ABSTRACT
Some planning activities of organisations operate happily, others are muddled or ritualistic. A review of the activities which operate happily suggests a useful distinction between the performative sense of planning as doing something and the indicative sense of planning as describing something. In the UK, the importance of corporate planning for the management and control of public enterprises has been stressed in each of a series of official pronouncements over the past decade. To quote from a White Paper published in 1978, “The Government considers that the corporate plan, and the examination of strategic options, should have a central place in the relationship between the nationalised industries and their sponsoring departments.” In the Central Electricity Generating Board, the week-by-week planning of dispatch is conducted by a national control centre, which assigns load among stations according to criteria of merit-order derived from a scale of unit costs.
