In the seventies the tide turned. No longer is it the mark of good government to be bigger. In health care we now assert that whatever can be done outside the hospital better be done elsewhere. Before the seventies, even mildly sick mental patients in the United States were considered to be best off in a mental hospital. Since then, mental patients who are no threat to others have been pushed out of the hospital (not always with good results). We have moved away from the worship of size that characterized the first three quarters of the century and especially the immediate post-World War II period. We are rapidly restructuring and “divesting” big business. We are, especially in the United States, pushing governmental tasks away from the center and toward local government in the country. We are “privatizing” and farming out governmental tasks, especially in the local community, to small outside contractors. Increasingly, therefore, the question of the right size for a task will become a central one. Is this task best done by a bee, a hummingbird, a mouse, a deer, or an elephant? All of them are needed, but each for a different task and in a different ecology. The right size will increasingly be whatever handles most effectively the information needed for task and function.

Limits to Growth

We have learned in our postmodern world that we can’t solve the problem of integration that is inherent in growth simply by devoting more resources to integration as we grow larger. The integration of functions in large-scale organizations may no longer be possible or if it is possible, it requires much too large a proportion of the total resources of the organization for this organization to survive. A new emphasis has thus emerged in postmodern organizations on the value of being small or at least being flexible in one’s attitude about appropriate size.