Quite curious how all those experts and professors surrounding Paxman Monday night (21st May) were discussing the lack or presence of a correlation between OECD country regulation on hiring and firing workers and their subsequent economic prosperity just blithely bypassing the issue of Member State “Culture”, and organisation. Or as was suggested in Peter Wilding’s “Funny that…” bumping against the rafters of the cultures of National Banks, the last vestiges of National Sovereignty and Self-interest.

Asking for more ‘regulation’ is a symptom of a Nation State’s culturally fairly stable take on “Uncertainty Avoidance”. Imposing it from on high on the other hand is more akin to that culture’s “Power Distance”. By crossing the scores obtained per ‘State’ (for want of a better word) for both Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance, the Dutch professor Geert Hofstede came, long ago, to 4 Concepts of what he called “Implicit Models of Organizations” the sort of thing that can stand for either how a country runs its affairs, or, more appropriate today, as how their banks run their affairs.

Here’s how it looks:

This is best illustrated by culture bound theories of organizations, demonstrating that (Management) Professors – or dare we say ‘Experts’ are also human and children of their own culture.

Since nothing is new, here’s 4 approximate contemporaries, all born in the mid-nineteenth century:

Henri Fayol (1841-1925) French engineer who wrote a ground-breaking text on organization in 1916: “Administration industrielle et générale”, wrote on the issue of the exercise of authority:

“We distinguish in a manager his statutory authority which is in the office, and his personal authority which consists of his intelligence, his knowledge, his experience, his moral value, his leadership, his service record etc. For a good manager, personal authority is the indispensable complement to statutory authority.”

This leads here to a model of the organization as a pyramid of people with both personal power and formal rules as principles of coordination.

Max Weber (1864-1920) founder of German sociology wrote about the authority in a bureaucracy:

“The authority to give the commands required for the discharge of (the assigned) duties should be exercised in a stable way. It is strictly delimited by rules concerning the coercive means … which may be placed at the disposal of officials.”

In Weber’s conception the real authority is in the rules. The power of the officials is strictly delimited by these rules. Hence we could recognize in this, as a model of the organization, a well-oiled machine that runs according to the rules.

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), an American engineer, was more focused on efficiency than authority. Today we can find some of his ideas in the “Matrix Organization”.. Whereas he only deals implicitly with the exercise of authority in organizations, another American pioneer of organization theory, Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) addresses this issue squarely as follows:

“How can we avoid the two extremes: too great bossism in giving orders, and practically no orders given?… My solution is to depersonalize the giving of orders, to unite all concerned in a study of the situation, to discover the law of the situation and to obey that…. One person should not give orders to another person, but both should agree to take their orders from the situation.”

Hence, the authority is neither in the person, nor in the rules, but rather in the situation. Here we see the model of the organization as a market, in which market conditions dictate what will happen.

Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), from China, was a scholar from the fourth corner of the power distance – uncertainty avoidance diagram. He received a Western education in Hawaii and Hong Kong and became a political revolutionary. As China started industrialization much later than the West, there is no indigenous theorist of industrial organization contemporary with Fayol, Weber or Taylor.

He was however pre-occupied with political organization, mixing the Western executive, legislative and judicial branches (all three nevertheless placed under the authority of one president) with two Chinese branches, i.e. the examination branch (determining access to the civil service) and the control branch (to supposedly audit the government).

This leads to a family model with the ruler as the country’s father and whatever structure there is, based on personal relationships.

Here then we have examples of organizational models related to the culturally different theories of founding fathers/mothers of organizational theory, illustrating the cultural framing and nationality of each author.

As Bob Garratt states it in “The Fish Rots from the Head” (Harper Collins, 1997 paperback edition): “For a massive directorial challenge, try linking together the (fifteen) national cultures of the European Union on the Hofstede map. You can see that regardless of the political and economic dimensions this is the world’s biggest cross-cultural experiment in attempting to link together (three) of the four major national, and organizational, cultures. Despite anything that the Maastricht Conference said, or the Inter-Governmental Conference declares, it will take at least half a century to get any significant attitudinal and behavioural shifts – and even then these may not be towards homogeneity. The cultural differences may well overcome the rhetoric of political and economic union.”

That was in 1996/97. Since then the European Union counts 27 Member States… Funny then that current CEPS stalwarts have forgotten how, as I remember, Peter Ludlow in the 80′s advocated ever more enlargement – admittedly with a hidden agenda to make it break under its own weight. Funny also that, if memory serves me right, Cameron is currently advocating further enlargement as a strategy for survival of… what exactly?

By the way, I was born a Fleming, married to a Brit, worked for Germans for longer than I care to remember and teach Francophones. But I was culturally raised in Flanders fields by a Flemish father with ancient White Russian roots and a Flemish mother born in Canada. So, no doubt, that says something about my take on all this as well. Go figure!