CONTENIDOS ACADÉMICOS Primer año EEE (BEng / MEng)

By the time Dorothea and I married, my research assistantship had been transformed into a full-time job, at $150 a month, and I was sure it would continue at least one more month.

Our research budget, funded by a university committee, had nearly run out. Clarence Ridley sent me before the committee to justify a renewal; once again, I did not question his judgment that I was a suitable delegate. The meeting was at the Shoreland Hotel, at whose bar Charles Merriam, Louis Brownlow, and others of the Olympians often congregated after workan awesome place.

Merriam, who took me to dinner before the meeting, was at his genial, disarming best. But at the meeting, I was subjected to some pretty rough questioning. Louis Wirth, the sociologist, muttered in my hearing, as he entered the room late: "What are we discussing? Oh, the Ridley and Simon stuff. Not very good, is it?"

My reaction was simply rage that these distinguished academicians could not recognize first-class work when they saw it. Of course, I did not express my anger during the meeting, but waited until I met with Dorothea afterward. She was properly sympathetic, although she may have found my self-assurance a bit startling.

The arrogance (or is it only confidence?) of the young can be impressive. But mine survived my youth.

Even today, my knee-jerk response to referees and other critics is the same: How can they be so foolish? I sometimes need a cooling-off period of hours or days before I can make a rational reply.

Our project did receive additional financing (from that committee or another). When our research monograph was finished, I began to devote my time to Ridley's organization, the International City Managers' Association (ICMA), becoming a staff member in 1938. My duties were partly editorial (as assistant editor to the monthly Public Management and the

annual Municipal Year Book), partly statistical (I gradually assumed responsibility for the statistical sections of the yearbook), and partly auctorial (writing numerous chapters for training manuals for city executives). My job in ICMA was a marvelous school in administration, my tasks as challenging as I could wish.

An Encounter with Computation

Through a course I had taken in statistics, I was aware of IBM punched-card equipment and its labor-saving capabilities. It occurred to me to try to mechanize the statistical work of the Year Book. Having discovered that the University of Chicago Bookstore had keypunch, sorting, and tabulating machines, I mastered the technology with the help of some books I found in the university library, and arranged with the bookstore to use their equipment.

Thus, while preparing the statistical tables, I enjoyed my first, prehistoric experience with computers. The calculating punch was especially important, for it taught me that a machine could be programmed

(rewired in that case) to make it do what you wanted it to doto make simple arithmetic calculations and to rearrange the columns in which information was printed.

Of course, what the calculating punch could do was very limited, and it had no internal stored program in the modern sense. You had to insert plugs attached to wires into the side of the machine so as to make the right inputs connect with the right outputs. But the seed of an idea had been planted in my mind, and from that time on I was alert to any scraps of news I encountered about the progress of calculating machines. I had no idea that 1 would find a use for them; they simply fascinated me.

Clarence Ridley

I have already said enough about Clarence Ridley to suggest that he was not an ordinary man. Educated as a civil engineer, he had served as city engineer and city manager in several communities before returning to Syracuse University for his Ph.D. He then came to Chicago as adjunct professor at the University of Chicago and director of the International City Managers' Association. He saw this organization as

pivotally located for improving local government administration, and exhibited masterly leadership and skill in exploiting the opportunity.

When he took charge of it, ICMA was a rather typical professional society, publishing a journal and holding an annual meeting that allowed city managers, always lonely in their posts (like all top

executives), to come together and commiserate with one another. Ridley created a whole series of new services that would be of value to the members. The Municipal Year Book provided information that permitted managers to compare their cities with others. A set of textbooks on municipal administration, covering almost every city service, formed the basis for correspondence courses that ICMA offered. The association also provided limited consulting services to its members, among other activities.

Ridley never forgot that the city managers were his key clientele, and his past experience made him one of them; but he also had a much broader goal of improving city government generally. City manager

government was still a minority form that had hardly penetrated the larger cities at all. The task was to build up cadres of effective professional municipal administrators, of which city managers would simply be prime examples. Fire chiefs could take the fire department administration course, whatever form of government their city had.

Ridley had an excellent sense of organizational politics. Like every professional association director, he wanted loyalty and active participation from his members, although not to the point where he turned the leadership over to them. But his skills and his rapport with members prevented any real difficulty on this dimension.

The morale of his own small staffabout half a dozen of uswas also high, for he was always presenting us with challenges and was generous in sharing credit. He had a temper, which was well under control and mainly used to express his occasional disgust with the world's foibles. He was more interested in solving problems than in placing blame on those who caused them.

He understood both the uses and the dangers of opportunism. After I had moved to Berkeley, we once had breakfast together when he was visiting the Bay area. He was describing to me some new activities he was planning. I asked, "Will the Spellman Fund approve of that?" (The Spellman Fund was, apart from membership dues, ICMA's main source of income.) He turned to me sternly, and said, "I earned my living before I ever heard of the Spellman Fund, and I think I could earn it again if they went away." I stored the lesson and usefully recalled it on a number of later occasions.

I don't know whether, or how often, Clarence Ridley was offered other positions during the years he directed ICMA. I cannot believe he did not have numerous alternative opportunities. But he understood clearly that

solid accomplishment takes timein an organization, usually many years. Solid accomplishment was what he wanted, and he was willing to take whatever time was needed.

For Ridley, the grass was always greenest on his own side of the fence. Watching him, I came to understand that well-managed organizations are powerful instruments for achieving socially important goals, and not yokes around the necks of their members. A few years later, in Administrative Behavior, I tried to explain how organizations can expand human rationality, a view quite opposed to popular

folklore in our society, which commonly sees them as dehumanizing bureaucracies.

I have portrayed Clarence Ridley as the very model of an effective administrator, because he was just that. If he had any serious shortcomings, I cannot remember them. A photograph of him is one of seven I have hung on the walls of my study. The others are my father, Charles Merriam, Chester Barnard

(businessman and author of The Functions of the Executive [1938]), Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein.

The Science of Administration

At the age of twenty-two, I was writing a major part of a volume called The Technique of Municipal Administration, which was supposed to inform experienced city managers how to run a city. Since I had had no administrative experience and had hardly even observed organizations, except for my brief

excursions to Milwaukee and Wichita and my position in ICMA, it was not immediately obvious to me what I should write. Of course, my task was not to invent a new theory but to assemble the existing knowledge, quite doable if one could write clear English.

In the field of public administration at that time (and in public and private management generally), there was nearly a consensus, nowadays referred to as "classical organization theory." You could find the core of it in Leonard White's Introduction to the Study of Public Administration (1926), and even more explicitly in Papers on the Science of Administration (1937), assembled by Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick as a bible for the staff of the President's Committee on Administrative Management.*

* This committee, consisting of Louis Brownlow (chairman), Charles Merriam, and Luther Gulick, was appointed by President Roosevelt to propose improvements in the organization of the federal government. Its report recommended, among many other things, the "six men with a passion for anonymity" who became the kernel from which grew today's Executive Office of the President. The report spawned a violent political battle between the president

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The classical theory put great stock in orderliness in organizations, for example, a clear division of labor and departmentalization based upon it, unity of command, a limited span of control for each manager.

While one could find a few mild dissents, the classical theory dominated the literature and provided the main body of lore upon which I drew for the Technique book.

In fact, the occasional deviations in the literature from the classical theory were not so much dissent as the seeds of new paradigms, one of them focused on human relations and motivation, another on decision making. Both made sense to me, and the latter, especially, resonated with my previous studies of the Milwaukee recreation programs and the measurement of city services.

It was while I was engaged in this work that I first encountered Chester Barnard's newly published The Functions of the Executive (1938), which seemed to me wholly superior to the other administrative literature of the day and fully compatible with my preference for looking at management in decision-making terms. Aided by the insights gained from Barnard, I soon realized that a little administrative experience goes a long way. Life in organizations is not very different from life elsewhere. Most of the writing on administration, including Barnard's, was based on everyday observation, not on esoteric experimental or observational techniques.

Organizations, it appeared, could be understood by applying to them what you knew of human behavior generally. Where specific experience was lacking, metaphors and analogies might fill the gap. For example, the phenomena of loyalty and identification, so central to the working of organizations, were quite visible in every school I had attended, not the least at football games. It even occurred to me that the mediating role I had sometimes played as a boy, when misunderstandings arose between my mother and grandmother, was not wholly unlike the role of the foreman as "man in the middle" between blue-collar workers and management.

But this reliance of administrative theory on common sense was not entirely acceptable to me. Systematic observation and experimentation were badly needed if this field was ever to become scientific. But until someone built a satisfactory theoretical framework, it would not be clear what kinds of empirical studies were called for.

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and Congress, comparable only to the fight of the same period over President Roosevelt's plan to "pack" the Supreme Court by enlarging it and appointing new liberal members. These battles contributed much to the crystallization of the bloc of Southern conservatives that ended for many years the dominance of liberals in the House of Representatives.

These reflections planted the first seeds of Administrative Behavior. I decided to write a theoretical doctoral thesis on decision making in administration, thereby modifying my earlier intent to write on the logic of administration. The thesis would raise many empirical questions that could be explored

subsequently in my research. This decision set the central strategy for my research in organizations over the next twenty years, but, busy with my daily tasks, I did not begin the work while I was at ICMA.

Sociability

In the summer of 1937, Ellis Kohs and I had found an apartment ($35 a month) a few blocks west of the university campus, near Cottage Grove Avenue, and had moved there from the dormitory. It was

understood that when Dorothea and I married, she would move in and Ellis would move out. After our wedding at my home in Milwaukee, we had a week's fine honeymoon at Turkey Run, a beautiful state park in Indiana, where we met two other congenial newlywed couples and ate enormous amounts of food at ridiculously low pricesthat is, at prices we could afford. Then Dorothea and I set up housekeeping.

I had already begun to learn what a talent she had for friendship, and how much her smile made up for my sometime prickliness. We soon had a wide circle of friends, many drawn from the graduate student group in political science and other social science departments, some from the Public Administration Clearing House, where ICMA was situated, some from my friends of undergraduate days, some who shared my philosophy of science interests (mostly people I had encountered in Nicholas Rashevsky's classes), and some whom we met through our liberal political activities. Our political science friends included a dozen married couples, a surprising fraction of whom remained married during the succeeding half-century.

Not many of the specifics of our social life in those years remain in my memory, and those that do are a haphazard sample. Since both of us had jobs, we generally ate out, and for a time belonged to a

cooperative eating club. We often ate lunch at the university's Commons, where we met David

Rockefeller, then a graduate student in economics. As we paid the cashier, David would sometimes buy us each a chocolate mint, keeping up the tradition of the dimes his grandfather, John D. Rockefeller so regularly passed out to strangers he encountered. David was a pleasant, bright, and unpretentious person.

We soon established a kind of salon, taking the place of the Saturday

evening discussions at Burton-Judson dormitories. More or less weekly, those friends who were especially interested in philosophy of science gathered in our apartment. Occasionally, we invited an outsider to join uson one occasion, Carnap camebut most of the participants were young graduate students, including the philosopher Herbert Bohnert, another philosopher named Carl Lienau, who carried in his coat pocket a small Hindi stone idol, a biology and medical student named Brucer, the physicist Al

Weinberg, and others. Logical positivism was the dominant, perhaps exclusive, religion in this group, and we took turns talking about our special interests or projects.

Both with and without our friends Dorothea and I also enjoyed outdoor activities, which on weekends were pretty much limited, by reasons of geography and the lack of a car, to the local Chicago beaches, the Indiana Dunes south of Chicago, and the Waukegan Dunes to the north. I have already discussed some of our more ambitious hiking ventures, such as the trip in Door County during a summer vacation.

Occasionally we rented horses for a ride in Jackson Park. In the winter we sometimes skated.

In retrospect, this period in our lives was a busy but uncomplicated time, during which Dorothea and I learned to know and enjoy each other, and through which we lived pleasantly without any master plan or serious concern for the future. There were no important branch points in the maze until 1939.

A California Junket

Ridley and I had become nationally known authorities on measuring public services, a topic of considerable interest because of the difficult financial plight of the citiesthen as now. Samuel May, director of the Bureau of Public Administration at the University of California in Berkeley, looked for Rockefeller Foundation support to continue some studies of local government that had been started in the Bureau with federal work relief (WPA) funds.

Sam May conceived the idea of getting a small grant from Stacy May^* of the Rockefeller Foundation to bring me to Berkeley in the late spring of 1938 to plan such a study and write a proposal to the

Foundation. The planning grant was awarded, paying my expenses and salary for three

* To avoid confusion, we referred to Sam May of Berkeley as ''Maybe" and Stacy May as "Maybenot."

months, and I set off on the first of my long train rides to California. I was greeted at the San Leandro depot by Dorothea's mother, whom I had not met before and, after a weekend in her home, established myself in the International House on the Berkeley campus. My mother-in-law had warned Dorothea against marrying "a mere child," but she and I soon became and remained good friends.

At Berkeley, I teamed up with Milton Chernin, the assistant director of the Bureau and a few years my senior. Together, we toiled through the summer to produce a document outlining a three-year study that would cost the Foundation the munificent total of $30,000 and would support three researchers, a

statistical assistant, and a secretary for three years. The WPA workers, some fifty strong, who had been employed on the Bureau's previous statistical studies would also be attached to the project, but paid from federal funds.

The trip was not all labor. I had my first view of the Sierra Nevada at Yosemite on Memorial Day weekend, and on another weekend drove down to Stanford University with Dorothea's mother, finding a sleepy rural campus that looked like a medieval Italian monastery basking in the summer heat and sun. As we admired the frescoes on the facade of the chapel, a string quartet practiced baroque music in the background.

Dorothea ended my several months' exile by joining me for a couple of weeks to attend her sister's wedding; then she and I drove down the coast along the recently opened highway to Big Sur, which she had visited a couple of years previously while the road was being built. She took me to Slade's Creek, near which the much publicized Esalen Institute of encounter group fame was later built, and along a trail to the edge of the ocean cliff. Affixed to the face of the cliff just below a gushing spring of steaming hot water, we found a platform on which had been installed two old-fashioned enameled bathtubs and a large wooden barrel into which water could be diverted and cooled. Mixing the cold water with the water directly from the spring, we took our baths, looking out on the Pacific Ocean from the hundred-foot height.

Precursors of California hot tubs.

When the Berkeley proposal was complete, I returned to Chicago to work for ICMA and, for a brief

period, for Public Administration Service, a nonprofit consulting service for municipalities, spun off from ICMA and directed by Donald Stone. Early in 1939, the Rockefeller Foundation made a grant for the

period, for Public Administration Service, a nonprofit consulting service for municipalities, spun off from ICMA and directed by Donald Stone. Early in 1939, the Rockefeller Foundation made a grant for the