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Institutionalization, the Ombudsman, and Bureaucracy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Larry B. Hill
Larry B. Hill
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma
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Abstract

This article proposes an authority based conception of the phenomenon of institutionalization. Whereas most social science writing on the subject focuses either upon the organization's internal structural integration (such criteria as well-boundedness, universalism, complexity, and coherence often are employed) or upon its ability to cope with environmental challenges (the concepts of adaptability and autonomy have been suggested), I propose that an organization's offensive capabilities vis à vis environmental actors be viewed as a measurement of its institutionalization.

Principally based upon fieldwork in New Zealand bolstered by additional research in Scandinavia, Britain, and Hawaii, this study focuses upon the institutionalization of the ombudsman—an increasingly popular bureaucratic control mechanism. A sociometric analysis of ombudsman-bureaucratic interaction is undertaken, and four questions are investigated: How extensive is the interaction? How consequential is the threat posed by complaints? What demands does the ombudsman make? How cooperative is the agency in responding? The investigation provides answers which are indicative of the ombudsman's successful institutionalization. That is, the office performs its mission and has established itself with the environmental actors as an authority figure.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , September 1974 , pp. 1075 - 1085
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1974

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References

1 Polsby, Nelson W., “The Institutionalization of the U. S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review, 62 (March, 1968), 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 12Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., p. 20. It should be noted that Polsby's first criterion, well-boundedness or environmental differentiation, is not strictly internal; it is related to Huntington's environmental concept of autonomy.

4 Selznick, Philip, Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), p. 17Google Scholar; Selznick's italics. On page 40 Selznick elaborates and indicates that organizations which are infused with value become “prized not as tools alone but as sources of direct personal gratification and vehicles of group integrity.”

5 Huntington, , Political Order, p. 12Google Scholar; he cites Selznick at p. 15.

6 As Eisenstadt, S. N. has observed (Essays on Comparative Institutions, New York: John Wiley, 1965, p. 187)Google Scholar: “From the very beginning, any bureaucratic organization is put in what may be called a power situation in relation to its environment and has to generate processes of power on its own behalf.”

7 This perspective is generally consistent with the “institution building” strand of literature, whose major theoretician has been Milton Esman. Influence, the extent to which the organization affects decisions in its functional area and its ability to enlarge its sphere of action, and impact or spread-effect, meaning the degree to which its values and actions become normative within the environment, are the labels given the two major criteria. Esman, Milton J. and Blaise, Hans C., Institution Building Research: The Guiding Concepts (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, 1966), pp. 6–7Google Scholar.

That paper was a product of the Inter-University Research Program in Institution Building (Indiana, Michigan State, Pittsburgh, and Syracuse Universities are the program's members). Most of its papers have been distributed in mimeographed form, but two collections have been published: Eaton, Joseph W., ed., Institution Building and Development: From Concepts to Application (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1972)Google Scholar; and Thomas, D. Woods, Potter, Harry R., Miller, William L., and Aveni, Adrian F., eds., Institution Building: A Model for Applied Social Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1972)Google Scholar. Esman's indebtedness to Selznick's conception of institutionalization is acknowledged in “The Elements of Institution Building,” in Eaton, p. 28.

8 The present focus upon the organization's offensive capability parallels Ralph Braibanti's discussion of “permeative dynamism” and the “propelled rediffusion of norms from one institution to others.” “External Inducement of Political-Administrative Development: An Institutional Study,” in Braibanti, Ralph, ed., Political and Administrative Development (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1969), p. 55Google Scholar.

9 Esman discusses linkages and transactions in “The Elements of Institution Building,” pp. 28–34. For an interpretation of institutionalization as an exchange process see Eisenstadt, Essays on Comparative Institutions, chapter 1, part 1.

10 On the national level the ombudsman has been transferred not only throughout Scandinavia and to New Zealand, but also to Great Britain, Guyana, Tanzania, Northern Ireland, Israel, Mauritius, France, and Fiji. New Constitutions in Bangladesh, Greece, Pakistan, and the Philippines provide for the office. Also, West Germany has a military ombudsman, and Canada has a “Commissioner of Official Languages.” On the sub-national level, three American states (Hawaii, Nebraska, and Iowa), six Canadian provinces (Alberta, New Brunswick, Quebec, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Saskatchewan), and three Australian states (Western Australia, South Australia, and Victoria) have ombudsmen. Such cities as Zurich, Switzerland; Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel; Dayton, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; San Jose, California; and Kansas City, Missouri have municipal ombudsmen. At least one hundred ombudsmen exist on the campuses of American colleges and universities.

Merely keeping track of the plethora of ombudsman proposals has become a major undertaking. The Ombudsman Committee of the American Bar Association, which has taken on that chore, reported in 1973 news about ombudsmen of various types in ninety different non-American jurisdictions, mainly national ones. In addition to several proposals at the American federal level, by 1973 ombudsman bills had been introduced into the legislatures of all but eight of the American states. Bernard Frank, “American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law, Ombudsman Committee Development Report, July 1, 1972-June 30, 1973,” Annual Reports of Committees: Section of Administrative Law, American Bar Association Vol. 10 (1973).

11 See Hill, Larry B., “International Transfer of the Ombudsman,” in Merritt, Richard L., ed., Communication in International Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 295–317Google Scholar. The volume edited by Rowat, Donald C., The Ombudsman: Citizens' Defender (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, and London: Allen and Unwin, 1965)Google Scholar, has been an important document in the ombudsman movement. Two other such documents are the papers presented in 1967 at Columbia University's American Assembly, which are collected in Ombudsmen for American Government? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), ed. Anderson, Stanley V.Google Scholar; and the papers in “The Ombudsman or Citizens' Defender: A Modern Institution,” ed. by Peel, Roy V., The Annals, 377 (May, 1968)Google Scholar.

12 Anderson, Stanley V., “Ombudsman,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1972, XVI, 960Google Scholar.

13 For an explication of the following conception of the ombudsman, see Hill, Larry B., Ombudsmen, Bureaucracy, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 1975)Google Scholar, chapter 1. See also Donald C. Rowat's rather legalistic listing of the ombudsman's “essential features.” “Preface to Second Edition,” in The Ombudsman: Citizens' Defender, rev. ed., ed. Rowat, D. C. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. xxivGoogle Scholar; and Stanley V. Anderson's functionally based “essential characteristics” in Ombudsman Papers: American Experience and Proposals (Berkeley: University of California, Institute of Governmental Studies, 1969), pp. 3–4Google Scholar.

14 A perusal of even the titles of the rapidly expanding ombudsman literature clearly reveals its normative thrust. Counting only the items from scholarly or semi-scholarly sources, Stanley Anderson's 1969 bibliography contains nearly 250 listings, and it now is quite incomplete. See Ombudsman Papers, pp. 381–407. The most influential early popularizing article was Abraham, Henry J., “A Peoples' Watchdog Against Abuse of Power,” Public Administration Review 20 (Summer, 1960), 152–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 The inaccessibility of files for extended research does not, of course, mean that no valuable work can be done. The ombudsmen themselves provide useful data in their annual reports, and they often have cooperated with scholars by granting interviews and sometimes providing additional statistical data. The classic comparative study remains Gellhorn's, WalterOmbudsmen and Others: Citizens' Protectors in Nine Countries (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Britain's Parliamentary Commissioner, who took office after Gellhorn's book was completed, is analyzed in Gwyn, William B., “The British PCA: ‘Ombudsman or Ombudsmouse?’,” Journal of Politics 35 (February, 1973), 45–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

The University of California's Ombudsman Activities Project, sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity (Stanley V. Anderson Principal Investigator), which has provided technical assistance to the new American ombudsmen, is not hampered by such research limitations. See especially John E. Moore's forthcoming monograph on the Hawaiian ombudsman.

16 Complaints relating to the armed services, those within the jurisdiction of a court or an administrative tribunal, and complaints against the Public Trustee and the Crown Law Office are specifically excluded. Implicitly excluded are complaints against Cabinet ministers' decisions (although departmental recommendations to them are included), complaints against government corporations, and most complaints against local authorities. Inmates of institutions may submit sealed complaints. For overviews of the New Zealand ombudsman see Gellhorn, Chapter 3; and Hill, Larry B., “The New Zealand Ombudsman's Authority System,” Political Science 20 (September, 1968), 40–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 New Zealand's percentage of working age population employed by its government agencies and enterprises is the world's highest. See Russett, Bruce, ed., World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 70Google Scholar.

18 Hill, Larry B., Parliament and the Ombudsman in New Zealand (Norman: University of Oklahoma, Bureau of Government Research, 1974), pp. 90–103Google Scholar.

19 For analyses of the complainants and their complaints see Hill, Larry B., “Complaining to the Ombudsman as an Urban Phenomenon: An Analysis of the New Zealand Ombudsman's Clients,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 8 (September, 1972), 123–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Larry B. Hill, “Socio-Psychological Dimensions of Complaints to Ombudsmen: A New Zealand Analysis” (paper presented at the meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois), September 7–11, 1971.

20 In about one-third of those cases the ombudsman added importance to the investigation to the extent of asking the department for an explanation of their policy.

21 Table 2, which deals with a most important variable, offers an opportunity for a statistical test of the sample (the sample figures are best compared with those for 1968 in parenthesis in the Table). When the frequencies for each classification which were observed in the sample are compared with the frequencies expected—because they represent the actual classifications—and the standard one-sample (or 1 × n) chi-square was applied, it was determined that the differences were not significant. According to the .05 criterion, the sample is representative of the universe, (one-sample X 2 = 3.98, d.f. = 5, p. > .50).

22 An important recent development is that increasing numbers of complaints are “rectified.” Whereas in earlier years only 60 to 80 per cent of the total “justified” complaints were “rectified,” the figure has been over 90 per cent since 1971.

23 Eisenstadt, , Essays on Comparative Institutions, p. 32Google Scholar.

24 Huntington, Samuel P., “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics 17 (April, 1965), 386–430CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 These matters are treated in Hill, “The International Transfer of Political Institutions,” chapter VII.

26 The data on the European ombudsmen were gathered during the summer of 1971, and the Hawaiian materials were obtained the following summer. These impressionistic observations are elaborated upon in Hill, Ombudsmen, Bureaucracy, and Democracy.

27 See Hill, , “International Transfer of the Ombudsman,” pp. 309–312Google Scholar.

28 See Hill, Larry B., “Affect and Interaction in an Ambiguous Authority Relationship: New Zealand's Bureaucrats and the Ombudsman.” Journal of Comparative Administration 4 (May, 1972), 35–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Weeks, Kent M., “Public Servants in the New Zealand Ombudsman System,” Public Administration Review 20 (November/December, 1969), 633–638CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Ascher's, Charles S. caveat is well taken; “The Grievance Man or Ombudsmania?” Public Administration Review, 27 (June, 1967), 175CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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