Diplomatie: Een organisatie in beweging

Abstract

Any organization can be described in terms of internal and external functioning. There are clear connections between the two, and these connections become the more apparent in cases of rapid structural change. Hence structural changes within organizations can be tackled, sociologically, By analyzing these dynamic interrelationships. In this article an effort is made to study the foreign service from this point of view. Diplomatic organizations exercise some political functions; part of these political functions are policy-functions. As far as these are concerned, a distinction can be made between information, persuasion and advising (functions). Due to a number of external factors (such as improvement of communications, rise in the number of states, growth of the importance of multilateral negotiating activities, etc.) some shifts occur in the importance of these functions as a whole — as compared with those of competing organizations — as well as in the relative strength of each of them. At the same time some important changes in the internal functioning of diplomatic organizations manifest themselves. Allmost all foreign services are subject in several ways to a process of internal differentiation. These processes have to be examined carefully in order to be able to understand some problems the foreign service is faced with nowadays. Part of these problems have a temporary nature and can he understood as ’resistances to change’; another part however, can be expected to have a more permanent character. All in all, these problems can be described in terms of ’basic dilemmas’ facing the organization as well as the profession. As such, three ’dilemmas’ are mentioned here, and they are indicated as conflicts between ’elite orientation’ versus ’structure orientation’ (Galtung), ’generalism’ versus ’specialist orientation’, and ’bureaucratism’ ' versus ’intermediarism’. Each of these three dichotomies is described in detail; these descriptions served as the main purpose of this study. At the end of the study a number of relations between organizational differentiation (types of speciahsts, types of career expectations, educational backgrounds etc.) and divergences of professional orientations are indicated, hypothetically. It is suggested that almost all diplomatic organisations may be described in terms of these three basic dilemmas.