- Email: [email protected]
Men and management in contemporary africa
74
WORLD
DEVELOPMENT
months before his fall). Figueroa applies Webb’s material on Peru to show how the military’s reforms are not touching the real problem: they essentially represent transfers within the top’ quartile of the income distribution. Only the paper on Colombia is optimistic: Urrutia and Sandoval find Colombian fiscal policy to be mildly progressive and are hopeful that small changes can gradually significantly modify Colombian economic and political structure. The one paper which explores a hypothetical situation for the future is that by Tokman on Venezuela. This is the only full exploration of an important aspect: the impact of redistribution on the pattern of demand and therefore employment; he also examines the effect on employment of alternative policies on technology. His analysis-which he stresses is very tentative and is limited only to the industrial sector-contradicts the usual assumption that consumer durables are more capital intensive than non-durables, and shows, as others have found, that the effect of redistribution on employment is rather slight given the present technological structure. But he also finds evidence of considerable flexibility in regard to techniques of production, and shows that with a different policy on technology the effect of redistribution becomes much more marked. A number of themes recur throughout the book. One is the inadequacy both of Marxist categories and of ‘functional’ income distribution data in the face of privileged groups of workers (who win control of the instruments of state policy and achieve a position of exploitation vis-&is other workers and even small owners-Foxley and Munoz) and of large sections of self-employed with very limited resources. The same facts point to the uselessness of wage policy and the need to focus rather on the determinants of productivity. Also stressed throughout is the role of the state as determining the primary income distribution-an aspect seen as more important than its role as modifier of the distribution ex post. The state’s role in determining distribution is held to be true both in a broad sense and more specifically in its effect on relative prices and every aspect of the economic structure. Only Urrutia and Sandoval reject this emphasis, in order to carry out a more traditional study of the ex post redistributive effect of fiscal policy, in a paper rather out of tune with the rest of the book-and in fact something of an anticlimax as the final paper.
The book is divided into two sections. The first part looks at the actual structure of income. It.provides a Spanish version of two of the most original pieces of recent research on the topic-Fishlow’s study of Brazil and Webb’s work on Peru. Both comprise original attempts at measuring income distribution and detailed studies of the different groups of recipients. Both stress how far the problem of poverty is centred not in the dropouts or exceptions but in the mainstream of income recipients in the rural sector. Fishlow-in common with all the studies in this volume which consider it-finds income distribution worsening over time. By contrast, the three interesting papers on socialist countries show a very different picture, although what they principally reveal are the difficulties of any kind of comparison between capitalist and non-capitalist systems in this regard. This section also attempts to ‘explain’ income distribution. Fishlow explores the role of education, age, region and economic sector. He finds all significant but is left with a large unexplained residual. Weisskoff examines the role of a changing balance between urban and rural sectors, if the sectors are characterized by different income distributions. Adelman and Morris assemble data on forty-three countries and examine the role of thirty-one economic, social and political variables. The problem throughout is the attribution of causality: in few of the relationships established can one-way causality be indisputably claimed. The second part of the book takes up the question of possible redistributive strategies. In contains a number of though necessarily particularly interesting papers, tentative. The weakest are those which restrict themselves to generalities, though this does not apply to the paper by Ffrench Davis, which is a clear discussion of the necessary qualities of a successful redistributive policy; he has also a succinct diScussion of the relationship between growth and redistribution. The context of this section of the book is given by the editor’s hopeful assumption that at any rate in the countries of the southern cone of Latin America the composition of classes and the structure of power has reached a sufficient degree of complexity that a develop ment strategy ‘is difficult to sustain if it is not capable of generating a move towards more equal income distribution’ (p. 20-note the date of the Conference). The analyses of ongoing supposedly redistributive policies are of necessity pessimistic. One of the most interesting papers, by Foxley and Munoz, looks at the macroeconomic consistency of Allende’s policy, and finds it seriously deficient (the Conference took place six
Men and Management in Contemporary 1974. Pp. xiii + 189. E4.95.)
Africa.
Swingeingly outspoken and thoughtfully constructive, partly rebel and more than a shade paternalist, Mr. Onyemelukwe offers a book, which is important not merely because it is written by a Nigerian about Nigerian situations, but, more saliently, because it is written by a practising industrial top manager, who has investigated and reflected beyond formal theory, conventional wisdom and the rules of thumb of day-to-day manage-
Institute of Economics Oxford.
BY
c:.
C. Onyemelukwe.
Rosemary and Statistics,
(London:
Longman
Thorp
Group,
ment. Briefly, Onyemelukwe finds Western patterns of industrial organization and relations (as translated to ill-suited to the indigenous Nigeria and elsewhere), cultures of Africa. Organization is based excessively-the key word-on the objectives of production and profit, so that the resolution of conflict between groups of co-operants becomes the major function of industrial relations. Rejecting the suggestion that there might be
BOOK REVIEWS
no alternative to the Western models, Onyemelukwe cites the Japanese pattern and goes on to develop a ‘community concept of business’ for African situations.’ However, he derives his model not merely from reactions to the West and from comparisons with Japan: having established that one alien mode of work fits the workers ill, he is not about to use another as a basis for remedy. Instead, he has studied actual Nigerian workers in different kinds and sizes of industrial enterprise-public and private, ranging from ten employees or less to 2,000 and more, with products from metals to gases, and scattered all over Nigeria. From them he has drawn a set of characteristics, which are African and which must be catered for by any organization wanting Africans to work for it productively and contentedly. (That these features may not be uniquely African, but possibly common to many human societies is not to the author’s point. What matters is that they are African and relevant to people working with Africans.) The outlines of the ‘model’ African are not in themselves new, but here they are put together in a fresh identi-kit. The African worker, first of all, does not see that he has a contractual and limited relationship with his employer: he looks for something more personal and more intimate. His employer has a dual role: as a neighbour in need of help he is obliged to his employee, and as a person or institution of superior resources he accepts his empioyee into protection and so becomes responsible for his total welfare and security, which naturally includes his total extended family. The employer’s obligation, then, is to provide a wage which does not so much reward productivity as cover need. The extension of the obligation is to perpetuate it through indefinite employment, and, since wage depends on need not performance, the perpetuation is independent of incompetence or inefficiency and even of damage caused through them. Dismissal should follow only on grievous violations of the human rules of such a relationship, for example, for theft, dishonesty or disobedience. Here enters a second major facet of the ‘African’ worker: he does not consider himself responsible for his own capacities, training, skill or efficiency. They are ‘given’ to him either by his fate, or in the case of training, by his employer. Inefficiency, incompetence, even carelessness are beyond the individual’s own control. Training has a special sense: it does not include guidance on-the-job, but only such instruction as is given under extraordinary circumstances and leads to an improvement m status and emoluments. If it is not given, the African feels under no obligation to acquire the skills even by asking questions of his supervisor. Hence, everything required for the job must be explicitly and formally taught to the African worker. This detachment overlaps into the worker’s stance towards the running of the firm: he is not interested in participative management, being content to leave management to the managers. However, he is concerned that the pay and privileges of management should not be excessively greater than his own; and that his own should be adequate. Interwoven is the African’s sensitivity to his responsibilities to his wider family. On the one hand, he expects his employer to help him meet them; On the other, he is fearful that colleagues in more influential positions will help their relatives at his expense. Consequently, he wants to see openness in
75
management and a free frankness in distributing information. Indifference to having a say in management is accompanied by an indifference to incentives which stress competition and individualism. In the social background of the African worker individualism and mobility by competition are suppressed. Instead, there is an expectation of communal mobility by age or seniority group: promotion is looked for on grounds not of performance but of length of service. Differences of ability, between members of a seniority group are recognized, but the abler are expected to support and supplement the weaker in maintaining the gap of respect and privilege between their group and the succeeding junior group. It follows that, since age and seniority are the expected criteria of advancement, the African worker is uncomfortable both when young men are appointed to senior posts by reason of superior pre-career qualification; and when outsiders are similarly imported by reason of superior performance elsewhere. It also follows that there is a strong proclivity to conform to the prevailing standards of work-mates and, on the other hand, a distaste for eccentricity, whether of behaviour or of ability. In the organization of work the African is much more concerned with process than with product or achievement. He is happier working in groups with much contact and interaction, than operating as a more or less lonely unit on a machine or task. Moreover, his pace of work cannot be forced: Onyemelukwe says, ‘There is therefore a reaction amounting to almost complete rebellion to schemes which eliminate a slow, leisurely work arrangement’. Finally, women in Africa are accorded lower status, so that African men do not take well to being ordered about by women. To suit this ‘African profile’ Onyemelukwe offers his ‘community concept’ of industrial organization. It is based on close interpersonal relationships and group interactions welded by a feeling of security and harmony on the part of all members, within a framework of strict rules to promote the objectives of the community as a whole. The structure of management would be settled by a public share-out of authority and privilege, with the guiding principle that approachability, informality and personalized contact should be facilitated by the pattern of hierarchy. The organization of work would be by groups. The choice of technology would be determined then by the sociology of the prospective workers. Promotion would be mainly from within existing ranks and determined by a balance between length of service and the opinions of the various groups affected. If it were necessary to fill a senior position by external recruitment, the dominant criteria of selection would hinge on traits of character-for compatibility with the community-rather than on ability, educational attainments or performance elsewhere. (No suggestion is made for coping with a competitive market while utilizing leisurely work arrangements, but doubtless examples
1. I use the world ‘African’ because the author judges that his experience and study in Nigeria is sufficiently close to his observations elsewhere in Africa to justify a term embracing the entire continent south of the Sahara.
WORLD
76
could be cited in the West and elsewhere. Nor is anything said about the place of women in industry.) The soundness of this profile-and therefore of the structure designed to accommodate it-is threatened, however, by the contrasting profile of the African manager. Onyemelukwe is very hard on his colleagues. Where they should be like chiefs in their villages, sources of help, inspiration and encouragement to the rest of the establishment, they have instead gladly entered the ranks of the elite and deliberately separated themselves from their people. They have assiduously aped the expatriates in manners, life-styles and methods of management. On the other hand, they have not been intelligent enough to grasp the substance behind Western ways and so have suffered a psychological dislocation. ‘Hence’, declares the author, ‘the educated African today is at the same time both scientific and prescientific and hence ultimately ascientific, amoral and opportunistic.’ Two poles are presented: the African worker (uneducated, bound by the culture of his fathers), and the African manager (educated but not liberated, essentially disenfranchised in two worlds). One has to ask whether there is nothing in between. For by the author’s own showing, in most of the firms he has studied, very small percentages of the workers are uneducated. Most have completed primary education, which means that they have spent a minimum of six years in school, and probably more, since they were evidently not the cream of their school classes. It would be difficult to believe that they were not affected in some way by their schooling, which, whatever else it might have been, was certainly individualistic in its competitiveness. Ranking and promotion by ability and merit would scarcely be strange. Conformity, the reluctance to question, the notion of authority by age, may well all have been reinforced. Nevertheless, responsibility for one’s own work and for working out one’s own answers would also have been inculcated. Goodly percentages of the workers-as many as 66 per cent in one firm-had had some secondary schooling, and a few in a few firms had actually completed the secondary school leaving certificate. Would such people genuinely regard themselves as on a par with primary school leavers or with the unschooled? It is perhaps more probable that they would try to identify themselves with the managers, who had made it, where they had tried and failed. Their resentment of the African manager’s airs might be a case more of sour grapes than
DEVELOPMENT
of offended egalitarianism. In lumping the workers in one bag and the managers in another-despite his data-Onyemelukwe the sociologist has reverted to Onyemelukwe the general manager. For the decision-maker finds rules of thumb handier to use that the gradations of a spectrum. This is not to deny that many will recognize some truth in the stereotypes: it is merely to question whether two stereotypes are enough and whether the analyses of workers and manager, of markets and politics, have been sufficiently fine to justify the ‘community concept of industrial organisation’ for all of Africa. It is worth a few lines more to note what is said about trades unions. Consistently with his view of Western patterns of industrial relations, Onyemelukwe believes that the form of trades unionism transplanted to Africa is inappropriate. The workers do not have faith in a union, except as an instrument of last resort for forcing employers to be reasonable. Only where relations between management and workers were poor, were union memberships found to be strong. Onyemelukwe believes that industrial or crafts unions in Africa suffer from the fact that they are outsiders to particular firms and therefore concerned only in time of trouble. He advocates the adoption of enterprise unions, which would of course round out his concept of the enterprise community. Whatever the criticisms one might make of iMen und Management in Contemporary Africa, it is an interesting, stimulating and even absorbing book. The evenhandedness of its slaps at managers-expatriate and African-at workers and at trades unions should mollify the resentments that might be provoked and might even help some managers to become better at their jobs. Because it was not to the author’s purpose, I have deliberately refrained from making comparisons with other countries. I cannot resist, however, adding one quotation to echo the old truth that no part of the human race is an island unto itself: ‘In Nigeria today, few people work as hard as they could. Their unwillingness shows that something is wrong, that people do not yet accept their part in industry as a constructive; worthwhile element of existence, that they are bored, unresponsive, discontented, frustrated and suspicious.’ John Oxenham Institute of Development University of Sussex.
Deepening in Economic Development. By Edward Press, 1973. Pp. xii + 269. Cloth E3.45, paper E1.60.)
Financial
This book gets off to a bad start. The third paragraph of the preface reads as follows: The substance and spirit of rhe book may have been affected too much by the author’s sample of experiences. A different sample of lagging economies and leading ones might have inspired a different essay, even a testament to the virtues of centralism and contrived markets, to the vices of finance and of ‘market forces’. The odds go the other way: economic incentives and constraints are so much the same everywhere that a different exposure would confirm views set down in the pages ahead.
The fears aroused by this passage are rapidly confirmed. Chapter 1 begins with a clear statement of intent
S.
Studies,
Shaw. (New York: Oxford
University
(which is fair enough): ‘The theme of this book is that the financial sector of an economy does matter in economic development’. But this is followed by an amazing set of statements, for example: Interest rates are the relative prices that have most pervasive relevance to economic decisions. (p. 3) In all cases [‘shallow finance’1 has stopped or gravely retarded the development process. A new strategy that has the effect, among others, of ‘deepening’ finance-a strategy of financial liberalisation-has invariably renewed development. (pp. 3.4)
In
short,
the
book
is a statement
of
faith
in a
WORLD
DEVELOPMENT
months before his fall). Figueroa applies Webb’s material on Peru to show how the military’s reforms are not touching the real problem: they essentially represent transfers within the top’ quartile of the income distribution. Only the paper on Colombia is optimistic: Urrutia and Sandoval find Colombian fiscal policy to be mildly progressive and are hopeful that small changes can gradually significantly modify Colombian economic and political structure. The one paper which explores a hypothetical situation for the future is that by Tokman on Venezuela. This is the only full exploration of an important aspect: the impact of redistribution on the pattern of demand and therefore employment; he also examines the effect on employment of alternative policies on technology. His analysis-which he stresses is very tentative and is limited only to the industrial sector-contradicts the usual assumption that consumer durables are more capital intensive than non-durables, and shows, as others have found, that the effect of redistribution on employment is rather slight given the present technological structure. But he also finds evidence of considerable flexibility in regard to techniques of production, and shows that with a different policy on technology the effect of redistribution becomes much more marked. A number of themes recur throughout the book. One is the inadequacy both of Marxist categories and of ‘functional’ income distribution data in the face of privileged groups of workers (who win control of the instruments of state policy and achieve a position of exploitation vis-&is other workers and even small owners-Foxley and Munoz) and of large sections of self-employed with very limited resources. The same facts point to the uselessness of wage policy and the need to focus rather on the determinants of productivity. Also stressed throughout is the role of the state as determining the primary income distribution-an aspect seen as more important than its role as modifier of the distribution ex post. The state’s role in determining distribution is held to be true both in a broad sense and more specifically in its effect on relative prices and every aspect of the economic structure. Only Urrutia and Sandoval reject this emphasis, in order to carry out a more traditional study of the ex post redistributive effect of fiscal policy, in a paper rather out of tune with the rest of the book-and in fact something of an anticlimax as the final paper.
The book is divided into two sections. The first part looks at the actual structure of income. It.provides a Spanish version of two of the most original pieces of recent research on the topic-Fishlow’s study of Brazil and Webb’s work on Peru. Both comprise original attempts at measuring income distribution and detailed studies of the different groups of recipients. Both stress how far the problem of poverty is centred not in the dropouts or exceptions but in the mainstream of income recipients in the rural sector. Fishlow-in common with all the studies in this volume which consider it-finds income distribution worsening over time. By contrast, the three interesting papers on socialist countries show a very different picture, although what they principally reveal are the difficulties of any kind of comparison between capitalist and non-capitalist systems in this regard. This section also attempts to ‘explain’ income distribution. Fishlow explores the role of education, age, region and economic sector. He finds all significant but is left with a large unexplained residual. Weisskoff examines the role of a changing balance between urban and rural sectors, if the sectors are characterized by different income distributions. Adelman and Morris assemble data on forty-three countries and examine the role of thirty-one economic, social and political variables. The problem throughout is the attribution of causality: in few of the relationships established can one-way causality be indisputably claimed. The second part of the book takes up the question of possible redistributive strategies. In contains a number of though necessarily particularly interesting papers, tentative. The weakest are those which restrict themselves to generalities, though this does not apply to the paper by Ffrench Davis, which is a clear discussion of the necessary qualities of a successful redistributive policy; he has also a succinct diScussion of the relationship between growth and redistribution. The context of this section of the book is given by the editor’s hopeful assumption that at any rate in the countries of the southern cone of Latin America the composition of classes and the structure of power has reached a sufficient degree of complexity that a develop ment strategy ‘is difficult to sustain if it is not capable of generating a move towards more equal income distribution’ (p. 20-note the date of the Conference). The analyses of ongoing supposedly redistributive policies are of necessity pessimistic. One of the most interesting papers, by Foxley and Munoz, looks at the macroeconomic consistency of Allende’s policy, and finds it seriously deficient (the Conference took place six
Men and Management in Contemporary 1974. Pp. xiii + 189. E4.95.)
Africa.
Swingeingly outspoken and thoughtfully constructive, partly rebel and more than a shade paternalist, Mr. Onyemelukwe offers a book, which is important not merely because it is written by a Nigerian about Nigerian situations, but, more saliently, because it is written by a practising industrial top manager, who has investigated and reflected beyond formal theory, conventional wisdom and the rules of thumb of day-to-day manage-
Institute of Economics Oxford.
BY
c:.
C. Onyemelukwe.
Rosemary and Statistics,
(London:
Longman
Thorp
Group,
ment. Briefly, Onyemelukwe finds Western patterns of industrial organization and relations (as translated to ill-suited to the indigenous Nigeria and elsewhere), cultures of Africa. Organization is based excessively-the key word-on the objectives of production and profit, so that the resolution of conflict between groups of co-operants becomes the major function of industrial relations. Rejecting the suggestion that there might be
BOOK REVIEWS
no alternative to the Western models, Onyemelukwe cites the Japanese pattern and goes on to develop a ‘community concept of business’ for African situations.’ However, he derives his model not merely from reactions to the West and from comparisons with Japan: having established that one alien mode of work fits the workers ill, he is not about to use another as a basis for remedy. Instead, he has studied actual Nigerian workers in different kinds and sizes of industrial enterprise-public and private, ranging from ten employees or less to 2,000 and more, with products from metals to gases, and scattered all over Nigeria. From them he has drawn a set of characteristics, which are African and which must be catered for by any organization wanting Africans to work for it productively and contentedly. (That these features may not be uniquely African, but possibly common to many human societies is not to the author’s point. What matters is that they are African and relevant to people working with Africans.) The outlines of the ‘model’ African are not in themselves new, but here they are put together in a fresh identi-kit. The African worker, first of all, does not see that he has a contractual and limited relationship with his employer: he looks for something more personal and more intimate. His employer has a dual role: as a neighbour in need of help he is obliged to his employee, and as a person or institution of superior resources he accepts his empioyee into protection and so becomes responsible for his total welfare and security, which naturally includes his total extended family. The employer’s obligation, then, is to provide a wage which does not so much reward productivity as cover need. The extension of the obligation is to perpetuate it through indefinite employment, and, since wage depends on need not performance, the perpetuation is independent of incompetence or inefficiency and even of damage caused through them. Dismissal should follow only on grievous violations of the human rules of such a relationship, for example, for theft, dishonesty or disobedience. Here enters a second major facet of the ‘African’ worker: he does not consider himself responsible for his own capacities, training, skill or efficiency. They are ‘given’ to him either by his fate, or in the case of training, by his employer. Inefficiency, incompetence, even carelessness are beyond the individual’s own control. Training has a special sense: it does not include guidance on-the-job, but only such instruction as is given under extraordinary circumstances and leads to an improvement m status and emoluments. If it is not given, the African feels under no obligation to acquire the skills even by asking questions of his supervisor. Hence, everything required for the job must be explicitly and formally taught to the African worker. This detachment overlaps into the worker’s stance towards the running of the firm: he is not interested in participative management, being content to leave management to the managers. However, he is concerned that the pay and privileges of management should not be excessively greater than his own; and that his own should be adequate. Interwoven is the African’s sensitivity to his responsibilities to his wider family. On the one hand, he expects his employer to help him meet them; On the other, he is fearful that colleagues in more influential positions will help their relatives at his expense. Consequently, he wants to see openness in
75
management and a free frankness in distributing information. Indifference to having a say in management is accompanied by an indifference to incentives which stress competition and individualism. In the social background of the African worker individualism and mobility by competition are suppressed. Instead, there is an expectation of communal mobility by age or seniority group: promotion is looked for on grounds not of performance but of length of service. Differences of ability, between members of a seniority group are recognized, but the abler are expected to support and supplement the weaker in maintaining the gap of respect and privilege between their group and the succeeding junior group. It follows that, since age and seniority are the expected criteria of advancement, the African worker is uncomfortable both when young men are appointed to senior posts by reason of superior pre-career qualification; and when outsiders are similarly imported by reason of superior performance elsewhere. It also follows that there is a strong proclivity to conform to the prevailing standards of work-mates and, on the other hand, a distaste for eccentricity, whether of behaviour or of ability. In the organization of work the African is much more concerned with process than with product or achievement. He is happier working in groups with much contact and interaction, than operating as a more or less lonely unit on a machine or task. Moreover, his pace of work cannot be forced: Onyemelukwe says, ‘There is therefore a reaction amounting to almost complete rebellion to schemes which eliminate a slow, leisurely work arrangement’. Finally, women in Africa are accorded lower status, so that African men do not take well to being ordered about by women. To suit this ‘African profile’ Onyemelukwe offers his ‘community concept’ of industrial organization. It is based on close interpersonal relationships and group interactions welded by a feeling of security and harmony on the part of all members, within a framework of strict rules to promote the objectives of the community as a whole. The structure of management would be settled by a public share-out of authority and privilege, with the guiding principle that approachability, informality and personalized contact should be facilitated by the pattern of hierarchy. The organization of work would be by groups. The choice of technology would be determined then by the sociology of the prospective workers. Promotion would be mainly from within existing ranks and determined by a balance between length of service and the opinions of the various groups affected. If it were necessary to fill a senior position by external recruitment, the dominant criteria of selection would hinge on traits of character-for compatibility with the community-rather than on ability, educational attainments or performance elsewhere. (No suggestion is made for coping with a competitive market while utilizing leisurely work arrangements, but doubtless examples
1. I use the world ‘African’ because the author judges that his experience and study in Nigeria is sufficiently close to his observations elsewhere in Africa to justify a term embracing the entire continent south of the Sahara.
WORLD
76
could be cited in the West and elsewhere. Nor is anything said about the place of women in industry.) The soundness of this profile-and therefore of the structure designed to accommodate it-is threatened, however, by the contrasting profile of the African manager. Onyemelukwe is very hard on his colleagues. Where they should be like chiefs in their villages, sources of help, inspiration and encouragement to the rest of the establishment, they have instead gladly entered the ranks of the elite and deliberately separated themselves from their people. They have assiduously aped the expatriates in manners, life-styles and methods of management. On the other hand, they have not been intelligent enough to grasp the substance behind Western ways and so have suffered a psychological dislocation. ‘Hence’, declares the author, ‘the educated African today is at the same time both scientific and prescientific and hence ultimately ascientific, amoral and opportunistic.’ Two poles are presented: the African worker (uneducated, bound by the culture of his fathers), and the African manager (educated but not liberated, essentially disenfranchised in two worlds). One has to ask whether there is nothing in between. For by the author’s own showing, in most of the firms he has studied, very small percentages of the workers are uneducated. Most have completed primary education, which means that they have spent a minimum of six years in school, and probably more, since they were evidently not the cream of their school classes. It would be difficult to believe that they were not affected in some way by their schooling, which, whatever else it might have been, was certainly individualistic in its competitiveness. Ranking and promotion by ability and merit would scarcely be strange. Conformity, the reluctance to question, the notion of authority by age, may well all have been reinforced. Nevertheless, responsibility for one’s own work and for working out one’s own answers would also have been inculcated. Goodly percentages of the workers-as many as 66 per cent in one firm-had had some secondary schooling, and a few in a few firms had actually completed the secondary school leaving certificate. Would such people genuinely regard themselves as on a par with primary school leavers or with the unschooled? It is perhaps more probable that they would try to identify themselves with the managers, who had made it, where they had tried and failed. Their resentment of the African manager’s airs might be a case more of sour grapes than
DEVELOPMENT
of offended egalitarianism. In lumping the workers in one bag and the managers in another-despite his data-Onyemelukwe the sociologist has reverted to Onyemelukwe the general manager. For the decision-maker finds rules of thumb handier to use that the gradations of a spectrum. This is not to deny that many will recognize some truth in the stereotypes: it is merely to question whether two stereotypes are enough and whether the analyses of workers and manager, of markets and politics, have been sufficiently fine to justify the ‘community concept of industrial organisation’ for all of Africa. It is worth a few lines more to note what is said about trades unions. Consistently with his view of Western patterns of industrial relations, Onyemelukwe believes that the form of trades unionism transplanted to Africa is inappropriate. The workers do not have faith in a union, except as an instrument of last resort for forcing employers to be reasonable. Only where relations between management and workers were poor, were union memberships found to be strong. Onyemelukwe believes that industrial or crafts unions in Africa suffer from the fact that they are outsiders to particular firms and therefore concerned only in time of trouble. He advocates the adoption of enterprise unions, which would of course round out his concept of the enterprise community. Whatever the criticisms one might make of iMen und Management in Contemporary Africa, it is an interesting, stimulating and even absorbing book. The evenhandedness of its slaps at managers-expatriate and African-at workers and at trades unions should mollify the resentments that might be provoked and might even help some managers to become better at their jobs. Because it was not to the author’s purpose, I have deliberately refrained from making comparisons with other countries. I cannot resist, however, adding one quotation to echo the old truth that no part of the human race is an island unto itself: ‘In Nigeria today, few people work as hard as they could. Their unwillingness shows that something is wrong, that people do not yet accept their part in industry as a constructive; worthwhile element of existence, that they are bored, unresponsive, discontented, frustrated and suspicious.’ John Oxenham Institute of Development University of Sussex.
Deepening in Economic Development. By Edward Press, 1973. Pp. xii + 269. Cloth E3.45, paper E1.60.)
Financial
This book gets off to a bad start. The third paragraph of the preface reads as follows: The substance and spirit of rhe book may have been affected too much by the author’s sample of experiences. A different sample of lagging economies and leading ones might have inspired a different essay, even a testament to the virtues of centralism and contrived markets, to the vices of finance and of ‘market forces’. The odds go the other way: economic incentives and constraints are so much the same everywhere that a different exposure would confirm views set down in the pages ahead.
The fears aroused by this passage are rapidly confirmed. Chapter 1 begins with a clear statement of intent
S.
Studies,
Shaw. (New York: Oxford
University
(which is fair enough): ‘The theme of this book is that the financial sector of an economy does matter in economic development’. But this is followed by an amazing set of statements, for example: Interest rates are the relative prices that have most pervasive relevance to economic decisions. (p. 3) In all cases [‘shallow finance’1 has stopped or gravely retarded the development process. A new strategy that has the effect, among others, of ‘deepening’ finance-a strategy of financial liberalisation-has invariably renewed development. (pp. 3.4)
In
short,
the
book
is a statement
of
faith
in a