ABSTRACT
Of the central importance of the enterprises’ relationships with their governments, there seems no room for doubt. Latin America testifies to it; Africa even more forcefully. In Oceania (in the guise of Papua New Guinea), the relationship admittedly seems so far to be of only nascent significance, yet it is plain from Robert Floyd’s conclusions that the seeds of the customary problems with this relationship-inadequate institutions, confused objectives, defective techniques-are already close to germination. Only in Asia, were it possible to regard Singapore as representative, would the relationship appear not to be a problem; sadly, however, in this regard Singapore cannot be taken as representative. (Though, in comparison with India and some other countries, Singapore may seem too small to point to any conclusion of general significance, the maxim of the great biologist, T.H.Huxley, “treasure your exceptions”, counsels reflection and it will be necessary to return to Singapore’s exceptional experience later in this essay.) Drawing, however, on the general experience of the less-developed countries, Leroy Jones and Gustav Papanek are able to propound a crisp summation of the issue of the relationship between enterprises and governments which, it can be asserted with confidence, is equally true for most of the developed countries: “The fundamental problem is thus to provide
sufficient governmental control to insure achievement of intended deviations from private behaviour, whilst insuring sufficient managerial discretion to minimize unintended deviations”.1 This issue of the reconciliation of governmental control and managerial autonomy is characterised by Horacio Boneo as “the eternal problem of public enterprise”.
