Knowledge And Decisions

The lengths to which this can be carried in practice may be illustrated by the fact that even under the extreme hierarchic subordination of slavery, there were often skilled, experienced or trusted slaves whose judgments on major economic decisions were relied on by slaveowners to a greater extent than the judgments of the white overseer⁸ — so much so that a disaffected coalition of such slaves could cost on overseer his job.⁹ The slaveowner’s overriding interest in the economic efficiency of his enterprise was thus sufficient to cause him to violate both the principle of hierarchical subordination and the prevailing racial ideology, in order to appropriate the gains arising from the advantages of informal relationships.

Decisions made through informal relationships can be more readily individualized than in an organization bound by its own rules. A child who is ill, grieving or otherwise temporarily impaired in whatever way, can be given special attention and exemptions from normal requirements incrementally — to precisely the extent, for just so long, and for only those activities to which his special needs require, in the judgments of his parents or siblings. He can be “special” for some purposes but not for others, for to be too special would impair his own personal relationships with others, as well as the general life of the family. Formal organizations have parallel attempts to allow for illness or injury, for example, but its benefits are generally available to people who fall within categories verbally described in advance, rather than according to an ex post judgment of the overall nature and severity of their individual disability. Thus, for example, a worker suffering a minor injury of a sort described in the rules may receive a windfall gain, while another worker psychologically devastated by the ending of a love affair is expected to continue carrying out all duties as if nothing had happened. Here it is not a question of a misjudgement by management — which would be paralleled by similar parental misjudgments — but of the inherent anomalies of hierarchical organizations. Again, in some instances incumbent officials may choose to somehow modify organizational rules in order to obtain the gains of informal relationships but this modification is not inherent in hierarchical organization, is in fact in conflict with it, and consequently its scope is likely to be more severely limited the more hierarchical the organization. Soldiers in combat are not given time off after receiving “Dear John” letters.

Informal decision making thus allows a fungibility of highly disparate factors in terms of their net effects, viewed retrospectively. The proverbial “advantage of hindsight” can be utilized by informal processes. But formal organizational decision making tends toward a prospective categorical specification of factors to be taken into account in specific, programmed ways. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of informal relationships tend to be greatest in decisions which turn on individual personal or circumstantial differences of a sort which cannot be explicitly or exhaustively specified in advance, which may result from too wide and varied an assortment of influences to list in advance, or even to convey in any logically compelling way after the fact, and which require a large amount of highly individual information at low cost.