EMOTIONS
IN
COMMAND
BIOLOGY, BUREAUCRACY, AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION
FRANK KEMP SALTER
With a new introduction by the author
First published 1995 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 1995 by Frank Kemp Salter.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2007035708
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salter, Frank K.
Emotions in command : biology, bureaucracy, and cultural evolution / Frank Kemp Salter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-0671-8
1. Social control. 2. Organizational behavior. 3. Hierarchies. 4. Dominance (Psychology) I. Title.
HM661.S275 2008
303.34dc22
2007035708
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0671-8 (pbk)
To my parents Nora and Frank,
for their ultimate contribution;
And to my wife Sibylle,
for her proximate forbearance
HIRAM CATON
Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University, Brisbane
I welcome the opportunity to provide some introductory remarks to this unusual book. I was closely involved in Frank Salters study of social interaction in organizational settings until 1990. His doctoral thesis had aimed high. It was meant to establish the conceptual and observational basis of an ethological approach to rule-governed behaviour. Referees enthusiastically recommended publication, but Salter undertook new observational studies, continued his wide reading, and located to the Max Planck Centre for Human Ethology, where he benefited from an unusually rich research environment. I had seen none of the additions and revisions until they reached me a short time ago. With fresh eyes I examined the final draft, which persuaded me that this study inaugurates the ethological study of organizational behaviour.
The suggestion that bureaucracy might have a significant biological component is not a thought that strikes most social scientists as obvious. This despite the fact that organizations are learning a new set of rules to accommodate the entry of significant numbers of women into formerly male workplaces. Some rules were meant to compensate slippage on the career ladder that women experience as mothers. Others are designed to disrupt male coalitions (the Old Boy network), to eliminate hazing of women who enter spaces that men perceive to be their own (harassment) and to diminish courtship and conquest behaviours in the workplace (sexual harassment). The easy informality of the turned on sixties has been replaced by a new austerity that guards personal space, purges language of undignified expressions, taboos displays of prowess, and replaces miniskirts by loose-cut apparel or power dressing.
For the human ethologist it is a stroke of good fortune to happen to be around when so great a revision of the rules of verbal expression and deportment are being implemented. The process of behaviour modelling or role construction is exposed to the nerves and in respect to behaviours whose body language is rich.
Salter resists the temptation to begin his exposition with the ethology of gender-neutral interpersonal interactions. That neutrality is an add-on to another neutrality requisite to any bureaucracy at all impartiality in the selection of personnel and impartiality in operations. His discussion begins with current sociobiological investigation of the trend toward kin favouritism. Nepotism is the institutional expression of the tribal, ethnic, and religious organization of ambient society. In the Third World, it is the acknowledged obstacle to the construction of effective bureaucracies. The strength of the nepotistic tendency is seen in the fact that its vestige, the spoils system, was not eliminated from public service institutions in the Western world until the introduction of the merit system a little over a century ago. Even then it is compromised by party allegiance, which in former communist societies was of decisive influence.
As he explains in his review of stratagems that historically have been used to restrain nepotism, this predisposition is well-founded in the sociobiological theory of kin selection. There is a substantial literature interpreting hunter-gatherer and chiefdom social practices as rule-based reinforcements of kin-selection mechanisms. The rules do not merely duplicate biology. As the group expands in size beyond the effective range of kin selection (about the distance of third cousins), the rules also provide instructions for composing group identities based on faiththe belief that the group benefits from the compliance of each of its members to an authority (the headman or council). Empirical evidence identifies this trend toward reciprocal altruism, but it also shows moiety relapses into taking the bird in the hand in preference to faith in the long-term reciprocities obtained through identification with large group benefit.
This is the contemporary biological formulation of the age-old problem of the origin of the state as a ranked society that creates public goods (security, prosperity), but which distributes benefits unequally according to caste, class, or clan. How is it possible to break the centrifugal force of kin selection? Historically, the answer is that centralization occurs through warfare. War establishes the identity of a non-kin group as a hostile host threatening the resources or existence of each household. Struggle with the outgroup provides tangible proofs of the ingroups identity as a reciprocally altruistic group. But then the military regiment established to oppose competing outgroups is turned upon the ingroup to enforce compliance where faith in long-term reciprocal benefits fails (as it invariably does).
This is the solution to the problem of the origin of political order emanating from contemporary research on the origin of pristine states. For Salter it is not a solution that provides a basis for an adequate theory of organizations because it does not account for the key feature of complexity voluntary compliance to recognized authority. Military bureaucracies are illustrative. The rules of military regiment have ever mandated extreme sanctions against defectors. But an army based merely on the soldiers fearing his commander more than the enemy would desert at the first opportunity. The construction and maintenance of bureaucracies must invoke a positive force that countervails not only the kin-selection centrifuge. It must also cultivate capacities for self-denial and self-sacrifice.
Contemporary organization theory has a simple answer to this puzzle: service is motivated by the material and social rewards of service. This is undoubtedly correct. Bureaucracies acknowledge it in justifying their relative shares of the tax dollar. They argue that all participate in the benefits of public goods collectively created by public service agencies. The same argument is used to justify the costs of scientific research, of health delivery systems, and so on.
