Corporate Autonomy and Institutional Control: The Crown Corporation as a Problem in Organization Design

Paul McEwen is a chartered accountant in Toronto.

This book began as Stevens’s doctoral thesis in political economy at
the University of Toronto. It is directed to the “student of
government enterprise” and examines a fundamental purpose of
organizational theory: namely, to discover why the actual information
flow and decision-making in an organization do not always (ever?)
parallel the processes formally set out in an organizational chart.

The book consists of three parts. Part 1 includes a literature review
and the theoretical framework for Stevens’s examination of auto-nomy
and control in Crown corporations. In Part 2, Stevens discusses the
historical structure and operation of Crown corporations, especially as
it relates to information flow and decision-making, in Alberta,
Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Part 3 examines the ideological origins and
consequences, real or imagined, of the different Crown corporation
designs observed in the subject provinces.

A central issue debated in the literature is whether the Crown
corporation does (or should) operate like a private corporation, at
arm’s length from government, or as a decentralized instrument of
public policy for the government of the day. In examining which of these
models has been most closely followed in a given province, Stevens
focuses less on the formal decision-making structures and information
processes than on the decision-makers and information agents within
Crown corporations and government. By interviewing the cabinet
ministers, senior civil servants, and Crown corporation managers who
served in the provinces and corporations under study, Stevens is able to
bring some life to a potentially lacklustre area of study.

This is not a book for those uninitiated in the study of organizational
theory. However, for the student of public policy and administration, or
of economics, it serves as a rigorous examination of the conventional
wisdom about Crown corporation management. For the more casual reader,
the most interesting sections are probably the provincial case
histories, which contain numerous quotations from key players who were
instrumental in the creation, development, and operation of Crown
corporations during the period when such organizations flourished.