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provision for more effective workers participation, a bold move
which has its roots in a genuine concern by TANU to eradicate
the obvious alienation of labour in the parastatal sector and which
we shall examine in much more detail in the next section, is not
regarded as posing any fundamental threat to the inherited
management systems.

It is generally felt that this new policy can be accommodated
with only marginal adjustments by management, and yet as we
shall see in section IV, there are already clear indications that ef-
fective workers’ participation and orthodox western management
systems are incompatible. Western management systems are
unquestionably elitist and extremely hierarchical. Management
tends to be remote from the workers and to rule by decree.
Workers participation is rigidly circumscribed and, outside of
negotiations concerning material rewards (conceived of in very
narrow terms), is limited in such a way that it does not interfere
seriously with management’s discretion over all major decisions.
The western management style would also seem to be at odds
with Tanzania’s socialist aspirations in a myriad of other ways.
High salaries, fringe benefit and expense account living, heavy
reliance on advertising frequently with appeals to sexism and the
superiority of ‘bourgeois’ life-styles and consumption patterns;
liberal use of ‘public relations’ personnel as pretective cocoons to
hide the truth from the public; maintenance of rigid specialisation
so that workers gain proficiency in only one or two monotonous
repetitive activities; an acute sensitivity to matters of profit and
loss and an acute insensitivity to the implication of their activities
for society at large. These are but a few obvious examples; there
are many more, perhaps not so obvious, ways in which western
management systems and practices might be open to question.

Management systems are not, therefore, ideologically neutral
and hence the wholesale importation of western capitalist
management systems into Tanzania should be viewed with con-
cern. The extensive use of the purveyors of the systems — western
management consultants and in particular the A merican company
Mckinsey is an even more bewildering aspect of Tanzania’s policy
towards its public sector. Mckinsey have been given contracts to
set up management and control systems for N.D.C., S.T.C. and
East African Harbours Corporation (as well as being given the
much more important responsibility of setting up the new

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