The Organization Man Page 28
This kind of pre-supervision has several unfortunate results. First, it further depreciates the role of the individual. Revealingly, when such designs are discussed, the talk dwells less on people than on categories of people; the central idea is not to bring together several brilliant men so much as to bring an anthropologist, an economist, a psychologist—as if all that separates us from discovery is the setting of a goal and the right table of organization to carry it out.
Such planning, furthermore, compounds the younger men’s already great interest in the externals of research rather than the content of it. In social science, particularly, methodology is being made the route to prestige, and those most likely to get ahead are becoming once or twice removed from the people they are supposed to be studying. It is considered somehow wrong now for first-rate social scientists to have to go out and talk to people themselves. More and more, this is being done by legions of emissaries in order that the social scientist may not be diverted from analyzing what people are like. When younger men talk about “sophisticated” design, this is the sort of thing they are apt to mean.
A lot of them know better, but because of current pressures to rationalize discovery in terms of research design, the true nature of science is thus further obscured from those who will one day follow them. As one young scientist, Walter Roberts, puts it: “There is a tremendous difference between science as it is done in the laboratory and science as it is reported. True science is helter-skelter, depending on one’s hunches, angers, and inspirations, and the research itself is done in a very personal fashion. Thirty or forty years ago, it was written up this way. In reporting a great discovery a scientist would say, ‘I was working on such-and-such a reaction when I dropped some sulphuric acid by mistake. When I examined it I found, to my surprise, a strange thing going on….’ But today nobody would write it up in this way.”
Gerald Holton of Harvard uses the example of John Dalton’s atomic theory in the 1800s: “It is now well known that this work led Dalton to the epochal concepts of the chemical atom, atomic weight, the law of multiple proportions … but it is worthy of note that each and every one of his steps as just given was factually wrong or logically inconsistent.” Today? “It is part of the game,” continues Holton, “to cover up the transition from the private to the public state, to make the results in retrospect appear neatly derived from clear fundamentals…. Months of tortuous, wasteful effort may be hidden behind a few elegant paragraphs, with the sequence of presented development running directly opposite to the actual chronology, to the confusion of students and historians alike.”*
Thus the organization mystique has grown in science. So far, it has not been an active effort; the decline of the individual researcher has been a by-product, and no identifiable school of thought has promoted it. But a status quo cannot long endure without an ideology to sustain it. In any field, we all want to reassure ourselves that things are the way they are because that’s the way they should be, and science is no exception. Of late there are unmistakable signs that a number of people have been groping for a rationale that would openly justify the decline of the individual.
In a recent collection of efforts along this line, Teamwork in Research,* we see several people of good will taking a crack at this impossible business. The underlying premises are much the same as we have heard them expressed in the corporation: the group is superior to the individual, the individual contributes by suppressing himself, and so on. Present, among other ideas, is the “self-ignition” theory. This theory does not question that the group is more creative than the individual, but only how big the team should be. (With fewer than four members, self-ignition does not take place, while more than ten prevents it.)
There is, however, one illuminating strain in most such efforts. They dwell often on the frustrations of the scientist, but they reveal nothing so much as the frustration of the administrator. In a particularly poignant passage, Howard Tolley, consultant to the Ford Foundation, speaks of the “Individualist” and the “Research Team.” After a few nice words to the effect that the individualist can be of value to the team, he gets to the point. “Even when the research team has been constituted for some time,” he warns, “individualism may crop out to mar the joint effort. One or another member of the team may get tired and become frustrated. He manifests this in various ways. He fails to show up. He does not come over to see you or talk to you. He withdraws within himself. He sits and looks out the window.”
What administrator wouldn’t be frustrated? Here is this man who won’t come over to talk to you. He doesn’t want to be counseled. He sits there staring out the window—off in a little world that you can never enter. Challenge indeed for all the interpersonal skills a man can muster, for if the administrator cannot enter the man’s private world, he must somehow get him out of it. The team leader should do this, Tolley suggests, by “talking to this individualist, asking him to lunch, feeling out by counseling that which is at the root of the trouble.” Then, as time goes on, there should be fewer repetitions of such behavior. The goal, Tolley says, is “to gradually bend or mold the individualist so that, while retaining a degree of his individualism, he nevertheless more and more inclines toward group approach, group-thinking, team-thinking.”
This extraordinary plea is shocking because it is put so openly. But elsewhere the fight against talent goes on. Others are not so audacious—they make the plea with more nicety of phrasing—but the essential message is the same. They’ll make these people happy whether they want to be or not.
In the case against the individual, there is one more ideological point. It can properly be called the final one. Is there, some now ask, anything really left to discover? When I first heard young trainees state, soberly, that all the basic advances had already been made and that it was now the technicians’ turn, I dismissed their proposition as ludicrous. But they have not been alone. Lately some respectable scientists have been saying what amounted to the same thing, though in more sophisticated terms. They don’t say there is nothing left to discover; they say that we have now reached the point where we know what there is left to discover. Periodically, contributors to scientific journals have attempted to define just where these potential discoveries lie.*
An observer of scientific thought sums up this presumably optimistic view thus: “There undoubtedly remain many new ways to combine old discoveries. But this is invention as contrasted with science in the sense of discovering the laws’ of nature. It is these laws which I think can be compared to charting the geography of the earth. I find it hard to conceive that the laws are anything like endless in number, or are subject to endless refinement. This is not to say that we are anywhere near discovering all the laws, either. But at least we can, with some confidence, list the things we dont know. A recent issue of Scientific American, for instance, listed these among the major questions in science: What is matter? What holds the nucleus of the atom together? Where do cosmic rays come from? Why are galaxies spiral? Is this a universe of chance or of law? How is a protein made (i.e., what is life)? What is memory? —and a few others.” But that’s about the long and short of it, many believe.
Furthermore, the argument goes, discovery is inevitable anyway. “The way different people have come to the same discovery independently,” one optimist holds, “refutes the ‘great-man’ concept the layman cherishes. It’s mostly luck who makes the big discovery. It may be irreverent to suggest, but if there had been no Einstein there would, in all likelihood, still be a relativity theory.”
Carried to its ultimate conclusions, this technological interpretation of the history of science is profoundly anti-individualistic. For if it is true either that fundamental discovery is inevitable or that we have exhausted all but a few opportunities for it, there exists less and less reason for encouraging the kind of conditions which lead to that kind of discovery. The trainees would be right after all; the priority should be given to the team work of combining and recombining what we already
have.
Speaking to his friend, Lucien Price, Alfred North Whitehead recalled how, in the 1880s in Cambridge, nearly everything was supposed to be known about physics that could be known, and, like others, he thought it was an almost closed subject. “By the middle of the 1890s,” he said, “there were a few tremors, a slight shiver as of all not being quite secure, but no one sensed what was coming. By 1900 Newtonian physics were demolished. Done for! Still speaking personally, it had a profound effect on me: I have been fooled once, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be fooled again.”*
For his part, the layman can say that he finds it logically inconceivable that we can confidently measure the questions that separate us from total truth; that we can say we know what is unknown. He can say also that we have heard all this before; that epoch after epoch, technicians have assured him of the imminent completion of human knowledge, and that they have always been wrong. And thank heavens they have been! The implications otherwise would be too awful to accept—for then, with knowledge finite, with all the mystery and the challenge gone, what a crashing, futile bore our world would be!
* “On the Duality and Growth of Physical Science,” American Scientist, January 1953.
* Edited by George P. Bush and Lowell H. Hattery (Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1953).
* Physicist George Gamow, writing in Physics Today (Vol. 2, No. 1, January 1949): “It seems to me that our science definitely shows signs of convergence, although this statement can also be easily classified as wishful thinking. We see, nevertheless, from our analysis, that in the field of microphenomena there is only one big region remaining to be explored: the theory of elementary length in its relation to the problem of elementary particles.”
* Dialogues of Whitehead, Lucien Price (Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1954).
CHAPTER 18 The Foundations and Projectism
The bureaucratization can be reversed. For the man who wants to escape the mesh of organization, to ask his own questions, and to ask them for the sheer hell of it, the foundations are the last best hope. Alone of our big institutions, they do not have to yield to the pressures of immediacy or the importunings of the balance sheet. They have the money to invigorate individual research and they have the franchise. The job they have assigned themselves is not to support the status quo but to do what others cannot do or are too blind to do.
And how have the foundations responded to this challenge? They are not countering the bureaucratization of research; they are intensifying it.
Their support of the social sciences is the best yardstick of their performance. They have many other interests: Rockefeller, for example, has a long tradition of support—very enlightened support, too—in the biological sciences. But social-science research is the chief area common to all three, and they have become the critical source of support for it. The money they give is only a small part of the total spent on social science, but most other money has strings on it. Of the $38 million given by the government, all but $2 million goes to applied, large-scale team projects. Business milks basic research, for it eventually uses the techniques developed by academic researchers, but it has shown no disposition to support it at all, and the universities, with few exceptions, have little money left over after salaries and housekeeping expenses are paid. As their “restricted” funds for contract research have gone up, their “free” funds have gone down. If the social scientist wishes to take a leave of absence from the team—in short, if he wishes to exercise his own curiosity and not somebody else’s—it is to the foundations that he must turn.
Here is the way they apportion their funds. Of the roughly $11,500,000 a year average (based on 1953-54) they have been giving to social science, only $2.8 million goes to individual projects or fellowships. $8.7 million—or 76 per cent of the total—goes to big team projects and institutions.
One of the anomalies in this situation is that you can’t get an argument from foundation people on the subject of the individual. In principle, they are for him, and few are so emphatic, and quite sincerely so, that it’s the man and not the program that counts, every time.
But.
They too are organization men. There are difficulties, they explain. The Ford Foundation argues that it just has to give its money in large-scale grants, and while it could give a bit more to individuals and still get rid of its money, it’s not likely to get very enthusiastic about such a course. Not only financially, but philosophically, it would be a diversion; the “problem-solving,” action approach is the foundation’s basic strategy, and this puts something of a premium on the virtues of well-directed, administered, co-ordinated projects. The foundation’s officials are quite frank about it. “We’ll plead guilty,” Rowan Gaither, Jr., president of the foundation, said to me of the disparity. “We do try and take care of the individual, but it’s hard in a foundation of this size. It’s very hard to support individuals without a staff of about one thousand, so we prefer to rely upon other institutions to provide this service for us.”
Giving to individuals, to put it another way, costs too much. Carnegie and Rockefeller have devoted proportionately more to individual research, but their officers make much the same point. It often takes just as much work to make a $5,000 grant to an individual, they argue, as it does $500,000 to a university. The $500,000 grant, they further argue, may be the best way to support individual research; rather than “retail” grants for a certain kind of research, it is more efficient to give a lump sum to an outstanding group to pass on down the line. It was on such grounds of efficiency that Carnegie dropped its program of individual grants-in-aid after the war. The question is not if individuals should be supported, Carnegie insists, but who should do the selecting.
A poor case. If the big foundations can’t afford the staff work, who can? Not the small foundations. With the very notable exception of the Guggenheim Foundation, they don’t give much to individuals either.* As they can point out, it takes as much work to give $5,000 to an individual as it does $500,000 to a university. Perhaps the big foundations …
The big foundations say it costs too much. But need it? Instead of cutting down the number of individual grants, a better solution might be to cut down on the amount of staff work involved. It’s been done, and quite successfully. Henry Allen Moe, the wise old bird who directs the Guggenheim Foundation, manages to give $1,000,000 to some 200 to 250 individuals each year. He uses advisers liberally (and gets their advice free), but his basic apparatus consists of no more than himself, two assistants, nine clerks, and a passion for excellence.
What if more individual support did require a heavier staff load? That’s what foundations are supposed to be about—to do what others can’t. Internal administrative considerations are important, but not as ends in themselves. Administratively, the foundations have a good case only if the other groups they rely on are in fact supporting the individual. But are they? Where the foundations specifically earmark funds for individual research, as in fellowship funds given to the Social Science Research Council, the intervening agencies do pass it on for independent work. (And all such grants, no matter how large, I have included in the individual-grants totals.) Where grants are not so earmarked, however, the money has a way of accumulating direction as it gets passed down the line. Eventually, of course, individuals have to do the work, but the work is apt to be what a committee or a department or a center thinks should be done, and while this may be worth while it is not the kind of independent, nondirected work under discussion.
To argue for more individual grants is not to argue against other kinds of support. As the foundations point out, some of the large institutional grants can have the effect of supporting individual work. The foundations have contributed heavily to the creation of “communities of scholars”—the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, founded the National Bureau of Economic Research; Carnegie, the Russian Research Center at Harvard; Ford, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In such communities of scholars t
he work done is what the scholars wish to be done, and the foundations have been careful not to interpose any control.
But the fact remains that the sums available for the support of an individual doing what he—and he alone—wishes to do is only a fraction. It is such a small fraction, furthermore, that an effective increase in individual support would not jeopardize the support of other kinds of projects. Quite probably, a shift of 15 per cent in the giving pattern would be enough to have a marked effect on the academic world.
One reason no great funds would be needed for a sharp change in the climate is that the chance of a grant can be as important to the researcher as the money. Even a moderate upward shift would stimulate not only the particular people who get them but everyone in the field. In 1952, for example, the Ford Foundation gave $5,500 to fifty-four scholars to use as they saw fit. Quite aside from their effect on the individuals, they lifted the morale, and hopes, of social scientists everywhere, and people who didn’t get them praised the idea as warmly as those who did. (The foundation has recently put through another such program, this time with a hundred grants at $4,250 apiece.)
Such grants encourage the scholar to think that he too might be able to follow up that long-shelved idea. Some may not, but the mere knowledge that a grant might be had can deeply influence a man’s work—and this applies to the co-operative as well as the lonely, for they too have their private dreams. Let a man feel that he can have the support for the unexpected and he will welcome the unexpected all the more when it comes—not reject it because he sees no time to pursue it and then later sigh over opportunities passed by.
This brings us to the most crucial argument of all. The foundations argue that there are very few people willing and able to do independent work and that all those worthy of support are already taken care of. Assuming for the moment that this is correct, is not a question begged? There is a cause-and-effect relationship in the foundations’ position. There are now 162 million people in this country, and proportionately there are just as many people with inherent talent, and in absolute numbers, more. If this talent is growing up in a climate which does not encourage the speculative, independent side of their nature, can the foundations who help shape that climate plead neutrality?