Mary Parker Follett's Dynamic Administration
Follett's Law of the Situation, circular response, and integration as a way to resolve conflict.
Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), American social worker and management thinker. Her lectures were published posthumously as "Dynamic Administration" (1941), edited by Metcalf and Urwick.
Follett shifted the study of organisations away from pure structure and efficiency, toward relationships, groups and conflict -- a socio-psychological approach that anticipated the Human Relations School by roughly a decade.
Resolving conflict: domination, compromise, integration
- Domination -- one side wins outright, and the loser simply waits for a chance to reverse the outcome.
- Compromise -- each side gives up part of its demand -- neither is fully satisfied, so the conflict tends to resurface.
- Integration -- the parties uncover the real interests behind their stated demands and find a solution that satisfies both without either side sacrificing. Her classic example: two people disagree over a window, one wants it open for air and the other shut against a draught -- opening a window in the next room satisfies both.
Law of the situation and circular response
- Law of the situation -- neither party simply commands the other -- both study the situation and take their orders from it. Authority, for Follett, belongs to the job and the knowledge it requires, not to rank as such.
- Circular response -- behaviour is not a straight line of stimulus and response. Each party's action changes the situation the other responds to, so relationships are continuously reconstituted -- the "dynamic" in Dynamic Administration.
- Distinguished power-with (coactive, which can grow as people cooperate) from power-over (coercive, which is a fixed, divided quantity).
Critique
- Integration assumes interests are genuinely reconcilable and that parties hold roughly equal power -- it offers little guidance for zero-sum conflicts.
- The method for actually finding the integrative solution is left fairly vague in practice.
Answer-writing cue: Follett is a strong bridge answer between the classical and human-relations schools -- use her to show administrative thought moving from rigid hierarchy toward relationships and shared authority, and cite her influence on Chester Barnard and later negotiation theory (Fisher and Ury's "principled negotiation" echoes her integration idea).
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