Guy Benveniste
Nadialebon (talk) 19:25, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
Guy Benveniste is an organization theorist who wrote about the politics of planning and about making bureaucracies more adaptive to change.
Early life
Guy Benveniste was born in Paris, France February 27, 1927. He left Vichy France in May 1942 to take refuge in Mexico. He attended Harvard University receiving a BS and Ms in Engineering in 1948 and 1950 . He worked as construction engineer and as an economist for the Mexican Light and Power Company before immigrating to the United States in 1954. He then joined the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California where he undertook economic studies including the economics of solar energy and later became involved in economic development in third world countries. In 1961, at the beginning of the Kennedy administration, he was seconded to the Labouisse Task Force on the reorganization of the US AID agency. He joined the Kennedy administration in December 1961 working in the State Department on cultural and educational problems. He joined the staff of the World Bank in mid 1962 when the Bank began financing education projects in developing countries. He went on mission to Afghanistan and participated in justifying one of the Bank's first low interest loans for education made to that country. He was transferred to Paris and UNESCO in 1963 and was instrumental in the creation of the International Institute of Educational Planning where he remained until 1965. He then obtained a PhD at Stanford University in the sociology of planning and was appointed to the faculty of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968[1] [2] .
Contributions to Planning Theory.
Benveniste remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1993. While at Berkeley he published a series of books on the sociology of planning and bureaucracy. His Politics of Expertise and subsequent volumes[3] [4] [5] analyzed the process of planning or of giving technical advice. Benveniste argued that planners and experts had to consider political realities in the context of their technical arguments if their plans were not to remain shelved. Benveniste was an early proponent and contributor to the literature on the problems of implementing ideas into action. His first paper on the sociology of planning had already been published in 1968[6] . He and other early writers argued that planners needed more than a good understanding of the technical problems of planning. They needed to understand the political and organizational context in which planning took place. Benveniste provided a theoretical argument to help articulate the technical reality to it's political and organizational context.His work was always somewhat controversial since it suggested bending some truth to power[7] . His publications span a quarter century. His first book, an analysis of planning in Mexico was published in 1970[8]. He was one of the first contributors to a better understanding of the political dimensions of planning and reform. As such his work received considerable attention at the time[9] [10]. He thus criticized theRational planning modeland contributed to a better understanding of theUrban planningprocess. Later, Benveniste espoused a far more active political role for planners in his Mastering the Politics of Planning published in 1994. This last volume received considerable attention and a 1993 issue of the journal Planning Theory with nine articles was devoted to it[11] .
Contributions to the Study of Professionals in Bureaucracy
Benveniste's contributions to the organizational theory literature included Bureaucracy, published in 1977[12] and subsequent volumes[13] [14] . Because of his interest with planners he focused on professionals and their roles in a rapidly changing environments. In these works, Benveniste focused on the role of professions in creating more flexible and adaptive organizations. He attempted to show that by giving more discretion to better trained professionals it was possible to decentralize control in organizations[15] . His The Twenty First Century Organization, published in 1994, was translated and published in China[16] .
References
- ^ Benveniste, Guy (2010). From Paris to Berkeley. CA.: Create Space.
- ^ Anonymous (1993). "Retirements: Guy Benveniste". Educator. 7: 36–37.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - ^ Benveniste, Guy (1972). The Politics of Expertise. Berkeley: Glendassary.
- ^ Benveniste, Guy (1977). The Politics of Expertise, 2nd edition. San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser.
- ^ Benveniste, Guy (1981). Regulation and Planning. San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser.
- ^ Benveniste, Guy (1968). "Toward a Sociology of Planning". Journal of Developing Areas. 3: 27–36.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - ^ White, Jay (1991). "From Modernity to Post modernity: Two Views of Planning and Public Administration". Public Administration Review. 51 (6): 564–568.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - ^ Benveniste, Guy (1970). Bureauracy and National Planning. New York: Praeger.
- ^ Peterson, Paul (1973). "The Politics of Expertise". The Social Service Review. 47: 634–635.
- ^ Morrow, William (1973). "Princes, Pundits, and Policy Planning". Public Administration Review. 33: 285–289.
- ^ Kaufman, Jerry (1993). "Commentary on Guy Benveniste's Mastering the Politics of Planning". Planning Theory. 9: 8–76.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - ^ Benveniste, Guy (1977). Bureaucracy. San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser.
- ^ Benveniste, Guy (1987). Professionalizing the Organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- ^ Benveniste, Guy (1994). The Twenty First Century Organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- ^ Cayer, Joseph (1995). "The Twenty First Century Organization". American Review of Public Administration. 25 (3).
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - ^ Benveniste, Guy (1998). The Twenty First Century Organization (translated into Chinese). Beijing: Glocal.