Mary Parker Follett: The Enduring Contribution

Author(s): Elliot M. Fox

Source: Public Administration Review, Vol. 28, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1968), pp. 520-529
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Society for Public Administration
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520
Mary Parker Follett:
The Enduring Contribution
ELLIOT M. Fox, Columbia University
1 HIS YEAR MARKS THE 100TH AN-
NIVERSARY of the birth of Mary Parker Follett,
a distinguished pioneer of modem manage-
ment and administration. Miss Follett's dis-
tinctions are many. She was a woman who
achieved a place in what was then largely a
man's world. She was one of the first to see
that the handling of people constituted a ma-
jor problem of modem management. She was
quite unique in recognizing that the concepts
that had mainly concerned political philoso-
phers were relevant also to the process of man-
agement, administration, and leadership in al-
most any field of human endeavor. She de-
veloped a theory of human interaction that
retained a remarkable consistency over a
wide range of applications.
Her philosophy was acclaimed by men like
Bernard Bosanquet and Viscount Haldane,
while successful industralists like Henry S.
Dennison, Robert B. Wolf, and B. Seebohm
Rowntree praised the practicality of her rec-
ommendations.' In the current literature on
management and administration, her ideas are
cited frequently, if briefly, and articles ex-
pressing appreciation of her pioneering con-
tribution appear from time to time. Moreover,
anyone familiar with her ideas cannot help
but notice that some of the things she was
saying 25 and even 50 years ago have now
begun to be more popular than they were in
This essay is based on the author's doctoral disserta-
tion in progress at Columbia University.
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) Mary Follett's contribution to the science of
management and administration spanned the
years between 1918 and 1933. She developed
ideas much in advance of her time, many of which
are only now beginning to be appreciated. De-
spite a nontechnical, almost simplistic terminology
and a highly unsystematic style of exposition, she
developed a theory of human interaction of con-
siderable depth that retains a remarkable con-
sistency over a wide range of applications. Her
frequently cited admonition to follow the law of
the situation is based on a concept of the "situa-
tion" as a whole complex of reciprocally re-
lated interactions which are by their very nature
constantly evolving and changing, thus giving
both the occasion and the opportunity for con-
tinual efforts to keep the process healthy. Integra-
tion, the name of the healthy process, is a means
of bringing differences together so as to create a
new synthesis. The "law" of the situation means
acting in accord with present integrations and an-
ticipating those that still need to be made. The
theory has practical applications in the areas of
order giving, conflict resolution, the exercise of
authority and leadership, the proper use of ex-
pertise, the coordination of individuals and de-
partments in an organization, and much else.
her own day, although they are often ex-
pressed without acknowledgement to her.
Yet, much of Mary Follett's thinking re-
mains unappreciated, perhaps because her con-
tribution lies in the area of "human relations,"
a subject that is more nebulous than the pro-
cedures for getting work done that made Tay-
lor, Gantt, and Gilbreth famous. Also, Follett
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968
 MARY PARKER
was never a very systematic writer, she threw
out interesting ideas more or less randomly,
and the thread of consistency is hard to find
and harder to follow. Finally, one of her great-
est virtues serves to obscure the full impact of
her contribution: she almost always expressed
herself in simple, fairly commonplace terms.
Perhaps she would be more carefully studied
if she had developed a jargon that invited
periodic efforts at interpretation. As it is, her
phraseology was so ordinary that few feel the
need to explain it.
The Law of the Situation
An excellent example of the last point is her
frequently cited admonition about following
the law of the situation. Here is an ordinary
kind of expression that reminds us of a whole
repertory of cliches about keeping your ear
to the ground, getting into the swim of things, Follett understood the operation of Congress
etc. Follett, too, had in mind these common- a great deal better than Woodrow Wilson,
place notions, but also a great deal more.
Her practical recommendations were always
part and parcel of a whole theory of human
interaction which grew out of her experience,
reading, and endless conversations with people
in all walks of life.
One of her most engaging talents was the
ability to draw other people into cooperative
dialogue; this coupled with the rare ability to
appreciate the other person's experience al-
most as if it were her own means that her ad-
vice was drawn from experience-not the
experience of the old hand in the field who
has personally tried everything, but an eclectic
experience that has been translated into gen-
eral principles and then retranslated into prac-
tical advice. Her theory, distilled out of so
many sources, was necessarily an interdis-
ciplinary one. It is relevant to political ques-
tions like sovereignty, representation, power,
and freedom. It is relevant to, indeed it is de-
rived from, the study of the group process in
its many forms. It has something to say about
the resolution of conflict and the establishment
of control. It deals with management and ad-
ministration, social investigation, leadership,
and the proper use of expertise. All this is lurk-
ing behind the guileless phrase, "law of the
situation."
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968
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FOLLETT 521
Follett first used this phrase in a paper pub-
lished in 1919, and while she seems to have
had no premonition of the extent to which this
expression was to be used later, her usage of it
here was already consistent with the whole
body of ideas that she was developing.2 It
was also consistent with her own previous ex-
perience in volunteer social service which had
begun in the Roxbury section of Boston around
1900. Four years before, she had already
published her first book, The Speaker of the
House of Representatives, which appeared in
1896 while she was still an undergraduate at
Radcliffe. This work was based on a thorough
job of scholarly research-to which was added
the distinctly Follett touch of interviewing
former speakers-and its perceptive under-
standing of congressional operation was praised
by no less an aficionado of things political than
Theodore Roosevelt, who thought that Miss
whose Congressional Government had ap-
peared the previous year.3
The Women's Municipal League of Boston
It was, however, her social work rather
than her early scholarship that played the
greatest role in determining the direction of
Follett's subsequent thinking. After several
years of work with boys' clubs which met in
local schoolhouses, she was asked in 1908
to become chairman of the Committee for Ex-
tended Use of School Buildings of the newly
formed Women's Municipal League of Boston.
The aim of Follett's committee was to get
young people off the street at night by open-
ing the schoolhouses for recreation. A care-
fully conceived campaign was launched to
secure permission to use the schools and event-
ually to have the school system operate eve-
ning centers as one of its regular functions.
In 1912 the school system did take over the
operation, thus beginning a service to the peo-
ple of Boston that is now in its 57th year of
continuous operation.
By the time the evening centers were well
established, the situation had changed in a
way that admirably illustrates part of what
Follett was later to call the law of the situa-
 522 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
tion. Her progress reports to the League show
us how the situation developed in fact and in
her own thinking. Begin with the idea of getting
young people off the street. Next, recognize
that the school has the needed space and being
a public building can welcome the young citi-
zen without making him feel patronized as he
might, for example, in a settlement house. He
comes in for recreation, but it turns out that
recreational activities teach the participant
how to cooperate, and when the members of a
group have learned how to cooperate with
each other they have begun to learn how to
govern themselves.
Thus, by 1913, Follett is telling the man-
agers and leaders of the Boston school centers
that the main purpose of the drama coach, for
example, is not to produce good plays nor of
the basketball coach to win games. The basic
purpose of both of them is to give people
practice in cooperating with each other, and
practice in the process of self-government.4
So getting young people off the street event-
ually turns into training for democratic citizen-
ship. The situation has evolved and the pur-
pose has evolved along with it. The hopes and
anticipations of the leader are themselves ele-
ments in the situation and play their part in
its evolution. In this case, Follett expressed
some hopes for citizenship training at the
beginning, but its outlines remained vague
until the situation developed further. It is a
process of cultivation, not imposition.
A similar story emerges from Follett's
establishment of the Boston placement bu-
reaus. Several years earlier she had seen city-
wide, centrally coordinated placement efforts
in London and in Edinburgh which had been
set up through the cooperation of the boards
of education and of trade. She hoped for a sim-
ilar arrangement in Boston, but she went about
it by working within the situation that was
already developing around the community
centers. Those whom we now call "drop-outs"
-at that time they could quit school at the
age of 14-needed help in choosing a trade,
in keeping a job once they had found one,
in finding a new one if they quit or got fired,
and they needed encouragement to return to
school if possible. Placement bureaus can do
all these things, but you lose regular contact
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REVIEW
with the child once he no longer comes to
school. But he does come to the community
center, and the adult leaders there can keep
their ears open for the job problems of their
club members. Placement bureaus should there-
fore be attached to the schools and to their
community centers.
At first it was possible to get a bureau
established at only one school. But that one
soon began to attract inquiries from quar-
ters of the city beyond its immediate neigh-
borhood, so that the beginnings of a central-
ly coordinated, citywide bureau began to de-
velop of its own accord. Not that things turned
out exactly as Follett's committee had planned
it. The situation changed abruptly on them
a couple of times, and there were one or two
false starts-experiences that may have under-
lined the principle that Follett was later to
emphasize so often, namely, that you cannot
impose purposes upon a situation from the out-
side. Nevertheless, the situation in Boston dur-
ing those years did contain the potential of a
centralized placement bureau that could enlist
the cooperation of employers and educators.
With persistence and with appropriate alliances
with other groups such as the Girls Trade
Education League, the Vocation Bureau of
Boston, the Chamber of Commerce, and others,
the potential was found and cultivated, so that
eventually the placement bureaus, too, became
part of the regular activity of the Boston school
system.
Principles of,.Human Interaction
Follett once said that discovering a purpose
in a situation could be like finding an un-
familiar plant and cultivating it without know-
ing what kind of flower or fruit to expect. Only
after it appears do you know what you have
been working for.5 It is interesting to note
therefore that her work with community cen-
ters bore fruit also in the development of her
theory of human interaction. This theory came
initially out of her observation of the group
process. Recreational clubs teach people how
to govern themselves. People together produce
results that could not have been produced by
any of the participants acting or thinking sep-
arately. Group experience moves the action
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968
 MARY PARKER
tendencies of each member in a direction of
mutual compatibility and harmony. The group
process thus appears at once as a source of
social creativity and of social control. The term
she used most frequently at first to cover the
consequences of group activity was the word
"unifying," and in this usage the process of
"unifying" became the epitome of democracy.
It was with all these things in mind that she
started to write an account of the Boston com-
munity center movement, but the more she
thought about the nature of the "unifying"
process the more she became interested in its
implications for the rejuvenation and puri-
fication of society and politics in general. The
result was a full-blown political treatise called
The New State: Group Organization the So-
lution of Popular Government, published in
1918. The political solution proposed in this
book and its critique cannot be dealt with in
an essay of this length; however, large sections
of the book are devoted to describing the
healthy group process.
This is the aspect that makes the book im-
portant, and it is this aspect, rather than the
proposals for founding politics on the neighbor-
hood group, that Follett picked up to develop
further in subsequent work.6 This further de-
velopment began to study the group process as
a means of understanding human interaction in
general whenever two or more people got to-
gether or play any kind of a part in influencing
each other. At the same time, a better distinc-
tion emerged than had existed before between
interaction in general and healthy interaction
in particular. This distinction was implicit in
portions of The New State, but it came out
more clearly six years later in Creative Ex-
perience, where we find interaction in general
described in terms of the principle of "circu-
lar response" and healthy interaction in terms
of "integration."7 When we have examined
each of these principles we shall see that the
integration of the circular response is the
same as following the law of the situation.
As soon as two people perceive each other
their behavior begins to be determined, in
part, by that perception, so that each is react-
ing, in part, to the other's reactions to him.
Her most graphic illustration of this point is a
tennis game.8 One player serves the ball and
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968
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FOLLETT 523
the other returns it, but the nature of the r
turn is determined not merely by the other
player but also, in part, by the nature of the
original serve. As the volley proceeds, each
motion of the ball reflects the composite his-
tory of all the preceding motions. So it is
with any other human interaction. I never
react simply to you. It is always, in Follett's
formula, "I-plus-the-interweaving-between-
you-and-me meeting you-plus-the-interweaving-
between-you-and-me, etc."
There is a circular response for each person
in the interaction producing what Follett calls
variously: interweaving, interpenetrating, inter-
lacing, interknitting, intermingling. Other
terms are: functional relation, reciprocal re-
sponse, and activity-between. She was never
one to limit herself to a single term if she
could gain a nuance or two by using a dozen.
The principle of circular response, or what-
ever you like to call it, applies to all levels
and combinations of human activity-between
two individuals, in groups, between groups,
among and between the various aggregations,
institutions, organizations, and nations. It
could be seen, for example, when the delibera-
tions of a minimum wage board to which
Follett belonged triggered actions by employers
which in turn affected the further deliberations
of the board. It can be seen when customer
acceptance of a product makes possible a
lower price, which improves acceptance to a
point where the price can be lowered further.
It applies to the relations between nations,
between labor and management, farmers and
middlemen-whatever the context, whatever
the identity of the interactors.
When the numbers in the interaction multi-
ply, so do the interrelationships between the
responses, and it is the totality of all the inter-
weaving relationships relevant to a given time
and place that constitutes the "situation."
Sometimes Follett used the term "total situa-
tion" to underline the fact that we are never
dealing merely with the circular response
relatings between this party and that party, but
also with all the other relatings that apply to
both of them while they are interacting.
The principle of circular response and its
interweaving relationships is not difficult to
appreciate, but we often overlook its implica-
 524 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
tions, for example our common practice of
making judgments of each other-and we have
whole formalized systems for doing this. We
need to remember that when we react to a
person-whether in a formalized judgment or
tion.
in any other way-we are reacting in part to
ourselves. As Follett put it: "You say, 'When
I talk with Mr. X he always stimulates me.'
Now it may not be true that Mr. X stimulates
everyone; it may be that something in you
has called forth something in him." 10 Or,
suppose you want to know what your people
have been thinking. You can never find out-
exactly-because the situation will change by
the very fact that you have entered it. There
are implications here, too, for our way of
viewing individual behavior in general. Follett
never denied that individual behavior is a
function of individual personality. But more
than most of us, perhaps, she insisted that
individual behavior is also a function of the
situation. Change the situation and you change
behavior-not always easy, but more realistic
than trying to change personalities.
Most important, every situation is in a
continual process of change. One moment of
interaction produces the next in a progression
measured not by simple but by compound
interest-the increment of the increment. We
have always an evolving situation, and every
purpose evolves along with the situation that
generates it."1
We are thereby warned against trying to be
simplistic in our approaches, categorizing
people and groups, thinking we can predict
how they will act, as if they, like the leopard,
will never change their spots. Follett's message
is that within every total, evolving situation of
interpenetrating circular responses there are
many powerful factors operating to erode
established interests, positions, and prejudices;
to effect changes in the direction of wishes;
and to make possible the unifying of previously
separated elements into new and integrated
wholes. The nature of human interaction is
such that healthy solutions to its conflicts are
possible. The healthy solution is called an
"integration," although she used the word
"unifying" more in her earlier writings, as
we have seen. Sometimes, too, she called it a
synthesis, and in her advice to managers and
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REVIEW
administrators she often talked about coordi-
nation or cooperation, by which she meant
the principle of integration as it applies to the
problems of managing people in an organiza-
The Healthy Social Process
Follett never gave a concise definition of
integration, but if we try to reduce all of her
comments and illustrations to a single sentence
we might say that integration is a harmonious
marriage of differences which, like the nut and
the screw or the parts of a watch, come to-
gether in a way that produces a new form, a
new entity, a new result, made out of the
old differences and yet different from any of
them.12 Very often when she wrote about the
interaction process in general she seemed to
be implying that integration is a natural out-
come of any interaction, and it appears indeed
that she believed that on many occasions an
integration takes place quite automatically.
Perhaps it is integrations of this kind that
account for the underlying health in a society
at any given time-the very foundations of
our existence that we are unaware of because
they give us no trouble. But integrations, in
any event, are not permanent. As situations
keep evolving new differences continually arise,
and those that are not automatically integrated
remain in conflict, denying the satisfaction of
desires to individuals and handicapping the
ability of the society to function. It is then
that the situation calls for study, effort, in-
genuity-consciously applied leadership for
producing an integration.
Anyone who wishes to help this process
along must keep in mind two principal pre-
requisites for a successful integration. First,
the differences must be susceptible to change.
When two whole differences confront each
other, they must each be broken apart and
analyzed, reevaluated, added to, put back to-
gether in a new way. Second, in order for
that to happen, all the factors, the full details
of all the differences, must be brought into the
open; there must be full, free, and honest
contribution from all sides. Follett tells us,
for example, that in forming a committee she
would tolerate neither the potential member
who was willing to come and give his advice
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968
 MARY PARKER FOLLETT 525

without changing his opinion nor the man who have been anticipated exactly. The law of the
was happy to come and learn but who had situation also includes those aspects that deter-
nothing to contribute. She gives a number of mine what is possible and what is not. Follett
examples of successful integration. One man acknowledged that integration is not possible
was taken to court for a debt that he could not in all cases,'4 and she is clear that we are
pay without ruining his business. The judge always talking about real factors, real action
could have followed precedent and ordered tendencies or motor impulses in the various
the business sacrificed to pay the debt. In- participants, actual possibilities.
stead, he followed the law of the present Whenever an integration is not possible or
situation and worked out a way of paying by for any reason is not accomplished, there are
installments so that the creditor got his money a number of alternatives-all of them unde-
and the debtor was able to stay in business. sirable.'5 One common alternative is domi-
The members of a creamery cooperative nation or "power over," where one of the
changed the direction of a loading platform unintegrated differences takes the field to the
so that those coming in from different direc- exclusion of the others. Power, according to
tions could unload at the same time instead Follett, is the ability to make things happen.
of fighting about who should unload first. Most In an integrated situation you have "power
interesting from Follett's point of view was with," because all action tendencies have been
the Workmen's Compensation Act, which pro- mobilized into compatible and mutually co-
vided better compensation to injured workers operative directions, thus consolidating all of
and at the same time encouraged action that the power available. The trouble with domina-
reduced the number and severity of injuries.'3 tion, therefore, in addition to the discomfort
Each of these examples shows a confron- experienced by the individuals being domi-
tation of differences that did not automatically nated, is that the repressed action tendencies
integrate. They were initially of an "either- are neither changed nor killed. Like the
or" character-either the man will be paid or repressed wishes of Freudian psychology, they
not, this group will load first or not, etc. In are still there, ready to work against the
each case the matter was resolved not by intentions of the dominator whenever possible.
deciding for one side or the other and not The available social power is thus divided
by giving each side half of the original demand,
against itself, and the power of the dominator
but by coming up with something new that -while it seems great because it is the only
satisfied the real requirements of both sides. power visible-is in fact severely handicapped
But each side had to contribute its point of by the contrary tendencies of the dominated.
view and each side also had to adjust its This was Follett's objection to any authori-
thinking somewhat from its original position. tarian organization that operates on the basis
Thus, if the "situation" is the total network of "power over."
of reciprocal responses surrounding any point In lectures to business groups during 1926,
at which we are involved or in which we have Follett began to apply her theory of authority
become interested, then the "law" of that situ- to business organization by taking issue with
ation consists of those aspects of it that are the common assumption that the authority in
integrated, healthy, and worth following, an organization resides in the head and is
together with those that are still in conflict and
filtered down from there by a process of
require our conscious and deliberate attention "delegation." The authority or power of every
to resolve. The "law" is concerned both with person at every place in the organization, she
what is and with what might be. We put maintained, belongs to him because of his
ourselves into harmony with the former and knowledge and because of the opportunities
work to make the next situation by integrating for action that his situation presents. The real
the latter. As we do so, the new situation authority is the law of the situation at any
builds upon the old according to the incre- given place, and the real leader or effective
ment of the increment and creates something manager is the one who can understand that
that had not existed before and that could not law and get the most out of it.'6

NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968

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 526 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Another alternative to integration is one
that has been favored as a solution to inter-
national problems, namely, the balance of
power. Here there is, ideally at least, no
domination, simply two or more persons,
groups, classes, or nations, each with its own
internally developed power that is not in
principle diminished but merely balanced off
by the confrontation of equal strength. The
trouble with this arrangement, of course, is
that it never stays that way. Since there has
been no integration, each party retains the
action tendencies that led to the confrontation
in the first place, and as soon as it can over-
whelm the balance it will do so.
A third alternative is compromise, which is
often recommended as a solution to the evils
of domination or power balance. But in com-
promise, each party is obliged to repress part
of what it wants, detracting from the total
power of the whole. Compromise, moreover,
offers no chance for progress. It creates noth-
ing new. It merely rearranges the old positions.
Whether it comes in the juridical garb of "com-
pensatory equalization" or in the legislative
process of "log rolling" or in the everyday
practice of each making a sacrifice for the
other, the result is the same-reduction in the
effective social power, detriment to the indi-
vidual, and a store of unintegrated differences
lying in wait for the first favorable opportunity
to rise again.
Finally, there is an especially undesirable
form of interaction that Follett called crowd
manipulation. Crowd manipulation, at any
rate, is unintegrated on both counts: it does
not ask for the contribution of each in search
for a common idea, nor does it propose that
anyone change his position on anything. Its
main technique is an emotional appeal designed
to obscure such differences as may exist. In its
benign form, it smooths over unresolved dif-
ferences and helps the society to settle into a
superficial status quo. In its virulent form it
taps the waiting reservoir of unintegrated and
uncontrolled power which has been repressed
by domination or compromise and which is
ready to be called forth by the first demagogue
or agitator who can find a suitable formula.
Follett's theory was interdisciplinary in its
origin and it is interdisciplinary in its appli-
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REVIEW
cation. In its terms, sovereignty, for example,
is the basic power and control over itself that
is established by any integrated group. Uniting
(integrating) with other groups-or nations-
therefore does not detract from the real sov-
ereignty or power of the original unit, but
rather adds to it. This view has implications
for federalism and for centralization and de-
centralization in government and industry.
Order giving, according to Follett, must not
be a form of "power over" if it is to be a
healthy process; rather both the man and his
subordinate must look at the same situation and
obey it, although the superior may have a par-
ticular responsibility for pointing out what that
situation is.
Conflict is to be welcomed, since integration
requires the full contribution of all sides to a
question. Follett no doubt felt that a decorous,
intelligent meeting of minds was more con-
ducive to integration than a violent exchange,
but she insisted that conflict could be con-
structive and that it should not be avoided
for the sake of a spurious peace.
The exigencies of modem living require
more and more the facts, figures, and consid-
ered judgments of the expert, but this does
not mean that we must turn over the direction
of our affairs to him. Rather, we must find
ways of integrating his contribution with the
experiences and insights of ordinary people.
Final Contributions
Most of the concepts referred to thus far
were fully developed in Creative Experience,
which appeared in 1924. The book attracted
considerable attention from businessmen be-
cause of its frequent reference to problems of
business administration, and broadened Fol-
lett's contact with the business community, a
contact begun while working with placement
bureaus and continued later as a represen-
tative of the public on the Massachusetts
Minimum Wage Boards. She used her business
acquaintances as sources of information and
experience, and then, as time went on, she
became a kind of consultant to them in the
area of personnel problems.
Her contribution to the field of management
and administration might have been confined
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968
 MARY PARKER
to personal conversations, however, if it had
not been for Henry C. Metcalf and his Bureau
of Personnel Administration in New York,
which over the years boasted of a long list
of distinguished lecturers including Frank Gil-
breth, Elton Mayo, Stuart Chase, Ordway
Tead, Morris Cohen, Harry Overstreet, Nor-
man Thomas, Roscoe Pound, Floyd Allport,
and many others. Mary Follett lectured first
in January 1925 and periodically thereafter
until 1932.
Her debut as a lecturer to the business com-
munity was followed by another significant
change in her career. In January 1926 her
lifelong friend, Isobel Briggs, with whom she
had lived for some 30 years, died at the age
of 75. Follett felt this loss very keenly and
it marked the beginning of the end of her long
residence in Boston. She spent more and more
time away after 1926, much of it in England,
which had been Miss Briggs' homeland and
where she herself had many pleasant associa-
tions going back to her student days at Newn-
ham College, Cambridge. She did some lec-
turing in England, especially to the Rowntree
Lecture Conferences for managers and super-
visors, which were held periodically at Oxford
under the sponsorship of B. Seebohm Rown-
tree of the Rowntree chocolate works. She
also spent some time at Geneva studying the
League of Nations. She returned to the United
States in 1932 to give what was to be her
final lecture to the Bureau of Personnel Ad-
ministration in New York, and then in the fall
of the next year she was back to look after
some personal business affairs. While staying
in Boston, the scene of so many of her accom-
plishments, her health, which had been causing
concern for some time, took a turn for the
worse, and she died following an operation
on December 18, 1933.
At the time of Miss Follett's death Lyndall
Urwick, who had known her both in England
and at Geneva, where he was director of the
International Management Institute, contacted
Henry Metcalf to suggest publishing a collec-
tion of Follett's papers. After some difficulties
of editorial collaboration across the ocean,
Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers
of Mary Parker Follett appeared first in En-
gland in 1941 and the following year in the
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968
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FOLLETT 527
United States. It contains all but one of the
papers given to Metcalf's lecture series.
The last series of lectures that Miss Follett
ever gave was at the London School of Eco-
nomics early in 1933. These were included in
Freedom and Coordination under Urwick's
editorship, and he has been responsible also
for a number of other important references to
Follett's work.'7 The last lecture of this series
contains a four-point statement of the funda-
mental principles of organizational8 She had
used substantially the same points a few
months earlier in New York, when she was
speaking more specifically about social plan-
ning on a broad scale. However, the prin-
ciples of organization remain the same, and
they have become almost as well known as
the law of the situation. These principles are:
1. Coordination by direct contact of the
responsible people concerned
2. Coordination in the early stages
3. Coordination as the reciprocal relating
of all the factors in a situation
4. Coordination as a continuing process.'9
Coordination, as the word is used here,
means the process of integration as it applies
within a given organization. It implies, as all
integration does, the full, willing, and honest
contribution of each party involved, the mutual
alteration of activities and desires toward the
formation of a cooperative whole without sacri-
fice by any party.
In this survey of the main outlines of Fol-
lett's law of the situation and of the theory of
human interaction that underlies it, we have
necessarily had to omit many of its conceptual
and practical applications and have had to be
content with only brief indications of limita-
tions. Still, perhaps we have seen enough to
form some conclusions with regard to the ex-
tent and the value of her contribution. She has
nothing useful to tell us about organizational
structures or administrative devices, and it is
a question that we will have to leave open
as to how much her own ideal of integration
may have depended on certain structural char-
acteristics that she took for granted. She was
concerned only with the activity of people
and with the process that takes place when
people interact with each other, quite apart
from any formalized circumstances that may
 528 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
surround them. Even in the area of inter-
action, her view was limited by a complete
preoccupation with the healthy process. She
had no place for second best. Even when she
admitted that integration was not always pos-
sible, she gave us no guidance as to what to
do in such a case.
Perhaps she felt that the philosophies of
domination, power balance, compromise, and
crowd manipulation had already been so fully
developed throughout the ages that they
needed no help from her. Yet these are the
only alternatives that she gave for integration,
and to whatever extent integration is not pos-
sible we might expect her to at least acknowl-
edge that some substandard devices may be
justifiably resorted to. But she did no such
thing. She was like a salesman who knows
only too well that he has competitors, but
who usually finds it quite impossible to enter-
tain the notion that anybody would think of
buying from one. She merely insisted that
although integration is not possible in every
case, it is possible in more cases than we realize
And perhaps if it is not possible now, it will
be later.
So the use of substandard processes is quite
irrelevant. They are already there in any case
and will inevitably be used until something
better is developed. The important thing is to
work for something better. That is what Fol-
let cared about, and it is here that she made
her contribution. Admittedly she had nothing
to say about many areas of human concern,
but she does direct our attention to one of our
most important concerns. In an age of in-
creasing change, the old devices-even if they
were well integrated at one time-must be
replaced. We have increasing need for new
social invention. At the same time we are
continually being confronted with new dif-
ferences and new conflicts. In the midst of
all this, Mary Follett told us that we need not
be afraid of difference, but rather should wel-
come it as the opportunity for new social
creation. She gave us a theory of human inter-
action that shows how the same factors that
cause change also provide the means for solv-
ing the problems presented by change, a theory
that tells us that the possibilities for the healthy
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REVIEW
resolution of conflict is part of the natural
process of human intercourse.
Even as she recognized the difficulties
inherent in the route she was recommending,
she retained a fundamental optimism with
regard to human potentiality. "Experience
may be hard," she admitted, "but we claim its
gifts because they are real, even though our
feet bleed on its stones. . . . I see no golden
age in the past or in the future, but I believe
in the possibilities of human effort, of dis-
ciplined effort, in truth in its Anglo-Saxon
meaning (tryw) of faithfulness, and in the
essence of relation from the amoeba and its
food to man and man, as the release of
energy, the evocation or the calling forth of
new powers one from the other." 20
Notes
1. The fundamental statement of Follett's ideas is
contained in two books (still in print) and a
posthumous collection of her lectures on busi-
ness management which has become one of the
standard works in that field. See, Mary Parker
Follett, The New State: Group Organization the
Solution of Popular Government (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1918; reprinted, Gloucester,
Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965); Creative Experience
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1924; reprinted,
New York: Peter Smith, 1951); and Henry C.
Metcalf and Lyndall Urwick (eds.), Dynamic
Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary
Parker Follett (New York: Harper, 1942). The
editors' introduction to the last contains much of
the biographical data used in this article. In ad-
dition, Colonel Urwick has very kindly furnished
personal reminiscences and other materials.
2. "Community is a Process," Philosophical Re-
view, Vol. 28 (November 1919), pp. 576-588.
The "law of the situation" appears on p. 586.
This article contains a number of ideas that
arose out of Follett's thinking in The New State
and which were to be developed further in later
work.
3. Book review by Theodore Roosevelt in the
American Historical Review, Vol. 2 (October
1896), p. 177. Follett was an undergraduate for
ten years, from 1888 to 1898, when she grad-
uated, summa cum laude from Radcliffe. This
period included time out for writing The Speaker
of the House and a year in England at Newn-
ham College, Cambridge. She also studied for a
while in Paris, probably after leaving Radcliffe,
although that is not well established.
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968
 MARY PARKER
4. Evening Centers-Aims and Duties of Managers
and Leaders Therein (Boston: City of Boston
Printing Department, 1913).
5. Creative Experience, op. cit., p. 83.
6. The ideas from The New State that came in for
later development appear mainly in the first
half of the book.
7. The principle of "circular response" and illus-
trations thereof are mostly in Chapter III of
Creative Experience.
8. Follett used the illustration of the tennis game
first in The New State, pp. 25-26, and again in
"Constructive Conflict," Dynamic Administra-
tion, p. 44.
9. Creative Experience, op. cit., p. 63.
10. Ibid., p. 62
11. Ibid., pp. 64-65, 75. For a discussion of the re-
lation between the situation and its purpose see
ibid., pp. 84-87.
12. Mary Follett died before the word "integration"
became popularly associated with Negro-white
relations, but the integration of the races as the
phrase is now used is quite compatible with her
concept, and that concept has a number of in-
teresting implications that bear on present racial
problems.
13. References to and illustrations of integration are
to be found scattered all through Follett's writ-
ings. Some of the principal places, including the
illustrations just cited, are: The New State, p. 29;
Creative Experience, pp. 43-46, 157-160, 184-
185; Dynamic Administration, pp. 32-33.
14. Creative Experience, p. 163; "Constructive Con-
flict," Dynamic Administration, p. 36; "Some
Methods of Executive Efficiency," Rowntree
Plan Now to Attend ASPA's
1969 National Conference on Public Administration
May 19-21
Deauville Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 1968
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FOLLETT 529
Lecture Conference, Proceedings, October 1,
1926, p. 73.
15. As with integration, the discussion of its unde-
sirable alternatives appears in various places
throughout her writing. Her principal observa-
tions on power are contained in a chapter in
Creative Experience, pp. 179-194, and in a lec-
ture in Dynamic Administration, pp. 95-116.
16. Follett developed her ideas about authority in
business in substantially the same form in three
separate lectures. The most accessible version at
present is in "The Meaning of Responsibility in
Business Management," Dynamic Administration,
pp. 146-166.
17. In addition to Freedom and Coordination, there
are: L. Urwick and E.F.L. Brech, The Making
of Scientific Management, Vol. 1 (London: Man-
agement Publications Trust, 1945); Lyndall Ur-
wick (ed.), The Golden Book of Management
(London: Newman Neame, 1956); and several
articles. Also, see note 18.
18. This last lecture, "The Process of Control," was
actually published before any of the other
business lectures (except "The Illusion of Final
Authority"). It was included in Luther Gulick
and Lyndall Urwick (eds.), Papers on the
Science of Administration (New York: Insti-
tute of Public Administration, 1937).
19. The version here is the one in Dynamic Admin-
istration, p. 297. In the other version, point three
has been moved to point one, which is a bit
more appropriate, since it underlines the general
importance of reciprocal relating (another term
for circular response, etc.).
20. Creative Experience, pp. 302-303.