The Management of Human Services 9780231895378

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
1 The Management of Human Services - A Challenging Opportunity
I. The Macro Level
2 Service Integration: Real Versus Illusory Solutions to Welfare Dilemmas
3 Centralization Versus Decentralization in the Design of Human Service Delivery Systems: A Response to Gouldner’s Lament
4 The Social Ecology of Citizenship
5 Demystifying Organizations
II. The Micro Level
6 Organizational Constructs and Mega Bureaucracy
7 The Empirical Limits of Social Work Professionalization
8 Client-Organization Relations: A Systems Perspective
9 Exposing the Coercive Consensus: Racism and Sexism in Social Work
III. Prescriptive Strategies
10 Some Issues in the Evaluation of Human Services Delivery
11 Toward a Paradigm of Middle-Management Practice in Social Welfare Programs
12 Conceptual and Technical Issues in the Management of Human Services
13 The Social Political Process of Introducing Innovation in Human Services
14 Conclusions
Appendix - List of Participants
Index

Citation preview

The Management of Human Services

THE

MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES ROSEMARY C . S ARRI AND Y E H E S K E L HASENFELD EDITORS

NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

I

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data M A I N ENTRY UNDER TITLE: T H E MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN

SERVICES.

P A P E R S P R E P A R E D FOR A C O N F E R E N C E O R G A N I Z E D BY T H E LOIS AND SAMUEL SILBERMAN F U N D A N D THE J O H N S O N T I O N , A N D H E L D IN R A C I N E , W I S . , J U N E 2 7 - 3 0 ,

FOUNDA-

1977.

I N C L U D E S BIBLIOGRAPHIES A N D I N D E X . 1. 2.

SOCIAL WORK

ADMINISTRATION—CONGRESSES

SOCIAL SERVICE—CONGRESSES. II.

HASENFELD,

HV41.M276

I.

SARRI, ROSEMARY

YEHESKEL.

658'91'361

ISBN

78-9083

0-231-04628-6

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS N E W YORK

COPYRIGHT ©

GUILDFORD,

SURREY

1 9 7 8 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS A L L RIGHTS RESERVED

P R I N T E D IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S O F A M E R I C A

C.

Contents

Foreword

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

1 The Management of Human Services— A Challenging Opportunity I

1

THE MACRO LEVEL 2 Service Integration: Real Versus Illusory Solutions to Welfare Dilemmas R O B E R T MORRIS A N D I L A N A HIRSCH LESCOHIER

21

3 Centralization Versus Decentralization in the Design of Human Service Delivery Systems: A Response to Gouldner's Lament HOWARD ALDRICH

51

4 The Social Ecology of Citizenship MORRIS JANOWITZ A N D G E R A L D D . SUTTLES

80

5 Demystifying Organizations C H A R L E S PERROW

105

II THE MICRO LEVEL 6 Organizational Constructs and Mega Bureaucracy E U G E N E LITWAK

123

7 The Empirical Limits of Social Work Professionalization IRWIN E P S T E I N A N D K A Y L A C O N R A D

163

8 Client-Organization Relations: A Systems Perspective YEHESKEL HASENFELD

184

vi

CONTENTS

9 Exposing the Coercive Consensus: Racism and Sexism in Social Work FELICE D A V I D S O N PERLMUTTER A N D LESLIE B . ALEXANDER

207

ΙΠ PRESCRIPTIVE STRATEGIES 10 Some Issues in the Evaluation of Human Services Delivery P E T E R H . ROSSI

235

11 Toward a Paradigm of Middle-Management Practice in Social Welfare Programs RINO PATTI

262

12 Conceptual and Technical Issues in the Management of Human Services A R N O L D G URI Ν

289

13 The Social Political Process of Introducing Innovation in Human Services ANDRÉ L . DELBECQ

14 Conclusions

309

340

Appendix—List of Participants

353

Index

357

Foreword

is the product of a project initiated by the Lois and Samuel Silberman Fund with the objective of bringing together some of the most recent and, it is hoped, forefront theoretical and empirical studies of the issues inherent in the management and administration erf human services, and providing the forum through which they can be communicated to those concerned with the future of human services. The issues clearly transcend this field and are equally pertinent to other social institutions such as government, éducation, and culture. A word about foundation grants in general and this grant in particular. Every legitimate grant seeks a public benefit. The role of a foundation is catalytic. The most any foundation can do is recognize a need and stimulate those who are able to address the problem through personal encouragement coupled with financial support. The willingness of Rosemary Sarri and all of the participants to make themselves available on relatively short notice, submit themselves to a self-imposed discipline as to quality of effort and timetable for completion is a testament to the fact that no project is a product of a foundation, but rather belongs to those who produce it. The Johnson Foundation which generously made its Wingspread conference facility available for this project shares this thinking. THIS VOLUME

And so, I have asked the editors, and they have agreed to dedicate this volume

T o T H E THOUSANDS O F CREATIVE INDIVIDUALS ENGAGED IN FOUNDATION PROJECT G R A N T S . THEIR COMMITMENT O F T A L E N T , INTELLECT, EFFORT, A N D TIME H A S M A D E T H E PRIVATE FOUNDATION A U N I Q U E AMERICAN INSTITUTION,

vili

FOREWORD

SANCTIONED T O ENTER T H E PUBLIC FORUM W I T H

PRIVATE

INITIATIVE T O STIMULATE EXCELLENCE, INNOVATION, A N D BETTERMENT OF HUMAN WELFARE. Samuel J. Silberman President The Lois and Samuel Silberman Fund

Acknowledgments

PROBLEMS in the management of human services have long been an important concern of the editors of this book—in our research and consultative work with these organizations, in our own practice as administrators, and in the training of social work professionals for management positions. Administration of these organizations is becoming increasingly complex, but our knowledge of the necessary strategies and technologies is quite inadequate to meet the ever-increasing demands. Moreover, there are high levels of dissatisfaction expressed by clients, staff, and the community about the rigid and ineffectual bureaucratization of human services. Thus, it was a significant opportunity when Samuel J. Silberman approached the senior editor indicating that the Silberman Fund was interested in sponsoring a series of projects to aid in the improvement of administrative management capabilities of human service organizations. In our case he asked her to consider the preparation of a book for senior level administrators, policy makers, social work educators, and students which would deal with some of the critical issues for public and private agencies in the 1970s. When we accepted his offer we decided to focus our attention particularly on the management issues as related to service delivery to clientele. As a result of the Silberman Fund's interest and support along with that of the Johnson Foundation a conference was held at Wingspread conference facility in Racine, Wisconsin, June 27-30, 1977. Participating in the conference were the authors of papers presented in this book and nine social work administrators, social scientists, and educators who served as discussants (see Appendix A for list of participants). To each and all of these distinguished colleagues we are deeply appreciative of the way in which they completed their work and complied with deadlines. The Wingspread setting on Lake Michigan provided a most pleasant

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

setting for three stimulating days of discussion of issues in the delivery of human services. It was particularly stimulating because of the frank candor among social scientists, administrators, and educators. Since then it has occurred to us that each of the respective professional groups has much to gain from similar opportunities of this type. Without the stimulation and support of Samuel Silberman it is doubtful that this effort could have come to fruition as quickly as it did. Moreover, he used his not inconsiderable management skills very effectively to facilitate the entire project. We also wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Johnson Foundation, especially Mr. Leslie Paffrath, President, and Mr. Richard Kinch, Program Associate. Everything was done so well by them to provide an environment conducive to creative discussion. The cooperation of Dean Philip Fellin of the University of Michigan School of Social Work is gratefully acknowledged. He relieved the editors of regular assignments and without that, the project could not have been completed. We also wish to acknowledge a special debt to Ms. Christine Sherman, who assisted in arranging and managing the Conference and in the subsequent preparation of papers for publication. Her dedication to the success of the effort merits our deep gratitude. We were greatly stimulated in the activities associated with producing this book by students, colleagues, administrators, and others. We hope that the book will in turn stimulate others as they cope with the management of human services. If it does, then clients of human service organizations should benefit significantly and a major objective for all of us will have been achieved. Rosemary S arri Yeheskel Hasenfeld University of Michigan February 1978

The Management of Human Services

ONE

The Management of Human ServicesA Challenging Opportunity

IN THE evaluation of social welfare institutions in the United States the seventies will undoubtedly be characterized as the decade during which the management of human service organizations became of paramount concern. The preoccupation with the development of management tools and techniques to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of human service organizations may be seen, in part, as a reaction to the wide-spread disillusionment with the efforts at social service reforms in the 1960s and early 1970s. The issues evolve less around the extension of citizenship rights and social service entitlement to disenfranchised social groups, and more in checking the rise of welfare expenditures, reduction of waste and service duplications, and efficient use of existing services. It is widely acknowledged that social welfare institutions in the United States are facing a growing crisis in terms of their societal legitimation, allocation of resources, public expectations and demands, and administration and management. Several factors may have converged to produce this sense of malaise. First, there has been an unparalleled expansion of federal expenditures on social welfare in the years following World War Π, from 8.9 percent of the Gross National Product in 1950 to 17 percent of the GNP in 1973 (Janowitz, 1976). At the same time, however, as Janowitz cogently points out, this expansion has been accompanied by deficit spending, which at times of declining economic growth and especially of reduced economic surplus creates severe pressures on the economy. Second, there has been a tremendous rise in the expectations and demands of various social groups to have a share of the "human services p i e . "

2

T H E M A N A G E M E N T OF H U M A N

SERVICES

Many of these groups have been previously denied access to adequate health, education, and welfare services, while others received services under highly restrictive and degrading conditions. Titmuss (1969), in writing about attitudes toward welfare in the United States, notes that most people have a "public burden" notion of the welfare state. In contrast, in Europe welfare is more often synonomous with well-being and certainly is not a popular "bad word." He further refers to the United States as the "diswelfare state" and documents the fact that many of our so-called welfare programs benefit the total society despite the popular view of being for the undeserving, deviant, poor, or handicapped population. This clash between greater demands for human services and the predominant public attitudes toward welfare has created a crisis in the societal legitimation of these institutions. This is exemplified in what Wilensky (1975) terms the revolt of the middle mass against the welfare state. Third, the expansion of human services was coupled with an accelerated bureaucratization of the system. There has been a vast proliferation of new human service bureaucracies, regulatory agencies, and an ever-increasing array of administrative bodies. The bureaucratization of the human services had introduced powerful new interest groups, namely the bureaucracies themselves (Wilensky, 1975; Alford, 1975). As each human service bureaucracy pursues its own self-maintenance and self-expansion, fragmentation of services, lack of coordination, zealous defense of domain, and rejection of "undesirable" clients are the frequently observed consequences. The public outcry as to the increasing inhumaneness, rigidity, and lack of responsiveness by human service organizations may be anchored in the sense of loss of power in controlling one's fate vis-à-vis these bureaucracies (Coleman, 1973).

T H E N A T U R E OF H U M A N S E R V I C E

ORGANIZATIONS

It is within this context that the management issues of human service organizations must be addressed. In particular, we must identify and develop an organizational theory that is applicable to this set of organizations and that can inform us about the parameters that control their functioning. Until recently, most of the theory of organizational behavior was based on the study of business and industrial organizations. It was assumed that the con-

T H E M A N A G E M E N T OF HUMAN S E R V I C E S

3

structs and propositions useful in understanding the behavior of these organizations could be applied to understanding the behavior of the human service agencies. In fact, in a recent series of essays Richard Cyert argues that there are more similarities than there are differences between profit and non-profit organizations, as he defines them (Cyert, 1975). Although he presents a convincing set of arguments, adequate comparative research about the similarities and differences remains to be completed before one can accept Cyert's assertions. In fact, he himself acknowledges some of the profound differences with respect to defining and increasing productivity, controlling resources and budgeting, and performance evaluation. Whether one conceptualizes human service organizations as a distinct and unique set of organizations depends on the importance attached to the following attributes which characterize them. First, human service organizations work on people by processing and/or changing them individually or collectively. The persons directly handled by these organizations are simultaneously their input, raw material, and product. As Perrow (1965) notes, people are vested with values and have definite social position and location which the organization must respond to. Thus, every decision and action undertaken by these organizations involve moral evaluation and moral judgment of people and have consequences to their normative and social standing (Hasenfeld and English, 1974; Freidson, 1970). As a result, human service organizations must adopt ideological systems to justify their activities, yet always face the risk that these ideologies will be contested by various social groups. Second, and related to the above, human service organizations are characterized by a precarious domain consensus. Since these organizations intervene in the lives of people, they confront multiple expectations and conflicting demands in a pluralistic society. For example, on the one hand there is an expectation that welfare departments respond in a humane way and provide for the needs of the poor. On the other hand, there are persistent demands to reduce the welfare rolls and force the poor into the labor market. Similarly, juvenile courts are simultaneously pushed to pursue a "law and order" goal and a "social rehabilitation" orientation (Sarri and Hasenfeld, 1976). The lack of domain consensus is intensified as these organizations serve populations perceived or defined as deviant. In order to accommodate to multiple and often conflicting demands, human service organizations are

4

T H E M A N A G E M E N T OF H U M A N

SERVICES

likely to develop ambiguous and often contradictory goals. Therefore, the issues concerning who should be served and what services should be provided are never fully resolved, nor can clear goal priorities be established. Third, human service organizations, particularly in the public sector, acquire very limited autonomy in relation to their task environment. In particular, these organizations are highly dependent on resources controlled by other organizations and are often subject to extensive regulations by various legislative and administrative bodies. Dependency on the task environment constrains the ability of these organizations to develop service modalities which reflect the actual needs of the population. Rather, these tend to reflect the constraints and contingencies imposed by external units. Helfgot (1974) showed, for example, how a reform organization established to promote structural changes in social service agencies on behalf of the poor has transformed its goals to treat the personal and social pathologies of the poor as a consequence of the pressures by the funding and regulating agencies. Warren, Rose, and Bergunder (1974) arrived at a similar conclusion when assessing the impact of Model Cities programs. Similarly, Hasenfeld (1975) noted that the employment placement services serving the poor are more likely to heed the needs of the potential employers than the job seekers. Put differently, in many instances, human service organizations become captives of external units and thus come to serve their interests rather than the interests of the population they were established to serve. Moreover, being dependent on other organizations reduces the incentives of such organizations to innovate, for there seem to be little real payoffs in developing new programs unless they are clearly underwritten by public funds. Fourth, despite the increase in the variety of new service technologies,. a major characteristic of human service organizations is the lack of determinate and effective technologies. With few exceptions, particularly in the health field, most human service technologies are based on limited and fragmentary knowledge bases while having to deal with complex human behavior. As a result, most fail to meet the attributes of a technology as defined by Perrow (1965). In particular, few of these technologies can be shown to be effective (see, for example, Segal, 1972). Consequently, human service organizations develop ideological systems in lieu of technologies which guide and justify the behavior of staff. The lack of coherent and determinate technologies generates a great deal of internal ambiguity and inconsistencies in response to client needs. Specifically, indeterminate technologies generate a

T H E M A N A G E M E N T OF H U M A N

SERVICES

5

great deal of staff discretion and lack of any service capabilities of quality control. Development of explicit criteria for performance assessment and measures of accountability become highly problematic. These forementioned characteristics indicate that, at the very least, organizational and management theories must incorporate them into their explanatory models and prescriptive paradigms in order to be of any relevance to human service organizations, particularly as these confront current challenges and problems.

P R O B L E M S CONFRONTING HUMAN SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS The manifestations of the crisis in our welfare institutions are readily apparent in the pressures, dilemmas, and problems facing the administrators of human service organizations. We shall note some of them briefly. ENVIRONMENTAL UNCERTAINTY It is already apparent that human service agencies face serious problems in this time of stable or declining resources and growing demand. The social service agency is in a peculiar dilemma because resources are stable or declining in some areas, but demand generally continues to rise. As Cyert (1975) notes, problems for non-profit and human service agencies are particularly significant in this regard, since these organizations place little emphasis on generating new resources; instead they see the solution in the allocation of resources provided to them by the environment through governmental agencies, members, or clientele. The persistent problems of high inflation coupled with high unemployment that plague society pose significant problems for human service agencies which rely so heavily on public resources. It is difficult to determine whether environmental uncertainties and rapid social change are the key factors producing the crises for social service administrators or whether these are the results of development in administrative practice itself. Not long ago Herbert Simon recapitulated developments in public administration that seem equally applicable to administrators of social service agencies. If a science has been culture bound—and public administration has been through most of its history—it becomes difficult to distinguish between progress in the science, on the one hand, and changes in the social institu-

β

T H E M A N A G E M E N T OF H U M A N

SERVICES

tíons they purport to describe, on the other—The developments taking place in public administration theory and practice are, to a considerable extent, consequences of modifications of the social environment of governmental organizations. (Simon, 1967, p. 89) In either case, the ability of these organizations to plan for the future is highly curtailed in the face of such uncertainty, resulting in a reactive and passive posture to changing human needs. Similarly, there are increasing and unrelenting pressures on human service organizations to become more efficient and cost-effective (Rivlin, 1971). It is clear that, in the face of shrinking resources, human service organizations must readdress themselves to fundamental policy questions regarding the setting of service priorities and populations to be served. There is a serious danger that in doing so, these organizations will succumb to the pressures of the more articulate and resourceful social groups, while abandoning their commitment to the disenfranchised, the dependent, and the weak. PLANNING SERVICE DELIVERY SYSTEMS The diversity, complexity, and apparent fragmentation of the human services has created pressures toward increased coordination and integration of social services. Human service organizations are asked to participate in multi-organizational planning systems and are frequently required to give up some of their autonomy in planning for the future. Increasingly, the planning functions of human service organizations are made contingent upon conditions set by coordinating bodies of various jurisdictions, by pressures to affiliate with networks of organizations, and by demands to cooperate with other service agencies. This has resulted in a far greater intervention of governmental bodies in the planning process. In fact, it seems that one of the unanticipated consequences of the greater involvement of multi-systems in the planning process is to reduce significantly the probability of actual program implementation (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973; Williams and Elmore, 1976). In the same vein, services integration has been a federal priority of HEW since the mid-1960s, and progressively the concern has been directed toward integration of various political and horizontal units with the assumption that effectiveness and efficiency would thereby be enhanced. Primary attention has been directed toward program planning and management at the state and regional levels with little explicit reference t