Strategic Organization for People-Centered Development

Management is a process of mobilizing resources toward a purpose. It is inevitably value driven with respect to the choice of both purpose and means. This reality-all too often neglected or even deniedbecomes increasingly significant in the midst of current social, political, economic, and ecological forces which generate demands for redefinition of the purposes management serves and the methods it applies. This paper briefly examines: (1) the implications for management of the current period of global social transformation; (2) the emergence of the strategic organizational form among the largest and most successful corporate enterprises; (3) parallel advances in the theoretical and methodological bases of management for Third World development; and (4) the growing challenge within the broader field of public administration to conventional theory and organizational models. The basic argument to be developed is that while bureaucratic organizational forms provided the unifying model for management in the industrial era-within both public and private sectors-an alternative, the strategic organization, is emerging as the model of choice for the coming era. The strategic organization represents at once a response to necessity, and a proactive commitment to the ideal that the purpose of organization is to serve the needs of people, while facilitating the human growth of all participants.