Political Organizations

...Indeed not...

...But to understand their organizational roles, in turn, requires a full understanding of such factors as why people join organizations (incentives), the modes by which leaders are selected or elected, the very processes by which organizations were formed in the first place, and the strategies they employ in dealing with other groups and government...

...Now, Professor Wilson has performed his task admirably...

...Citing a vast array of empirical evidence and utilizing his theoretical construct, he is able to show how various organizations within each of these groups possess what can be termed a "personality" of their own which impose varied and unique demands upon organization leaders...

...To put this otherwise, a broad knowledge of organizations in the sense indicated above enables us to comprehend the strategies and tactics of group leadership bent upon maintaining and enhancing both their own position within the organization and that of the organization visa vis other organizations...

...that play a greater role in fixing boundaries than others...

...I should also add that Dr...

...Finally, I should add, this whole problem area is compounded by those well-fed, upper-middle-class, highly-educated cadres who now perceive just how easy it is, given our present processes of fixing the boundaries of legitimacy, to keep jabbing and poking for ever-expanding boundaries...

...The evidence is not conclusive, however, and there are important qualifications to each of these generalizations...

...The easiest and most prudent maintenance strategy is to develop autonomy—that is, a distinctive area of competence, a clearly demarcated and exclusively served clientele or membership, and undisputed jurisdiction over a function, service, goal, or cause...

...As Wilson notes, "the NAACP from the first developed a structure and program that required little of the average member, permitted a variety of incentives to be employed at the branch level, limited its purposes to fairly specific goals that were generally approved by blacks, and engaged in campaigns that made it possible for victories to be won in the short term...

...And while it is true that certain groups are known to take an ideological stance on a wide variety of issues (e.g., National Association of Manufacturers, AFL-CIO), the requirements of organization mean that they must be selective in mobilizing their resources...

...How is this done...

...We say agroup is legitimate or acquires legitimacy when its demands are not outlandish, when what it seeks is reasonable—or, put otherwise, when its demands are "within reason by the standards of the larger publics...

...If the latter, even with respect to our larger public policy programs, the United States is in for deep trouble...

...Michael Balzano, now director of ACTION, found essentially the same situation in VISTA while researching his Ph.D...

...Solidary incentives by their very nature provide a strong impetus for democratic participation...

...Common sense assumptions and observations prevail in the development of Wilson's theoretical perspectives (Section I...

...Yet, the book itself points to broader concerns of profound significance, concerns which are in themselves beyond the purported scope of the book, but which nevertheless emerge from its pages...

...Three kinds of purposes, and thus three kinds of organizations relying on purpose as an incentive, can be distinguished: goal-oriented, ideological, and redemptive...

...This much at least is beyond question...

...Neither is free from difficulties, although solidary organizations may even require more consummate leadership skills, particularly when there are significant ethnic, religious, and educational differences between the units comprising it...

...Such coalitions may come about to ward off a perceived threat to existence, to cease costly competition, or to gain a highly significant benefit...

...The remainder of this book, divided into three major sections ("Internal Processes," "External Processes," and "Political Roles"), would be impossible to synthesize here save to note that the elements of the theoretical perspective—incentives, social and political structure, rationality, and self-interest—are all employed for understanding both theinternal and external behavior of group leaders...

...As Wilson notes, "Professional staff members of labor unions frequently wish to see their organizations act more aggressively on larger social issues than does the elective leadership, but the staff members are only occasionally in a position to carry out their desires...

...More than this, it should serve to focus our attention once again on the importance of formal and informal group behavior in the larger context of the American political system...

...Incentives obviously play a role in determining the internal ordering of an organization...

...Only a few examples will be cited here in the context of incentives to illustrate Wilson's thesis...

...The characteristic of purposive organizations is that their members work for the presumed benefit of the public or societal whole...

...And (d), contrary to the impression one might gain from reading certain Washington columnists, group pressure in the governmental process is highly exaggerated...

...However, its national leadership may, because of the highly decentralized structure, have a freer hand in ignoring local "wills," the more so as the resources of the organization are channeled to the top...

...Who or what sets the bounds within which the larger publics determine "reasonableness...

...It would be a mistake, for instance, to believe that solidary incentives yield greater unity and loyalty than purposive incentives...

...Three major types of incentives, each containing within them variations, are identified: material, solidary, and purposive...

...And this in the long run may will be the most significant factor in our political processes...

...More likely, however, temporary or ad hoc alliance is the rule...

...Thus, solidary rewards as a whole differ from material ones in that their effect, and indeed their existence, depends on the maintenance of valued social relationships (money benefits, but not social ones, may be received and enjoyed anonymously and even in isolation and where public they are as valuable when received from an enemy or a faceless benefactor as when received from an acquaintance...

...I do not mean to set us off on a circle-squaring expedition or point up what many believe to be an inherent weakness in group theory...

...Political parties, already fragmented because of our diffuse political structure, present the full panorama of leadership difficulties in the context of varying incentives...

...they are associated with a wide variety of organizations such as country clubs, lodges, charitable groups, etc...

...Saying that organizations seek to survive is not very different from saying that organizations exist, a statement that is of no interest at all and entails the risk of leading one to assume that survival, maintenance, and equilibrium are desirable social states...

...The competition of interest groups does not, in the long run, make it difficult for the government to start doing things, it only makes it difficult for the government to stop...

...A large voluntary association, for instance, may seem highly democratic, if one looks only to its local units...

...So, also, with "[p]rograms that benefit a well-defined group but at a cost to another well-defined group...

...Material incentives characterize those associations such as business and labor that either allocate "tangible benefits that are directly under [their] control or [regulate] access to these benefits...

...He has done what he set out to do'and students of the American political system are immeasurably better off for his fine analysis...

...Group theory perhaps more than any other enables us to gain a finer realization that the expansion or contraction of these boundaries is perhaps the most important factor of all in analyzing the political system and its direction...

...The theoretical perspective offered by Wilson "is that the behavior of persons occupying organization roles (leader, spokesman, executive, representative) is principally, though not uniquely, determined by the requirements of organizational maintenance and enhancement and that this maintenance, in turn, chiefly involves supplying tangible and intangible incentives to individuals in order that they will become, or remain, members and will perform certain tasks...

...One reason for friction between staff and members, as Wilson points out, certainly has to do with the relative educational, social, and economic status of staff personnel...

...In the Massachusetts Welfare Rights Organization, for example, the paid staff consisted for the most part of young, college-educated whites with a middle- or upper-middle-class background, whereas the membership consisted of women, mostly black, on welfare...

...For "openers," we have a pretty good idea that the "respectable" mass media and universities (institutions which presumably train the young) are important...

...Conversely, programs involving "distributed benefits and distributed costs" or "concentrated benefits and distributed costs" will usually not provide incentives for intense organization activity or conflict...

...For example, the researches of Lawrence N. Bailis which focused in part on the organization of...

...Wilson's approach to his subject matter, the behavior of voluntary organizations, is both refreshing and novel: refreshing because he avoids the turgid theoretical mumbo jumbo characteristic of many, if not most, similar undertakings...

...Benefits accruing to their members take the form of personal satisfaction for having accomplished or having worked for the common good...

...The formation of the American Federation of Labor was facilitated by the fact that its incentives were primarily solidary...

...Therefore, the concerns of AFL leadership until fairly recent times have been relatively narrow and local in nature...

...c) Contrary to popular belief, competition between voluntary associations is not common...

...The so-called "conservative" stance of the NAACP is due in large measure to its original goals and subsequent organizational development...

...Here we must pick and choose and note in a general way only some of the interesting areas surveyed...

...b) In an insightful chapter entitled "Organizational Democracy," Wilson suggests the following proposition: "In general, larger organizations seem less democratic than smaller ones, older ones less democratic than younger ones, and those created from the top down less democratic than those built from the bottom up...

...And even today with the merger of these two labor wings there are still detectable differences between the behavior and orientation of the staffs and leadership of both...

...This means that "Whatever the timing or nature of the intervention, the experienced organizational representative will see his task as one of evoking, maintaining, and enhancing existing relationships with sympathetic or like-minded public officials...

...The natural-system model is subject to all the criticisms leveled at functionalist approaches to social understanding generally—'system maintenance' is at best a tautology, at worst a conservative bias...

...I do not mean this in the sense of whether our more ambitious national programs work, whether they are based on a fiscally sound policy, or even whether they will not eventually undermine the basic fabric of our society...

...Solidary incentives are generally nontangible and involve status, prestige, camaraderie, and friendship...

...The kind as well as the value of the incentive employed will affect the demand for democratic forms...

...Extrapolating from the materials presented, one of the chief and more obvious reasons for this is a difference between the membership and staff incentives...

...Each presents baffling problems and calls for an array of leadership technique and skills...

...diverting much of any of these resources to persons known, or suspect, to be opposed to you is less efficient than devoting them to persons who, once aroused and informed, will act onyour behalf...

...As Wilson puts this matter: "The rational model assumes that all organizations have goals beyond member satisfaction, but this may not be the case (try, for example, to state intelligibly the goals of a university...

...And it is not a long step from this to the further realization that such boundaries simply do not establish themselves, that there are institutions (organizations...

...Indeed, most political organizations are based in varying degrees on all three...

...that is, its roots grew from independent but closely knit groups with common trades and often of the same nationality...

...But such cleavages are not confined only to social welfare organizations...

...the welfare mothers in Massachusetts showed that the state-paid organizers were far from content to provide simply the material incentives which were, understandably enough, uppermost in the minds of the members...

...Moreover, organizations are likely to "mobilize" only with respect to policy programs which call for "distributed benefits and concentrated costs" or "concentrated benefits and concentrated costs...

...Some political units are based primarily on solidary benefits, others on purposive incentives, and still others (machines) on material incentives...

...Purposive organizations, on the other hand, are generally prone to a more democratic structure, particularly as there is a need to define their purposes and formulate tactics for goal achievement...

...Autonomy gives to an association a stable claim to certain resources and thereby reduces uncertainty and lessens threats to survival...

...More exactly, "When a specific, easily identifiable group bears the costs of a program conferring distributed benefits, the group is likely to feel its burdens keenly and thus to have a strong incentive to organize in order that their burdens be reduced or at the very least not increased...

...In this connection, the trend, as Wilson sees it, is a decline in material incentives and an increased reliance on the solidary and purposive...

...Beyond any doubt Professor Wilson's Political Organizations will assume a very high place among the already vast and excellent body of literature in the political science field which deals with organizations and interest group behavior...

...And it simply will not do to place the blame, as so many are wont to do, on "mass politics...

...The thesis which permeates Political Organizations is that the behavior of group leaders is best understood in light of "their efforts to maintain and enhance the organization and their position in it...

...Rather, my concern is related to "legitimacy" in the broadest sense of the term...

...The Congress of Industrial Organizations' appeal, in contrast, was directed toward a nationally dispersed potential membership of lower economic and social status Hence, in its incipientstages, the CIO had to rely upon purposive incentives to attract membership...

...Associations, seeking to maintain themselves, are highly averse to risk and thus to active rivalry except under special circumstances...

...There are, of course, expections to this rule which Wilson duly notes...

...Just as executives seek to minimize strain in managing the internal affairs of the association, so also they seek to minimize it in their relations with other organizations...

...He assumes that individuals will "join organizations for a variety of reasons and that they are more or less rational about action taken on behalf of these reasons...

...In this connection, while it may be an exaggeration to say that the respectable media can confer instant legitimacy to an organization and its demands, we are not far from the mark in saying that it is highly important in what can be termed an indirect process of legitimacy conferral (e.g., those nice little college kids of a few years back, the best and brightest, who merely wanted to vent their inner frustrations with and demands on the academic structure...

...Organizations that distribute primarily money benefits are less likely to be democratic than ones that distribute other kinds....As long as a leader delivers money benefits that substantially exceed the costs of membership, he is not likely to be challenged...

...These are legitimate concerns all too frequently ignored by the dominant liberal intelligentsia...

...Quite the contrary...

...novel because he eschews the widely used "rational model" and "natural systems" approaches which contain within themselves certain unrealistic assumptions concerning the goals and purposes of organizational behavior...

...And for this, in large measure, we can thank our "illustrious" law schools and our "distinguished" jurists...

...He, like the precinct captain of a political party, will devote most of his 'contact' time to stimulating activity by, and providing information to, persons who he has reason to believe are in general agreement with him...

...But the question arises: Whither now...

...it also assumes that organizational behavior is motivated by a desire to attain its goals, but it is obvious thatmotives may be quite disparate and unrelated to stated objectives...

...Coalitions, in the sense of "enduring" unions for the advancement of common goals, interests, etc., are also rare...

...However, there can be no doubt that many of those who serve in such staff capacities find their chief incentive to be ideologically purposive and of a distinctively left-wing character...

...Time, energy, and money are in short supply...

...And this, to say the least, will be an accomplishment, for, as Professor Wilson correctly notes, over the past decade or so political scientists have increasingly turned their attention away from "group politics" to such matters as public policy content and impact, survey data findings, and the like...

...The staffers "were more interested in building a political movement among the poor that would play a leading role in the reconstruction of society and government...

...a) Cleavages between the professional staffs and members of an organization are not uncommon...

...We are told that there has been a "rapid expansion of government policy that has produced a kind of immobilism to the extent that each new program has acquired, or even created for itself, a client association that makes it difficult to change, and impossible to abandon, the original measure...

...Though he believes this perspective can be profitably applied to groups other than voluntary, he does focus on voluntary organizations because it is withrespect to such noncoercive organizations "that the effects of incentive systems are most clearly visible...

...And the further one inquires into this matter of boundary setting, and hence the legitimacy of demands upon government and the private sector, the more one begins to wonder whether the process starts from the "bottom up" (a genuine reflection of public deliberation or response to a genuine or felt need) or from the "top down" (the ideological dictates of those upper-middle-class, well-educated individuals to whom Professor Wilson refers on more than one occasion...

...dissertation...

...Such an understanding clearly involves a knowledge of the "constraints and requirements imposed by their [the leaders'] organizational roles...

...Likewise, to understand civil rights organizations, their policy positions as well as their successes and failures, one must know and appreciate their history, structure, and incentives...

...Legitimacy in the broad sense to which I refer corresponds to Wilson's use of the term in chapter fourteen, though, like Wilson, I find it easier to talk around it rather than define it...

...The more "liberal" CORE and SNCC, on the other hand, "were redemptive associations relying on broadly stated purposes the achievement of which required not only a general transformation of society but also the exemplary conduct of members...

...One of the principal exceptions to the rule involves the factors of "structure and environment...

...Such being the case, a whole host of vital considerations come to the fore...

...He also assumes that "executives seek chiefly to minimize organizational strain" and that the social and political structure of the general society (fragmentary or unified) will affect the external and internal ordering and behavior of organizations.' Certainly one of the more important chapters in this section in light of his analysis in subsequent sections is chapter three, "Organizational Maintenance and Incentives," wherein the kinds and nature of incentives are discussed...

...As Wilson points out, "autonomy" is a highly cherished end of an organization but he also writes that "establishing legitimacy is the essence of organization struggle...

...But, if instant conferral of legitimacy is beyond the powers of the mass media, instant conferral of illegitimacy is not...

...In Part II, "The Perspective Applied," Wilson deals with four major associational groups: political parties, labor unions, business associations, and civil rights organizations...

...Thus, they will not for long remain in an organization that offers them the very opposite of what they want...