4.2 PHASE II: ROLE ANALYSIS 



Because of their planned nature and drive for calculable behavior and 

 interaction, organizations are particularly amenable to analysis using the 

 concept of role (Yarwood and Nimmo 1976). Roles can be thought of as guides 

 for understanding, characterizing, and predicting organizational behavior 

 (Lamb 1980). Organizations tend to play certain roles, moreover, with remark- 

 able consistency (Golembiewski 1976). 



The concept of roles has been used in explaining the budgetary process 

 (Fenno 1970; Wildavsky 1974, 1975; Hrebrenar 1976). These works suggest that: 

 (1) roles are strongly associated with expectations of behavior attached to an 

 institutional position; (2) the various roles seem to fit in with one another 

 to form a stable pattern of mutual expectations; (3) frequent contact increases 

 understanding among the participants of the roles being played; and (4) the 

 more homogeneous the membership of a group, the more consensus it is likely to 

 have regarding its own organizational role (Wildavsky 1975; Hrebenar 1976). 

 Hrebrenar (1976) found that (contrary to his expectations) the best predictor 

 of budgetary decisionmaking behavior is past behavior patterns in similar 

 types of decisions. LIAM incorporates a view of organizational roles that is 

 consistent with these findings. 



Because there are identifiable actors, issues, and activities that are 

 peculiar to the establishment and maintenance of instream flows, and that 

 occur within the boundaries set by statute, legal precedent, and tradition, 

 decisionmaking here is characterized by heavy reliance on roles, and is shaped 

 by the interactions that occur between organizations. These interactions, 

 moreover, are themselves characterized by traditional patterns that have 

 emerged over time and that condition the outcome (Beckett and Lamb 1976; Lamb 

 1980a; Olive 1981a, b; Lamb and Lovrich 1986). Thus, organizations enter a 

 conflict with knowledge of their own position and the positions of others, 

 particularly when they have interacted with these organizations in the past. 

 Behavior thus tends to fall into standard and recognizable types, and the 

 policy outcome often depends on how skillfully the collective actors can use 

 this knowledge in dealing with other participants (Doerksen and Lamb 1979; 

 Lamb and Lovrich 1986). 



The role types that have been developed and included in LIAM are the 

 result of three processes that occur within organizations and that have been 

 documented in social science research. These processes were described under 

 the theoretical section of this chapter and include: incremental i sm, organiza- 

 tional process, and group psychology. First, organizations tend to make 

 internal decisions based on past decisionmaking efforts, and rely heavily on 

 the record of their own past experience to do so. Each organization, moreover, 

 enters the bargaining process with its own position little altered from its 

 past proposals or recommendations and, as negotiation progresses, these 

 recommendations are again adjusted incrementally as a result of compromise. 

 Incremental ism, then, can be viewed as shaping the "what" of organizational 

 behavior. Second, the ways in which organizations pursue their organizational 

 goals also tend to remain constant over time. Organizational processes, then, 

 can be said to shape the "how" of organizational behavior. Third, the group 

 psychology that develops within an organization also affects organizational 



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