Peter Vaill George Washington University
What do managers really do? How do they acquire skill and competence to do what they do? What can educators and trainers do to improve the process by which managers acquire this skill and competence?
These, it seems to me, are the three fundamental questions behind the so-called "competency movement"(CM) which is currently receiving so much attention in management education, particularly in that sector of management education which is concerned with helping managers improve their skills with people. While I cannot say that I have studied this movement exhaustively, I did contribute in the midseventies to AACSB's exploratory studies on the subject. I have not remained involved with the effort, but I have since heard several briefings on the progress of the work. Furthermore, like other managment educators, I have continued to hear criticism about graduating BBAs and MBAs—that they can't manage, aren't interested in managing, think "management" is essentially a process of rationally analyzing "problems" and deciding on "optimal solutions," and are generally insensitive to the nuances of organizational cultures and the deep human dilemmas which lie just below the surface of the apparently well-managed organization.
I am very uneasy about the competency movement in management education. Not that I am against "competency" and not that I do not accept responsibility for contributing to the competency of the students I see in class and the managers I see in various workshops and consulting relationships, but the work I see being done on the subject of understanding managerial competency and the efforts to contribute to it in education and training are not very consistent with what I think the managerial job is, and are not very consistent with what I think is going on when a learner is attaining competency. In this article I have undertaken to raise some of the concerns I have about the CM as I understand it. My intent, like everyone else's, is to contribute to the improvement both of managing and of teaching about managing.
I don't think there has been enough discussion of the theory of managing implicit in the studies of competency which have been conducted. The studies I have seen seem to start with the questions at the beginning of this article. The primary cognitive strategy which has been employed is what might be called a "factorial" or "dimensional" approach. In other words, the question, "What do managers do?" has tended to turn into the question, "What are the main factors in the manager's job?" The researcher has then differentiated a list of factors out of the job-wholes of a population of subjects. These lists have been subjected to further tests of reliability. Sample sizes have received careful attention. Validation of the lists has been more tricky, but apparently researchers have satisfied themselves that these lists do include factors which can be found in managerial jobs.
But do managers experience their jobs as lists? Does anyone have any evidence on this question? For the transformation of the job-whole into a list of factors is a fateful step, in the sense that it will then influence subsequent criterion attainment research, teaching/training designs, and ultimately the career and personal success of live men and women in the real world. I know I don't experience action roles, be they managing, teaching, parenting, consulting, or anything else as a list of factors. My clinical sense is that other managers, in my experience, similarly experience their job-wholes in a variety of ways other than lists, but I can't prove it, and, of course, with my own cognitive tendencies I may be a biased perceiver.
Some years ago, however, I wrote an essay about OD consulting whose premise was that we should not tell change agents how to act without paying a lot of attention to how the change project looks from the actor's point of view (Vaill, 1972). I tried in that essay to speculate about the actor's "practice theory," by which I meant something very close to Argyris' "theory-in-use." I defined an actor's practice theory as ". . . the models of situations and his relation to them which the actor develops in his mind. His practice theory is, literally, a personal theory guiding his practice, bearing some relation to public objective theories about organizational situations, but in no sense identical with them." I did not then and do not now draw Argyris's conclusion—that managers must be shown how ill-founded their subjective theories-inuse or practice theories are. Rather, my conviction is that there is far more wisdom in practice theories than academic theory has yet begun to tap. With regard to competency, my hypothesis is that the study of managing from a manager's point of view will reveal many subtle modes and mixes of competency and that these are likely to be more valid expressions of what is really going on than an externally generated list of factors can possibly be.
There is more to the theory of managing imbedded in the CM than merely its assumption of the list-like nature of competency. Below, I have written some propositions about managing and the manager's environment which must hold true in order for the CM's strategy to be effective. After each proposition, I have sketched some reasons why the proposition might not be true. In other words, I think the CM is presuming a world which does not exist, or which is at least quite improbable.
1. Competencies in managing are relative independent of each other. Attainment or nonattainment of one type of competency does not affect the probability of attainment of other types.
Comment: This is the metaphysical claim on whose truth rests the strategy of making lists of key factors in the manager's job. "Metaphysical" is used here in a purely descriptive sense; no pejorative overtones are intended. All research strategies rest on metaphysical assumptions.) It seems more likely to me, as is in fact recognized in some competency studies, that the competencies do "cluster." "Interpersonal competency," for instance, is a general phrase which covers a considerable variety of individual competencies. The more clustering there is in the manager's job, the more questionable it is that distinct competencies can be identified and teaching/training strategies developed to produce them.
2. The manager's job has identifiable outputs which result from the exercise of various competencies.
Comment: This proposition may have validity for an individualized task with physical products as outputs. But managing is neither individualistic, nor does the activity typically have Dhvsical outnuts. "Competency" is the capacity to produce an intended, identifiable consequence. If managing is a highly interactive flow process, rather than a neat structure of causes and effect, does the idea of competency in the sense of capacity to produce effects have any meaning at all? I suggest that just below the surface in the CM is the very kind of linear cause-effect thinking that we criticize in managers!
Another variety of this cause-effect thinking in the CM may actually be a logical fallacy. This is the assumption that if we identify the competencies possessed by effective managers, and then teach them to learners, that these learners will become effective managers. Bayesian statistics refutes this assumption. If I see it raining, I can predict that I will see people with umbrellas. But if I see people with umbrellas, can I predict with equal probability that it will rain? No. Those who die of lung cancer tend to have been smokers. Those who smoke, however, die of lung cancer with a much lower probability. If a child is born blind, the probability that the mother had German measles during pregnancy is much higher than the probability that a pregnant woman with German measles will have a blind child. Probabilities are not symmetrical in many cause-effect situations, yet I see no one in the CM seriously considering this phenomenon in the study of managerial competencies.
3. Managerial competency is a high leverage variable in the attainment of increased organizational effectiveness.
Comment: Every manager knows that a very large number of things are influencing organizational effectiveness. The more complex the organization, and the more turbulent its environment, the more of these things there are, and the more complex their interdependence and joint action; and therefore the more interactive and fluid managing becomes. The question must be asked whether the CM presumes a "managerial world" which is a great deal more stable and predictable than the modern world of managing reallv is.
4. Related to (3) above; Given the ambiguity and fluidity of all organizational situations, stability and control is introduced and maintained in the person of the "manager." The manager is a creator and restorer of order.
Comment: Managers are also innovators, leaders, fundamentally creators of disorder. The 1980s are seeing renewed emphasis on these modes of managing. One wonders if the competencies that go with creating change might even be less unit-like and easily understood than the competencies that go with equilibriummaintenance. Certainly the research on planned changes underlines how one's personal style and "touch" influences how a process of change goes. Possibly, the CM will unconsciously underemphasize the competencies that go with innovation and disorder, and end up fostering a regulative at the expense of an innovative view of managing.
Another way to make this point is to say that any specification of requisite managerial competencies assumes that we know the future; that we know what the requisite competencies will be. Yet, at the same time that we flirt with the CM we are speculating about a world of "transformation," of "post-industrialism," of a "third wave," of an "information age." Under conditions of possibly radical transformation, why do most lists of competencies omit what may be the most strategic competency of all: "Capacity to shelve one's competence in favor of an openness to the new. " Nearly twenty years ago, California consultant Will McWhinney coined the term "pedamorphosis" —the capacity to change back to a more child-like frame of mind—to capture this need for openness to the new among managers. The CM seems to be ignoring this point.
5. Exercise of a competency is relatively unaffected by the rea/-time, here-and-now perceptions of the manager. To possess a competency is to know when and how to use it.
Comment: Most lists of competencies I have seen do contain an item which might be called generically, "freedom from perceptual distortion." Perhaps that does take care of it, but I am left feeling uneasy. All my experience with action roles, including those for which I know I possess high competence, teaches me the extraordinary variety and subtlety of perceptual distortions. One of the chief sources of distortion, in fact, is my own conviction of competence in a situation. The time to be maximally careful is that moment when, "This job is a piece of cake," flits through one's mind.
Perception, in me at least, is not a stop-action photograph I take of a situation in order that I may determine what sort of competence is required in it. Perceiving is an act occurring continuously in parallel with my action in situations. Situations unfold before me, partly as a result of my effects and partly as a result of other factors. But perceiving what I am doing and what is happening, and what I am doing and what is happening, are inextricably interwoven. The metaphor of parallelism is only a very loose approximation. Thus, perceptual ability cannot be merely another item on the competency list. The exercise of my competencies and the understanding of their effects are perceptions through and through.
If the exercise of all competencies is interwoven with perception, and if perception itself is of a fundamentally different order, more deeply rooted in my character and personality, what bet are we making when we teach competencies without dealing with this deeper phenomenon?
6. Competencies can be attained and exercised across a wide range of action contexts.
Comment: The oft-mentioned but lightly regarded "artistic" dimension of managing is the defense that is made to those who say, as I have, that managing is highly contextual, fluid, interactive, not a list of skills, etc. But what do we mean by an artistic dimension? If we took managerial artistry more seriously, would we describe requisite skills with lists? Would we assert the kind of cause-effect relationships I was criticizing above in Proposition 2? System theory would certainly answer these questions with a resounding "No!"
Managerial artistry blends such contextual factors as the following:
• degree of geographical disperson among participants;
• extent to which the situation is "high stakes":
• the sheer number of people involved;
• the time available for the exercize of a competency;
• the endemic stress level among participants;
• the presence of norms in the situation about the manager's competency itself!.
Obviously there are many more such factors, and, of course, they do not exist or present themselves to the actor as a list either. None of the competency lists I have seen have "artistry" as a list-item itself, and properly so. But if it is not a list-item, what is it? What is its relation to the operational competencies we are trying to inculcate? It seems to me that the CM, while not denying the importance of artistry, tends to leave it as a personal quality or factor which will somehow enliven, enrich, and individualize a person's exercise of the competencies. The CM further assumes that the existence of a phenomemon of artistry does not by itself invalidate the search for competencies and the development of teaching/training methods to inculcate them. There is, however, another way of thinking about artistry which leads me to the conclusion that the CM is wrong in regarding artistry in the way that it does. Consider the relation between the phenomenon "managing" and the phenomemon "artistry." The artist, of whatever sort, tends to possess extraordinary competency (sic) with respect to such things as the nature of her/his materials, the history of the particular art, the ways the artistic product is likely to be experienced by others, methods of working, and the like. But all these unitary competencies are subordinate to something else: the expressiveness of the artist, whether we call this expressiveness "creativity" or "insight" or "inspiration" or whatever. I define an "art" as the attempt to wrest coherence and meaning out of more reality than we ordinarily try to deal with. The artist is after this "something more," determined to find coherence and meaning imbedded more subtly and deeply in experience than the rest of us see. The artist is after a theme, a dimension, an aspect of existence which no one else seems to see in quite the same way. From the very beginning of training, the artist is reminded daily that if the enterprise is nothing else, it is a celebration of one's specialness.
In a book of advice to aspiring writers, Sidney Cox once remarked:
What you mean is never quite what anyone else means, exactly. And the only thing that makes you more than a drop in the common bucket, a particle of sand in the universal hourglass, is the interplay of your specialness with your commonness (Cox, 1962, p. 19).
In teaching managing, what interplay of specialness and commonness do we seek to foster in learners? This is a question that few tend to ask. Interest in the question is certainly not very evident in the CM. I think, however, that leading and working with people in purposeful situations requires a greater sense of this interplay and capacity to perform it oneself than practically any other sphere of activity. That is what managing is, in my opinion. The whole history of the Organizational Behavior movement in management education can be understood as a grouping for this interplay, as an expression of the profound value we place on all the persons in an organizational situation —on the managers and the managees. The CM, to the contrary, vastly overemphasizes the commonness dimension of managing at the direct and possibly irretrievable exDense of the specialness dimension.
7. Exercize of a competency is possible irrespective of the morals, motives, and competencies of those toward whom a competency is directed. For instance, a competent negotiator can negotiate regardless of whether the other party is equally sincere or not.
Comment: The word "interaction" rolls off our professional tongues so smoothly that it is easy to forget what the word is saying. It is saying that in social behavior there are always at least two purposeful consciousnesses operating, and that in choosing actions each is taking account of itself and of the other in real-time. To be sure, the CM includes "interpersonal competence" on its lists of factors (the phrase itself is virtually a cliche), but I am a little nervous about what the CM thinks such competence is. Will it be defined as, "Knowledge of theory and research about human behavior and ability to apply it in situations?" Will the CM drift toward equating such competence with a quasi-scientific deduction about what is needed in a particular situation? In our litanies about the "situational" nature of management, we often forget that no scientific law can ever explain an individual case, nor can the law ever produce valid and unequivocal guidance on what should be done in a situation. The law always contains a ceteris paribus, and the individual case never does. The individual case contains both the phenomena the law is concerned with and all the other things the law leaves out or assumes equal.
To the extent that "interpersonal competence" does involve use of theories and research findings, what then can it possibly be? It most certainly is not the reduction of a particular case to a general law for, as noted above, this "case" has the marvelous capacity as an intentional consciousness itself to both anticipate and react to the way that "it" is being treated. It does not experience itself as an "it," while the assumption that some law applies rests on the other person holding still as precisely this—an "it."
Therefore, one does not possess an attribute called "interpersonal competence" conceived as an ability to work skillfully with people across a variety of situations. Such an image of oneself is an incorrect and dysfunctional starting assumption, and becomes more incorrect and dysfunctional as the situation gets more and more complex and unique. What sort of a competence is one which is best forgotten in the here-andnow, or best not even conceived of in the first place? Not one, certainly, which lends itself easily to operational specification on a list of key competencies!
8. No deleterious system effects are introduced by the possession and exercize of a competency by a manager, or if such effects do arise, competency to deal with them can be developed by the same process as that by which the original competencies were developed.
Comment: The intent of the CM is constructive. It wants to contribute to organizational effectiveness. However, to the extent the above proposition describes the CM's underlYing assumption, it places the CM in a dangerous position. If deleterious effects do arise from the correct exercize of a competency, the CM will tend to conclude that it must either have that competency misdefined or that its training methods must be incorrect in some way, or both. This will lead proponents of the CM to new research and new teaching/training designs which are aimed at avoiding the negative effects.
In addition to all the other questions I have raised above, one final issue emerges from the likelihood that deleterious effects will occur from time to time: The CM, it seems to me, cannot help but foster and contribute to specialization in managing. As competencies become more and more precise and supposedly operational, while available teaching/training hours stay relative constant, we will have to divide and subdivide the field of management further and further. There already is a trend under way over the past couple of decades away from general management training and toward more specific "majors" and "fields of concentration." The CM will accelerate this trend.
Of course, the cynic in me observes that such a development will be a boon to the assessment center devotees and the career path planners. This essay is not about those two related fields but they intertwine philosophically and practically with the CM. I will leave it at this: The more we specialize, standardize, and career-program the young men and women who want to learn managing, the more rigidities we introduce into the system, and the more we alienate these verv people on whom organizational futures depend.
In this essay, I have tried to state and critique some key aspects of the theory of managing on which the CM is based. I have tried to show that to the extent my eight propositions are faulty, the CM is faulty. Behind the questions I have raised, of course, lies an alternative theory of what managing is. The men and women we are training are entering a mode of living I call being-in-the-world-with-responsibility. What this phrase means to me is only hinted at in the above remarks and, in fact, it presently exists only as a series of hints, glimmers, and mental excursions in my mind. Somehow, though, I think we have to cling to what it means to be a whole person with purposes in a situation with others who themselves have their purposes. The wholeness of oneself in relation to the wholeness of others is not presently apparent in the CM's approach to managing and to its improvement.
Argyris, Chris, and Donald Schon. Theory in Practice, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974.
Cox, Sydney. Indirections, New York: Viking Compass Books, 1962.
Vaill, Peter B. "Practice Theories in Organizational Development," in Adams,
John, ed., Theory and Method in Organi2atlon Development, Arlington, Virginia: NTL
Institute, 1873, and reissued as New Technologies in Organi2ational Development: 2,
I.alolla. California: Universitv Associates. 1975.
Dear Peter:
As usual, you have written a provocative paper that raises some crucial questions about
the "competency movement." I have some concerns, however, in your position. It
feels as a wholesale indictment that admits of no benefits to this approach. The worry I
have is that the reader will write off your entire argument thereby missing many of the
valuable observations. In a sense, I think you fall into a similar trap as you accuse
those in the competency movement as doing. Namely, both of you have a non sequitur in your
reasoning (although yours starts at the opposite point).
As I understand your critique of the logic underlying those advocating the teaching of
managerial competencies, it is as follows:
1. If we can find effective managers, then we can studv what competencies thev use.
2. If we know those competencies, then we can teach them to future managers.
3. And, if these competencies are learned, the students will become effective managers.
As you point out, the first two statements may be correct without the third necessarily
following. But I think your reasoning also requires a logical leap of faith between your
first two propositions and the conclusion. As I understand it, you are saying:
1. A manager's job is more than a bunch of competencies.
2. True managerial effectiveness comes from learning the complexities, artistry and
interactive properties in behavior.
3. Since the second can't be learned from the first, there is no value in the first.
Let me use some analogies from learning how to ski (where I have some effectiveness) and
learning to how to play the violin (where I have none) to show that even though your first
two propositions are correct, the third does not follow.
In any sport or artistic endeavor, much effort is spent learning the basic component
parts. I spent much time on the practice slopes working on how to weight the skis and how
to shift that weight, and as I hear my neighbor's son, much time—too much time?
—is spent on similar basic skills learning the violin. You are correct that becoming
a competent skier or quality violinist, at some point, requires forgetting all the
component parts and responding to the whole. But the latter can best be done when the
first have been well ingrained.
One of the major problems I see with students and managers in their effort to achieve
excellence, is that they don't have the basic skills that are needed. If they knew how to
confront others non-destructively, give feedback, lead meetings, build teams, negotiate
well, build collaborative relationships, then it would be far easier for me to help them
learn when to do this (and when not) and how to integrate these separate skills into an
artistic whole. Furthermore, these are skills that will always be needed—I don't
worry about their being outdated.
Where I think you are on target is the danger if we, as educators, assume that knowing
these and other competencies are sufficient to attain excellence. While necessary, they
require a point where we say to the student "Now that you know all of that, forget it
and put yourself in the situation of an actual manager in an actual situation and
perform!" Students are likely to resist that ambiguity and perhaps seek the safety of
learning set skills. But isn't that what the challenge of education is all about?
Best,
Dvid L. Bradford November 19, 1983
Dear David:
Thanks for your commentary. You too are provocative and you have helped me focus my
thinking substantially, as I hope to display in the next few lines. I want to do two
things below: First, I see that I have to question the CM's logic at a more fundamental
level than I did in the paper you are reacting to. Second, and related, your comments on
learning skiing lead me to raise some questions for all of us about how much we really
know of the process of competency acquisition. In general, these two efforts will show how
deepIy my thinking is divided from what I see in the CM. Contrary to your worry, perhaps
it is necessary that the tack I am on be entertained or flatly rejected in a rather
wholesale way. The problem as I see it exists at the level of basic philosophies of
inquiry. I am trying to take big bites out of the CM, not just nibble at its edges.
To my first task: The CM makes a basic assumption which it does not question, and which it
probably is not even aware of as an assumption (or presupposition). It is this:
Competencies exist. The fundamental question then is, what is the basis for assuming that
competencies exist? or, as philosophers would say, what is the ontological status of the
idea of a competency? So you see, I think that even the first proposition which you
attribute to the CM "If we can find effective managers, then we can study what
competencies they use") is of very doubtful validity. The debate should be occurring
at the level of this proposition before we proceed with all the research and subsequent
designing of teaching/training programs and evaluating of "criterion attainment"
in learners. The whole argument you summarize is of at least doubtful validity; and, of
course, my personal opinion is that the argument is thoroughly faulty.
The CM commits what Alfred North Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced
concreteness" (Whitehead, 1925). The CM is on the why to forgetting that those lists
of factors I was talking about are abstractions. And they are abstractions of a very
tricky sort for they involve splitting action from consciousness. Managing of any sort,
let alone highly effective managing, is a very personal intertwining of consciousness and
action. The CM's idea of what definitely exists is an abstracted statement of visible
actioncapability; in fact the CM's idea of what is real is an abstraction twice-removed
for in its creation of a competency it has aggregated the visible action-capabilities of
many actors, smoothing out the differences of energy-level, personal style, and cultural
attunement which individnal setorR msnifect
The disadvantage of exclusive attention to a group of abstractions [says Whitehead],
however well-founded, is that, by the nature of the case, you have abstracted from the
remainder of things. In so far as the excluded things are important in your experience,
your modes of thought are not fitted to deal with them. You cannot think without
abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically
revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as
essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions (loc. cit.,
P. 59).
Speaking of Whitehead's fallacy, Abraham Kaplan says, "The fallacy lies in thinking
that the one is as concrete as the many from which it is constructed" (Kaplan, 1977,
p. 293). Closer perhaps to the Organizational Behavior tradition is General Semantics'
idea of confusing the word with the thing, mistaking the rnap for the territory. The
dangers of "reification," which aren't discussed in the social science
literature as much as they ought to be, also pertain to the sort of confusion I think the
CM is stuck in.
The CM assumes that an individual trainee will be able to reunite the newly learned
behavior with consciousness, and that no real violation of the personal intertwining I
spoke of has been committed by the abstraction. But I am doubtful. I am doubtful
empirically because of all the struggles I have watched over the years as learners tried
to figure what such things as "openness," "giving feedback,"
"being participative," etc., mean for them personally in their own ways of
thinking and acting in relation to others. More importantly though, I am doubtful on
logical grounds (for maybe I have been cursed with particularly cloddish learners, though
I don't think so). You can't split consciousness and action. The empirical competencies we
are talking about have assumptions woven all through them about the nature of the
consciousness which is going to implement them. Perceptive learners see this right away
when they see that the practice of these actions involves changes in values, shifts in the
focus of one's attention, re-inspection of one's past experience with people. They realize
that we are messing with their heads as well as with their "hands," as it were.
We have all been confronted by such learners. The most honest and effective teachers and
trainers realize the inextricability of consciousness and action and try to work caringly
with both. The CM is going to drive these folks out of the classroom.
Which brings me to my second main point. What I am talking about does not just apply to
the interpersonal and organizational sensitivities we associate with the teaching of
Organizational Behavior. It applies to all processes of competency acquisition. It applies
to learning auditing, and market research, and planning, to computing breakeven points and
learning programming. It applies to all learning. Yes, it applies to learning to ski.
To learn to ski involves, as you say, paying attention to the various actions which go to
make up "skiing." But to think about how one learned skiing is to pay attention
to something else. It is to pay attention to one's processes of attention while one is
practicing the requisite actions. Now, I haven't been on a pair of skis since I was
fourteen, though I practically lived on them in my childhood as a Minnesota kid. But let
me make some guesses about what the books and/or instructors said to your head as well as
to your body. I'll bet they said things like:
"Don't be embarrassed that you're on an easy practice slope."
"Don't worry about looking funny." "Don't cut corners with cheap or
ill-fitting equipment. ' "Make it a family project." "Figure it will take
you about X-hours of practice to become reasonably confident and competent."
"If you let yourself fall this way (a statement to your body), you won't get hurt (a
statement to vour mind)."
. . . and so forth.
Or, maybe they didn't, in which case many of the actions seemed pointless. You didn't feel
like you were getting anywhere (notice consciousness continuing to burble, even though the
instructor wasn't paying any attention to it?). This is why computer programming is so
hard for some people: the instructors don't realize they are tinkering with the tips of
consciousness as well as the tips of the fingers. It is why so many kids quit piano
lessons. It is why business school is so almighty boring to so many of our students. They
get no feel for the romance of managing, which is just a colorful way of saying that the
faculty is not helping them feel like managing will be something they will enjoy.
We don't turn off our minds while we are learning actions. We can't. Some demonic
ideologues of past and present realize this, by the way, and undertake to control
attention and awareness concommitant with their control of actions-to-be-learned. It is
perhaps appropriate that we are asking ourselves these questions as nineteen eighty-four
dawns, for those of us who seek to liberate the human spirit through education are in a
race of rather sobering importance. I don't see demonic ideologues in the CM for managing,
but I see some impoverished ideas about the nature of the human spirit. Masters and
Johnson have not succeeded in killing love with their competency studies of the sex act
(sic), although they and the porno crowd have managed to confuse a lot of people. I hope
the CM does no better with learners of managing. Meanwhile, those of us who see the
defects have a lot of work to do.
My very best,
Peter B. Vaill
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and theModern World, New York: The Free Press, 1967
(first published by Macmillan, 1925).
Kaplan, Abraham. In Pursuit of Wisdom, Beverly Hills, California: Glencoe Press, 1977.