organizations and of institutional dissociation have 

 created structural barriers rather than bonds between 

 the various organizational actors at all levels of 

 the Soviet S&T establishment. As we have seen, the 

 structure of decision making is predominantly verti- 

 cal and thus substantially inhibits lateral communi- 

 cation, cooperation, and coordination. 



Similarly, structural features help create and re- 

 inforce functional autonomy and non- integrative atti- 

 tudes among the organizational parts to the detriment 

 of the whole. With parts and no common purpose there 

 can be no coupling and no system. Soviet authorities 

 naturally intend that the various organizations and 

 agencies complement each other in pursuit of objec- 

 tives specified by the leadership. In practice, how- 

 ever, the parochial aims and special interests of the 

 parts frequently prevail over the centrally defined 

 purposes and needs of the nation or "system" as a 

 whole. Soviet organizations have been built largely 

 on the principle of total or near total self-suffi- 

 ciency. Each ministry is an empire of its own, oper- 

 ating almost independently of the others. Each of 

 the central administrative and functional agencies 

 has acquired entrenched bureaucracies which compete 

 with and frustrate each other. The very structure 

 and nature of the R&D administrative system — with its 

 emphasis on multiple authorities, mixed sovereign- 

 ties, and incomplete functional mandates — inevitably 

 exert their influence on the policy process and on 

 performance. Though of a different kind perhaps than 

 exists in the United States, bureaucratic politics — 

 with all the realities of interagency power, clashes 

 of priorities, and conflicts of interests — nonethe- 

 less is a prominent and permanent feature of the "or- 

 ganizational system" for science and technology in 

 the USSR. It is no accident that better "linkage" 

 and "integration" are important organizational issues 

 in Soviet science policy today. 



79 



