Mary Parker Follet proposed the "law of the situation" as an alternative to direct orders in organizational management. The law of the situation involves analyzing a situation to understand the underlying logic and demands, rather than one person directly telling others what to do. This allows for a more collaborative approach that gives people a sense of participation and contribution. Follet argued that arbitrary authority cannot persist if there is proper training in place, and that analyzing situations leads to higher quality decisions than direct orders by drawing on diverse analytic inputs. Her model aims to "depersonalize orders" so that the logic of the situation, rather than a particular person, determines the appropriate path forward.

1. ON THE LAW OF THE SITUATION
‘It has been hard for many old-fashioned employers to understand that orders
will not take the place of training. I want to italicize that.’
- Mary Parker Follet
INTRODUCTION
The manager is not allowed to give a direct order but must find some way of
getting the work of the organization done despite this constraint unlike, say, a
commanding officer in the armed forces who is not only given a responsibility to
discharge but also the power necessary to get the job done. There is a good
reason for this: the armed forces believe in a simple principle of management
called the ‘unity of command,’ which is conspicuous by its absence in civilian
life. The chain of command in the armed forces and the structure of the
organizations that are designed along this principle makes life in the armed
forces into something that is highly structured. This notion of a formal hierarchy
is however not easy to replicate in other organizations. So when Mary Parker
Follet began to ask herself what principles, if any, are involved in managing such
organizations, she came up with the notion of the ‘law of the situation.’ This
basically means that what comes in place of the direct order, in the design and
functioning of organizations, is an understanding of the law of the situation. The
advantage in this indirect approach is that it will become possible to
‘depersonalize’ the process of having to tell people what to do without the
dangers of the CEO imposing his will on anybody thereby hurting their feelings.
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2. OBEYING THE LAW OF THE SITUATION
The solution then is to ‘unite all concerned in a study of the situation, to discover
the law of the situation and obey that.’ In other words, people are less likely to
take offence in thinking-through a situation rather than in being asked to take an
order. Analyzing a situation is also a way of getting analytic inputs from those
involved in the situation in the hope that the quality of the analysis will not only
become much better, but the process of analysis will give the people involved a
sense of contribution and participation. This, according to Mary Follet, is an
important contribution of modern management since it is able ‘to depersonalize
orders’ effectively. In this process, it is the situation and its demands that matter
more than who is giving orders to whom. Interestingly enough, Mary Follet goes
on to add that ‘arbitrary authority’ will not be able to have its way if there was
sufficient training in place. ‘This whole subject might be taken up under the
heading of education,’ she writes, ‘for there we could give many instances of the
attempt to make arbitrary authority take the place of training.’ Mary Follet, no
doubt, comes across as a strong supporter of management education since in her
estimation ‘the aftermath of all revolutions shows us the results of the lack of
training.’ This is not only an incisive comment but also a startling thing to say
since the changes wrought by the political process are usually undone by
inadequacies in the process of training that is necessary to institutionalize the
change effort into a new set of organizational routines.
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
This is the case in both factories and firms where delays in implementing orders
may be related to ignorance rather than malice. This delay then may be linked to
the fact that it is more a case of ‘couldn’t’ do it rather than ‘wouldn’t’ do it, and
the implementation of a new policy initiative often requires training since the
new modalities means that the workers have to give up on the in-grained habits
that are already in place. Hence, Follet argues that ‘this whole subject might be
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3. taken up under the heading of education, for there we could give many instances
of the attempt to make arbitrary authority take the place of training.’
Furthermore, if we were to gloss that statement further, it will appear that the
giving and taking of orders in the conventional sense has become problematic
because it substitutes the problem of authority with the problem of analysis;
hence Mary Follet’s preoccupation with the notion of situation analysis in the
context of the case method. In a situation analysis it is not so much about asking
someone to do something in the traditional sense of giving an order, but working
out the basic modalities necessary for ‘discovering’ what must be done from the
analysis of the situation itself. In this form of analysis, ‘if orders are simply part
of the situation, the question of someone giving and someone receiving does not
come up. Both accept the orders given by the situation.’ The order then is
discovered from the underlying logic that governs the situation analysis rather
than issued in a direct form that could be misconstrued. This, for Mary Follet, is
the achievement of ‘scientific management,’ since it not only makes it possible to
‘depersonalize’ orders, but also makes it necessary to find the ‘law of the
situation’ every time through a process of intellectual discovery.
CONCLUSION
The relevance of the ‘law of the situation,’ in the context of the case method, then,
is related to the fact that the onus in a case analysis is to move away from a linear
model which presupposes that there is sufficient clarity available in order to
issue a direct order without bothering to analyze the situation. Mary Follet’s
model of analysis will not get rid of all the friction in administrative situations,
but we are now at least in a position to deploy the structural elements of the
friction. The analogy that Follet invokes here, of making a constructive use of this
friction, is akin to putting a ‘belt over the pulley’ and getting it to work rather
than keep complaining about the friction. The advantage with this model of
situation analysis is that ‘there will be just as much, probably more, room for
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4. disagreement’ than before. And even if there are differences in the interpretation
of the situation analysis, it won’t matter since we have now ‘found a method of
dealing with it.’ The pedagogical equivalent of this analysis of the situation in
firms in which the difficult relationship between authority and consent is
negotiated through the giving and taking of orders is called the case method
though with an important difference. This difference then is related to the
question of what is ‘integral’ to the situation rather than what is ‘arbitrarily’
imposed from outside the situation. That is why we must encourage students of
the case method who are learning the rudiments of a situation analysis in our
business schools to read this wonderful essay by Mary Parker Follet. What
appeared to be a radical argument in her time appears but common sense now
since the approach to management in civilian life is based on building consensus
rather than in giving direct orders.
REFERENCES
Follet, Mary Parker (1926). ‘The Giving of Orders,’ Classics of Organizational
Theory, edited by Jay M Shafritz and J. Steven Ott (Fort Worth: Harcourt
Publishers, 2001), pp. 152-157.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN, IIM KOZHKODE
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