns that are prevalent today and that in many ways typify modern societies. Professional principles share many elements with bureaucratic ones, but include some that are not common. Let us briefly survey the underlying characteristics of professionalism and compare them to those of bureaucratic organization, focusing on principles rather than on specific practices.

First, professional decisions and actions are governed by universalistic standards; that is, they are based on certain objective criteria which are independent of the particular case under consideration. These principles rest upon and are derived from a body of specialized knowledge, such as the science of medicine, and practice consists of applying these principles with appropriate skill to particular cases. The mastering of this body of knowledge and the acquiring of appropriate skills requires a period of specialized training. The character of bureaucratic administration does not differ greatly in this respect. Bureaucratic operations are also governed by abstract principles and consist

of the application of these principles to particular cases. Although the period of training for professionals is generally longer than that required of bureaucrats and contains some unique features, to be discussed presently, bureaucrats too undergo a period of technical training and indoctrination to qualify for their positions.

A second characteristic of professionalism is the specificity of professional expertness. The trained professional is a specialized expert qualified to deal with problems in a strictly limited area; he makes no claim to generalized wisdom--he is neither sage nor wise man. The practitioner's authority over his clients rests on their confidence in his expertness in some specific area; he enjoys no authority outside that sphere. In the interests of good health, for instance, the physician can tell his patient what he should eat, but he cannot tell him with authority what friends to choose. Contrast the limited authority exercised by the professional over his clients with the diffuse authority exercised by the parent over his children. The principle of specificity applies with equal force to the bureaucrat; in his case, too, specialization is the key to expertness, and the essence of bureaucracy is circumscribed authority.

Third, the professional's relations with clients are characterized by affective neutrality. Professional codes of ethics condemn emotional involvement with the client. These norms protect the client from being emotionally exploited and the practitioner from being torn apart by sympathy for his troubled clients. In addition, detachment insulates the professional so that he may exercise reasoned judgment. The relations between bureaucrats and clients are also marked by such impersonal detachment, with similar ends being served.

Fourth, professional status is achieved by an individual's performance, not ascribed to him because of some qualities he cannot change, such as sex or birth order. The professional's success rests upon outstanding performance in accordance with the principles laid down by his colleague group. In a similar manner, the bureaucrat is appointed to a position because of his technical qualifications rather than because of who he is or what connections he has, and his career advancement is governed by objective and explicit official criteria.

A fifth element in professionalism, essential to protect the welfare of dependent and vulnerable clients, is that professional decisions must not be based on the practitioner's self-interest, whereas in business life self-interests are expected to govern decisions. This difference does not mean that professionals are less selfish than businessmen, or less interested in economic advancement. It means that while each party to a business transaction is assumed, by the other and by the community, to act strictly in terms of his own interests, it is not legitimate for a professional to let his decisions as to what services to render be influenced by self-interest. If he does, the condemnation and thesanctions of his colleagues and of the community will hurt his interests in the long run. Thus, the structure of a profession tends to make the practitioner's own interests dependent on his serving the interests of his clients to the best of his abilities. Businessmen, on the other hand, are not condemned for acting in terms of their own interests. Moral disapproval attaches to the surgeon who recommends an appendectomy when the patient does not need one, but not to the auto or appliance salesman who recommends the super-deluxe model although the customer does not need the extra trim. ² Another aspect of this principle is that the nature of the services the professional renders to his clients is presumed to depend on their need and not their ability to pay; whereas the kinds of services rendered by a business to its customers depend, of course, on what they can afford to purchase.

In contrast to the first four principles, this fifth one is not characteristic of all formal organizations but only of certain types. Lack of self-interest is not expected to govern the operations of business concerns or of mutual-benefit associations, but it is expected of commonweal organizations and, particularly, of service organizations. As a matter of fact, the conditions for realizing this principle are probably more favorable for professionals working in service organizations than for professionals working outside this organizational context. The traditional practitioner in the free professions is not only a professional but also a businessman who makes a living by collecting fees from clients. His economic dependence on clients comes into conflict with the requirement to set self-interest aside in rendering service to them. For example, a physician's need to earn a livelihood puts pressure on him not to devote all his time to clients who are too poor to pay for his services. The salaried professional in the service organization is free of this pressure, and the organization supported by community or philanthropic funds is not dependent on fees from clients either. These conditions would seem to be more conducive to promoting disinterested service.

A final characteristic of the professions is their distinctive control structure, which is fundamentally different from the hierarchical control exercised in bureaucratic organizations. Professionals typically organize themselves into voluntary associations for the purpose of selfcontrol. As Goode explains, "the larger society has obtained an indirect social control by yielding direct social control to the professional community, which thus can make judgments according to its own norms." ³ Professional control appears to have two sources. First, as a result of the long period of training undergone by the practitioner, he is expected to have acquired a body of expert knowledge and to have internalized a code of ethics which governs his professional conduct. Second, this self control is supported by the external surveillance of his conduct by peers, who are in a position to see his work, who have the skills to judge his performance, and who, since they have a personal stake in the reputation of their profession, are motivated to exercise the necessary sanctions. Professionals in a given field constitute a colleague group of equals. Every member of the group, but nobody else, is assumed to be qualified to make professional judgments. To implement these values, professional organizations usually seek to have them enacted into laws establishing the exclusive jurisdiction of the organized colleague group in a given area of competence and granting it the right to license practitioners. The medical profession, for example, enjoys such a mandate in the area of healing; psychologists are now seeking legislation to obtain the right to license psychological counselors and testers, and even other practices in which their expertise is more questionable.

It is clear that this type of control structure differs greatly from that employed in bureaucratic organizations. The source of discipline within a bureaucracy is not the colleague group but the hierarchy of authority. Performance is controlled by directives received from one's superiors rather than by self-imposed standards and peer-group surveillance, as is the case among professionals. This difference in social control, which is related to that between expertness and discipline discussed in Chapter II, constitutes the basic distinguishing feature between professional and bureaucratic institutions, which have otherwise many similar characteristics. The significance of this difference is brought into sharp relief if one examines people who are subject to both forms of social control; that is, professionals in a bureaucracy.

 

The Social Structure of Work Group

PETER M. BLAU and RICHARD SCOTT

Looking back over the past several decades, one can note progressive changes in the focus of industrial research. Much of the empirical research on workers in industrial organizations has been motivated by an interest in practical problems of productivity. Earlier studies were chiefly concerned with physiological and economic factors relating to production. Researchers probed the nature of fatigue, experimented with pay incentive schemes, and examined the efficiency of worker efforts by means of meticulous time-and-motion studies. Taylor and his followers in "scientific management" attempted to dissect manual tasks in the hope of improving output by training workers to eliminate all body movements that were not essential, and they searched in vain for a set of "basic" activities to which all work behavior could be reduced. ¹ As it became evident that scientific management's conception of workers as rational machines could not adequately account for their behavior, because it ignored the influence of sentiments and values, attention turned increasingly toward research on the underlying psychological processes that influence production. This psychological focus is best exemplified in studies of worker morale. But the morale of workers was found to depend at least as much upon the interrelations of the worker with his colleagues as upon his individual needs and dispositions. Hence, the recent trend has been away from an exclusive concern with the individual and toward an interest in the social factors in the work situation, beginning with the "human relations" approach in industry and expanding to include systematic research on the social structure of work groups.

These Shifts in the focus of industrial research are rooted in changes in the organization of industry and in managerial ideology. ² The development from small- to large-scale industrial enterprises has

been accompanied by a corresponding shift in the ideological justification advanced for managerial authority. In the days of the small shop, it could be argued with some plausibility that hard work and superior ability led to success, and the ideological assumption that the entrepreneur had demonstrated superior ability served to legitimate his authority over employees. But as industrial concerns grew in size and complexity, advancing within them rather than establishing a factory of one's own became increasingly the major avenue of success. With the development of the modern large-scale enterprise, moreover, the abilities the worker has occasion to demonstrate have ceased to lead to managerial success, since the latter depends on entirely different skills--not technical ones but skills in coordination, that is, skills in dealing with relations between people. The ideology consequently no longer glorifies primarily the old Puritan values of hard work and thrift, or even the later ones of entrepreneurial drive, but the new ones of personality salesmanship--of the ability to handle human relations effectively. The admonition "build a better mousetrap . . ." has changed into advice on "how to win friends and [that is, in order to] influence people." The idealized concept of the industrial organization as a "pyramid of opportunity" where advancement in a bureaucratic career is open to all who have the required social skills has replaced in large measure the earlier idealized concept of an industrial environment where every technically able employee could open up his own business some day. The problems of industry have come to be viewed in terms of human relations rather than in individual terms because "from the standpoint of the individual these techniques became a means of career advancement; from the standpoint of management they seemed to facilitate the coordination of a growing and increasingly specialized staff." ³ And this trend is reflected in parallel changes in research focus.

While the human-relations approach to industrial research assumes a more sociological perspective than its predecessors, it still is not adequate for the systematic study of social structure. It does avoid the atomization of work groups into their individual members and thus overcomes a limitation of most morale surveys. But the humanrelations approach does not avoid a second pitfall: it tends to atomize the human relations in work groups by treating them as if they were attributes of individual group members, and it consequently ignores the organized network of social relations that characterizes group structures. This distinction may be illustrated by considering the relations between workers on an assembly line. Assembly-line workers, like others, establish friendly relations with co-workers nearby. But since they are strung out along the line, each person's set of interpersonal

relations is different: a given worker will have contacts with workers on each side of him and with workers across the line, while his neighbor's contacts will include some of the same men, but not all, and will extend to others not included in the first worker's range of contacts. ⁴ On such an assembly line, therefore, we typically find human relations among workers but no work groups, since individuals are not involved in a common network of social relations set off from others by distinct boundaries. There are no definite subgroups within the larger collectivity with which workers can identify, and there are no subgroup norms defining common standards of conduct. In contrast to the assembly line, which inhibits the formation of work groups in the above sense, most industrial situations promote their formation. The study of the distinctive significance of group structure requires going beyond the human-relations approach to consider the networks of human relations and the common values which unite group members.

INFORMAL ORGANIZATION

A Pioneering Study. No single research has exerted more influence on the direction taken by students of industrial organization than the study carried out by Roethlisberger and Dickson in the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Chicago. ⁵ A set of early experiments conducted in this plant had focused on the effects of varying degrees of illumination on worker productivity. ⁶ The first of these involved three different departments. When illumination was regularly increased, productivity increased in two of the three departments, but the increases were not parallel to the changes in illumination. A second study divided workers in one department into an experimental and a control group, with illumination being increased in the former and held constant in the latter; production increased in both of the two groups. A third study decreased illumination in the experimental group; again productivity of workers increased until the illumination had been reduced to a point where operators could no longer see their work. The conclusion seemed inescapable that the improved productivity noted was not due to increased illumination. The experimenters pointed out that many relevant conditions--including social ones-had not been controlled. Apparently what was involved in these strik

ing changes was that groups of workers routinely engaged in monotonous tasks were singled out for attention by management and by the researchers. This attention gave them a feeling of importance and made their jobs more interesting, and their consequent greater work satisfaction led them inadvertently to work faster.

Roethlisberger and Dickson, however, did not go so far in their interpretation at this point. They suggested only that the failure of the illumination experiments provided a stimulus for research in human relations and proceeded to set up the Relay Assembly Test Room. ⁷ Six girls were placed in a separate room (after their regular rate of production had been measured for two weeks prior to the transfer) where rest periods and other conditions, such as length of working day, could be varied. The experiment continued for more than a year. Regardless of the particular experimental variation in rest pauses introduced throughout the several phases of this experiment, the general course of the girls' productivity was upward. Several hypotheses were advanced to explain these surprising findings. For example, one possible explanation considered was that productivity increases were due to a reduction in fatigue produced by rest pauses. However, the productivity records for individual workers did not reveal the patterns that previous research had identified with fatigue, and hence this explanation was rejected. A second hypothesis was that the results obtained were due to changes made in the wage incentive factor. ⁸ To test this hypothesis, a second group of relay assembly workers were left in their regular work room but put on the same group incentive rate as that in the Test Room. Production increased in this group but far less than in the first group, a result the experimenters interpreted as indicating that although changes in earnings were important they did not account for all of the changes in productivity. Other explanations of the increase in productivity were similarly examined and dismissed. The conclusion finally arrived at was that increased productivity was a function of improved human relations. The entire social situation had been altered in ways that fostered friendly relations among workers. In addition, the supervision of workers had been taken over by the researchers who, in the interests of maintaining worker cooperation in the experiments, were very informal and nondirective in their approach.

Such findings as these led Mayo to reexamine some of his conclusions in an earlier study of a mule-spinning department in a textile

mill. ⁹ Mayo had been called to this mill in 1923 because of the extremely high turnover in the spinning department. He introduced rest periods, and when this change led to improved productivity and lower turnover, he concluded that the rest period relieved postural fatigue induced by work and interrupted the pessimistic revery of workers. Later, however, he decided that the results obtained could better be interpreted in social rather than physiological terms. The workers gained status as they discussed their problems with researchers and company officials. Besides, and this change is most important, the men had been transformed from "a horde of 'solitaries' into a social group" as they consulted together on the setting of rest periods and used this free time for socializing. ¹⁰

As the Hawthorne studies continued, an increasing awareness of the significance of social relations for worker morale led the investigators to decide to observe the behavior of a group functioning under normal circumstances rather than attempt to manipulate work conditions experimentally. An observer was placed in a room with 14 workers selected from a larger department; since the workers were engaged in wiring banks of telephone equipment the study came to be known as the Bank Wiring Observation Room. ¹¹ It soon became apparent that there were uniformities in the behavior of the group under observation that did not follow the formal organization's blueprint. Informal relations developed among the men and gave rise to organized patterns of conduct in the group--that is, there was an informal organization.

The observer painstakingly recorded the overt manifestations of the network of informal relations that developed among the workers. There were distinct patterns of interaction: some workers frequently helped out certain others; games were regularly played at lunchtime which included some workers but not others. Sentiments of liking and respect were expressed primarily toward some group members, while others were not respected and were disliked. These observable aspects of their informal relations divided the workers into two cliques and a few isolates who were not members of either clique. It was among members of the same clique that most friendship ties developed, most games were played, and even most lunchtime conversations took place. While there was some conflict between cliques, there were social bonds that united the entire group and made possible the enforcement of common norms.

What group norms were there to enforce? In the course of interaction a set of common rules of conduct emerged, which included the following prohibitions: Don't be a rate-buster by working too fast. Don't be a chiseler by working too slow. If you are a straw boss, act like a regular guy; don't try to get bossy. Don't be a squealer. Conformity to norms was rewarded by approval that bestowed a relatively high position in the informal status structure. Norm violations were punished by group members in a variety of ways. Minor violations might be met with "binging"--striking the offender on the upper arm --or with ridicule. Continued violation of important norms resulted in a loss of popularity, a reduction in social interaction, and ultimately in complete ostracism. One worker was isolated because he violated the most serious group norm: he "squealed" on his fellows to the foreman.

Group norms also defined "a fair day's work," and this productivity standard fell below the level that management deemed desirable. These norms are discusssed by the authors under the label "restriction of output"; but this emphasis seems one-sided, since the norms discouraged overly low as well as excessively high production. ¹² It is true, however, that workers guided by their informal standard of a fair day's work made less money than they could have. The fastest workers simply stopped working earlier than others to conform to group norms. And workers would discourage a fellow worker from working faster than the unofficial norm even though his output would increase their pay under the group incentive system. Such behavior seems irrational. But what is irrational depends on one's objectives. The workers' conduct can be considered irrational only if maximizing immediate income is assumed to be their sole objective, and this was not the sole objective.

The common objectives of these workers are implicit in the functions of their output norms. First, these norms allowed workers to increase their control over the environment and lessen their dependence on management. The workers were afraid that increased productivity would result in a cut in their piece rates, and although Roethlisberger and Dickson insist that none of the workers "had ever experienced any of the things they claimed they were guarding against" because Western Electric did not engage in such practices, ¹³ the workers had no assurance of this safety. Piece rates had been cut in other

companies, ¹⁴ and management had signed no contract with workers guaranteeing wage rates, there being no union at this time in the company. The workers' endeavor to control output was hardly irrational in these circumstances; indeed, it would have been irrational for workers to put their faith in the good will of management. The rational course was for the workers to take collective action in order to maintain productivity below the level that might tempt management to cut rates.

Norms controlling worker output also served the function of increasing job security for workers. The central objective of the workers was not maximizing their current income but attempting to keep their jobs so that they would have some income. For this study was conducted during the depths of the great depression. Millions of persons in the country were unemployed, there had been many layoffs at Hawthorne, and, in fact, the Bank Wiring Room study itself had to be discontinued because so many workers were laid off. ¹⁵ Thus, quite independent of possible changes in piece rates, an increase in productivity would have forced management to lay off workers in a depression if it were to act rationally. It would seem that restricting productivity was the most rational course open to workers to prevent layoffs.

A third function of informal output controls was to strengthen group solidarity by preventing competitive conflicts among workers. In the depression, each worker had strong incentives to keep his job. Roethlisberger and Dickson state that all but one of the workers participating in the study were in "very poor financial condition and if they were unemployed could not escape public support for long." ¹⁶ These circumstances could easily have led to cut-throat competition among the workers, each attempting to demonstrate that he, rather than his fellows, should be retained on the job because of his superior performance. The consequent conflicts would have torn the group apart and made the work situation most unpleasant had not norms controlling output maintained group solidarity by discouraging such rivalry. Given the situation in which workers found themselves, therefore, it appears that norms regulating the output of each worker were highly functional in protecting the interests of the entire group--they were rational means for this end.

Informal Organization and Performance. Although the depression gave workers in the Bank Wiring Room a special incentive for controlling output, such adverse economic conditions are not necessary for the development of group norms regulating production. For example, Babchuk and Goode report a situation where a sales group developed a quota system that equalized sales volume for each member although management had established a commission arrangement encouraging competition among salesmen. ¹⁷ This unofficial system lessened competition among salesmen, improved their performance in nonsales areas, raised morale, and increased total group sales. A study by Roy of a group of workers in a machine shop also deals with regulation of output. ¹⁸ Roy's role as participant observer gave him access to practices that might well have been concealed from an outsider. Thus, he found that although workers deliberately restricted their rate of production, they often engaged in output races with one another. Such competitive games were concealed from management and did not affect the level of productivity since they were compensated for by goldbricking. Apparently, workers enjoy proving their skills through excellent performance and even relish competition among themselves; but they do so only when the stake in competition is limited and does not place in jeopardy the worker's earning power or his job. While quota restrictions give the workers collectively some self-determination over the conditions of their employment, they do so at the social cost of preventing the workers' pride in their skills and enjoyment of limited competition from making a contribution to operating efficiency. These conclusions imply that official procedures instituted by management to assure the employment security of workers might well improve operating efficiency; for they would obviate the need for informal regulation of output by workers and, thereby, free the inclinations of workers to strive to excel in their work.

The informal organization may contribute to as well as impede effective operations in the formal organization. It has already been mentioned that worker norms controlling production usually discourage too slow as well as too rapid work. Another important mechanism linking the formal and informal organization is the informal reward system. Among persons identified with their craft or profession, there is a tendency to look up to colleagues who are particularly expert in occupational skills. The respect and the popularity that such workers frequently enjoy are rewards for outstanding performance,

and the promise of informal status serves as an incentive to workers for becoming more skilled in their work. An association between competence and informal status has been observed in various kinds of work groups. For example, competence, as judged by the supervisor, was positively associated with being respected by colleagues in both the City and the County welfare agencies. The same positive relationship between competence and informal status among colleagues was found in an earlier study of a law-enforcement agency. ¹⁹ On the other hand, Homans concludes from a secondary analysis of the Bank Wiring Room data and other sources that high informal status goes with modal productivity, not with outstanding performance. ²⁰ Other studies also have found that modal producers enjoy the highest informal status in work groups whose norms restrict productivity, because in these conditions the overproducers as well as the underproducers are penalized by loss of respect or even rejection. ²¹ It appears that the relationship between informal status and performance is contingent on work group norms: only if the expert exercise of skills is a dominant value in the group does high status tend to be associated with superior performance and to serve as an incentive promoting it; if the dominant norm standardizes productivity, high status is associated with modal performance. ²²

The cohesion of work groups often furthers operations. For example, cohesion has been shown to raise worker satisfaction and to lower turnover and absenteeism. ²³ Cohesion also provides social support for workers; thus, it can neutralize the disturbing effects of conflicts with clients, as was noted in Chapter III. But the direct effects of cohesion on performance appear to be more variable. The findings of some studies suggest that cohesion promotes productivity. For instance, research on such varied groups as clerks, railroad employees, and factory workers found that workers in high-producing groups had greater pride in the accomplishment of their work groups (which may be considered an indication of cohesion) than did workers in low-

producing groups. ²⁴ The researchers admit that the causal direction of the two variables measured is not clear, since a positive evaluation of the group's accomplishment may be either a cause or an effect of high productivity. However, they opt for the former because the workers had no objective information on their productivity as a group.

But other studies do not confirm this conclusion. For example, an experiment found that cohesion had no direct effect on productivity, ²⁵ and so did a field study by Seashore of 228 work groups in a factory. ²⁶ Both report, however, some indirect relationships between cohesiveness and productivity. Thus, Seashore did find, as he had predicted, that members of high-cohesion groups showed less variation in productivity than did members in low-cohesion groups, a datum which indicates that cohesion is associated with conformity to group standards. He also found that there was more variability in productivity between groups with high cohesion than between less cohesive ones. Finally, if the members of a highly cohesive group felt secure in their relations to the company, productivity tended to be high, but if they did not, it tended to be low. These findings suggest that cohesiveness increases the controlling power of the group over its members but that the direction in which this control is exercised--whether toward higher or lower productivity--is determined by other factors, such as the group's orientation to the organization. ²⁷

Informal Status. Informal status is not a unitary concept. Several dimensions of status have been identified, including power, prestige, and popularity. The various aspects of status are often but not always correlated. ²⁸ One basic analytical distinction can be made at this point

between two dimensions of social status in work groups: informal rank and social integration. An individual's informal rank is defined by the respect he and his opinions command among his fellows, and their consequent tendency to defer to him in social interaction. Rank is a hierarchical concept and refers to the relative standing of the members of the group. Integration is defined by social acceptance in a group, which is reflected in the degree to which an individual is drawn into interaction by his fellows. Although the integration of various members in a group often differs, it does not necessarily differ since all the members of a group may be highly integrated, or none may be. Thus, while rank is by definition a scarce commodity, integration is not and may be enjoyed by all group members, as is the case in highly cohesive groups.

We have already noted that the relationship between informal status and performance depends on the values and norms that prevail in a work group, and in a later section we shall analyze in greater detail the connection between informal status and group pressure. But let us now examine the implications of informal status for a person's orientation to others in the work situation--to his clients and to his colleagues. Caseworkers from the City Agency (which is described in the Appendix) were classified as being either primarily concerned with checking client eligibility for assistance in accordance with agency procedures (procedure oriented) or as chiefly interested in providing casework service to clients (service oriented). This distinction is based on each worker's description of how he had spent a day in the field visiting clients. ²⁹ Social integration among colleagues, whether it was measured by popularity (number of friendship choices received) or by informal acceptance (being called by one's first name by other workers), was found to influence worker orientation, but only among the newer workers (see Table 6 ). Among workers with less than

TABLE 6. SENIORITY, INFORMAL ACCEPTANCE, AND ORIENTATION TO CLIENTS

	Seniority
Orientation to Clients	More than 3 Years Informal Acceptance		Three Years or Less Informal Acceptance
	High	Low	High	Low
Service oriented	50%	50%	54%	22%
N (= 100%)	10	8	24	18

____________________

three years' experience, more than half of the highly integrated but less than a quarter of the unintegrated were oriented toward service rather than toward eligibility procedures, but among oldtimers (over three years' seniority), integration among peers did not affect orientation to clients. These findings can be interpreted by assuming that one factor that discourages casework service, although not the only one, is lack of familiarity with agency procedures, because it engenders anxieties that often find expression in rigid conformity with procedures. Several years of experience free workers from being preoccupied with procedures and thus make it easier for them to go beyond checking eligibility and provide some casework service. Half of the experienced workers did not provide much casework service, to be sure, but presumably the reason was that they were not interested in doing so rather than that anxious concern with procedures impeded their ability to do so. Social support from colleagues apparently relieves the anxieties typically associated with lack of experience, with the result that inexperienced workers who were integrated among peers were just as likely to furnish casework services as experienced workers. Only those workers whose anxieties were minimized neither by experience nor by social support were less inclined to provide such services. ³⁰

Now let us consider how informal status may affect relationships with colleagues. Caudill has shown that both formal and informal rank were related to participation in staff conferences in a private mental hospital. ³¹ With regard to formal position, senior doctors tended to participate most in the discussions concerning patients, residents were next highest in participation, and nurses and auxiliary workers, such as occupational therapists, participated least. Informal status rankings had an analogous effect on participation: the amount of participation of the various residents was directly associated with their competence as evaluated by their seniors and presumably with the respect they enjoyed among their colleagues. ³² Moreover, the outcome of a discussion varied according to the status of the individual raising the topic:

on topics introduced by a senior doctor only 8 per cent of the discussions were inconclusive, whereas 14 per cent of the topics raised by residents and 21 per cent of the topics raised by nurses resulted in inconclusive discussions. Caudill notes that this situation evoked a sense of frustration among lower-status personnel.

How does a worker's standing among his colleagues influence his reference-group orientation? Data from City Agency again indicate that seniority in the agency was a crucial factor intervening between status and reference group. Workers were considered to define colleagues as their major reference group at work if they said that it was more important to them to be highly thought of by fellow workers than by their clients or by their supervisor. The pattern exhibited by the data in Table 7 was similar whether popularity, respect, or being

TABLE 7. SENIORITY, POPULARITY, AND REFERENCE GROUP

Reference Group	Seniority
	More than 1 Year Popularity		One Year or Less Popularity
	High	Low	High	Low
Colleagues	38%	15%	0%	41%
N (= 100%)	26	13	4	17

often consulted by colleagues was used to measure informal status. ³³ Among newcomers (workers with less than one year of service) low status was associated with an orientation to peers, but among workers in the agency longer than one year high status was associated with a peer-group orientation. ³⁴ It appears that newcomers who have already gained some popularity can turn their attention from their colleague group to concentrate on other problem areas associated with their jobs-their relations with clients and superiors. Newcomers who have not yet become popular continue to direct much of their energies toward achieving social status among peers. Older workers, on the other hand, have had time to adapt in some way to the social situation; if they have failed to win friends among peers they do not continue to look for social support to their colleagues but rather turn to clients or superiors. If oldtimers have achieved popularity, however, the colleague group tends to

be an important source of satisfactions for them and, hence, the reference group to which they often are oriented. In other words, it seems that unpopular workers lost interest in being highly thought of by colleagues over time (from 41 to 15 per cent), whereas popular workers became increasingly oriented to colleagues as their reference group with the passage of time (from zero to 38 per cent). ³⁵

Status relations are not confined to individual workers; groups also differ in status. The status of work groups is generally associated with their position in the organizational hierarchy. The standing of the groups to which a person belongs is one aspect of his own status, particularly in his outgroup relations, as is illustrated by the high informal ranks of the engineer who is part of management and of the secretary to the top executive. Changes in the wage structure may alter the relative standing of work groups; they therefore become a source of intergroup conflict. Whyte reports a controversy arising between work groups when the introduction of an incentive system in one department improved the take-home pay of a group of young machine operators. The older workers immediately demanded improvements in their incentive systems, transfers to better jobs, and other changes in an attempt to reinstate the former differential in their favor. ³⁶ Both unions and management are continually faced with problems caused by changes that upset the established status order of work groups. Much of the resistance to change encountered in organizations is due to the disturbance which the proposed innovation would produce in the status structure.

EFFECTS OF GROUP STRUCTURE

Group Climate. The group climate or subculture is defined by the values and norms that prevail among group members. It is often asserted that the prevailing group climate influences individual conduct. But how do we know that the observed conduct is really the result of social pressures, since the individual may simply act in terms of his own attitudes and values? How can we distinguish between the influence of individual attitudes on behavior and the social constraints effected by group values and norms? To answer this question we must distinguish

two effects of group climate. First, the group climate can change the attitudes of individual members. We can observe this effect by noting the changes in attitude that occur in an individual after he joins a group, or we can infer such changes by comparing the attitudes of newcomers and of oldtimers as we did in the previous section. Second, and this effect is what concerns us now, the prevailing attitudes in the group can influence a group member's conduct regardless of his own attitudes. To isolate this type of structural effect, it is necessary to separate the external influence of group pressure from the internal influence of the individual's own orientation. ³⁷ (The latter may have been brought by the individual to the group when he joined it, or it may be the result of earlier group pressure which he has internalized.)

The method used to separate structural effects from those of personality attributes can be demonstrated with data from City Welfare Agency. Twelve work groups were divided according to their prevailing group climate: groups where the majority of members favored a raise in the assistance allowance without qualification were considered to exhibit a proclient climate; work groups in which the majority of the members were opposed to raising the allowance or who tempered their endorsement by various qualifications were considered to have an anticlient atmosphere. (The alternative of lowering the assistance allowance was not favored by any caseworker.) Within these groups individuals were divided according to their attitudes toward raising assistance, using the same measure. In this manner it is possible to ascertain what effects of a proclient atmosphere on the individual's acting and thinking are independent of his own orientation, as the data presented in Table 8 illustrate. ³⁸

The first row of percentages in Table 8 indicates the significance of proclient values for service to clients. Proclient individuals were somewhat more apt than anticlient individuals to extend casework services to clients rather than merely to check their eligibility for assistance (compare individuals with different attitudes within groups). But regardless of the individual's orientation, he was more apt to render services to clients if he was in a group where proclient values prevailed than if he was in an anticlient group climate (note the difference between the first and third column, and that between the second and fourth column). The combined effect of group and individual values

TABLE 8. GROUP CLIMATE, INDIVIDUAL'S
ORIENTATION, AND ATTITUDES

Attitudes toward Clients	Group Climate
	Proclient Individual's Orientation		Anticlient Individual's Orientation
	Proclient	Anticlient	Proclient	Anticlient
Service orientation	60%	44%	44%	27%
Willing to delegate responsibility	55%	78%	33%	50%
Worry little about cases	25%	56%	11%	32%
N (= 100%)	20	9	9	22

on service orientation was considerable: 60 per cent of the proclient individuals in proclient groups were service oriented, in contrast to only 27 per cent of the anticlient individuals in anticlient groups.

These data suggest that a worker's orientation influences not only his own performance but also his reaction to the performance of other workers in his group. If a proclient orientation prevails in a group, then the individual who merely checks client eligibility without providing casework services experiences disapproval, whereas the individual who provides services to clients earns the approval of his colleagues. The desire for social approval thus constrains workers in proclient groups to provide casework services to clients regardless of their own orientations to clients. In groups where the prevailing social climate is anticlient, social pressure works in the opposite direction, and the individual is socially rewarded for carefully checking eligibility but not for furnishing casework services. It is in this way that social processes--the distribution and direction of sanctions in interaction-exert an influence on a worker's approach that is independent of his own orientation to clients.

In respect to service orientation, the effect of a proclient group climate was in the same direction as that of proclient individual attitudes, and the two reinforced one another. But this reinforcement does not necessarily occur. The structural effect of the common value orientation in a group may be the reverse of the influence of the individual's internalized value orientation. This situation is presented by the data in the two lower rows of Table 8. The measure of willingness to delegate responsibility to clients is whether or not workers said that clothing should be made a regular part of the client's budget. At the time of

the study, recipients of public assistance at City Agency received a regular allowance for food and rent but not for clothing, which was supplied as needed at the discretion of the caseworker and his supervisor. In many other welfare organizations, including County Agency, a clothing allowance is included in the regular assistance budget, and City Agency workers were asked whether they would favor a change from their system to this system. Such a change would have saved them some tedious paper work, but it would also have deprived them of the power to furnish extra benefits to their clients at their own discretion, or to withhold them. A preference for the existing procedure implies that a worker is not willing to give up some of his own power of discretion in order to increase that of his clients. As Table 8 indicates, proclient individuals were less willing to delegate this responsibility to clients than were anticlient individuals. But the prevailing orientation in a group had the opposite effect: proclient group values increased the willingness of workers to delegate responsibility, both among proclient and among anticlient individuals. The last row in Table 8 reveals the same pattern. Workers were asked whether or not they tended to worry about their cases after working hours. Proclient individuals reported that they more often worried than did anticlient individuals; but membership in proclient groups operated to reduce worrying among both types of individuals.

Why is the influence of group values here the inverse of that of individual orientations? The following interpretation might be suggested: Proclient attitudes increase an individual's concern with his client's welfare, as indicated by the proclient worker's greater tendency to worry about cases. These same attitudes make him less willing to delegate clothing responsibility to clients, because he receives gratification from doing favors for clients, and because he can use his power to give clients more money than they otherwise could get by interpreting clothing needs liberally. ³⁹ Furthermore, the extra burden of paper work is less objectionable for proclient individuals (who obtain satisfactions from helping clients that make the extra work involved worthwhile) than for anticlient workers (who do not experience such compensating rewards).

We may turn now to the structural effects. The prevalence of proclient values in a group probably gives rise to norms protecting the interests of clients. These norms tend to favor delegating responsibility to clients, partly to guard their interests against the actions of any workers with anticlient attitudes, and partly to demonstrate confidence in and respect for clients. Norms that discourage too much worrying about clients are also more apt to develop in proclient groups, not only because emotional involvement is not conducive to optimum service to clients, but also because these peer groups must protect themselves against the inclination of their proclient members to worry excessively. Worried colleagues can make life unpleasant for those around them as well as themselves through their preoccupation with the misfortunes of clients and their tension. These problems confronted by proclient groups often give rise to agreement that the long-run interests of clients are best served by delegating responsibilities to them rather than keeping them dependent and by lack of involvement rather than feelings of great concern. In anticlient groups, on the other hand, there is no basis for such norms to emerge.