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By 1900, the general leadership of the Relief Society, the Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association, and the Primary Association had together made plans for a woman’s building for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “We want to have a house and we want land to build it on and it should be in the shadow of the temple,” Sarah M. Kimball, a vice-president in the Relief Society corporation, had told the sisters at a conference a few years earlier.[1] The women’s organizations had originally considered buying land, but the Church’s First Presidency decided to make them a gift of land immediately east of Temple Square in Salt Lake City. They had to raise some $20,000 before they could commence building. Church president Lorenzo Snow had told them that “when we had that amount on hand he would give the deed of the land, and we could be as sure of it as you will be of happiness when you get to heaven.”[2]

Some $14,000 into the fund-raising (sisters all over the Church contributed one dollar each), women leaders were disturbed by rumors that plans for a separate woman’s building had been shelved and that the women’s organizations would be officed in a Presiding Bishop’s building to be built on the same property.[3] The rumors were true. The Bishop’s Building was dedicated in 1909 with a few offices designated for the women’s organizations. An associate reported that the Relief Society president Bathsheba W. Smith “was almost overcome with grief”; and a decade later, feelings over the matter had not faded. As Relief Society general president Emmeline B. Wells told the board in 1920, “The land upon which the Bishop’s building is built is owned by the Relief Society.”[4]

Does this incident simply verify Marilyn Warenski’s assertion that Mormon women have no real power and their institutional privileges are therefore “always in jeopardy”?[5] What is power within the Mormon Church? How have its forms evolved? Does it affect men and women differently? 

To answer these questions we must understand something of the complexity of power in large institutions. Modern scholars consider organizational power to have at least three facets: formal authority, informal influence, and autonomy. Formal authority is the power derived from one’s position in a pyramidal hierarchy of officers. It is the authority flowing from rules that define duties and responsibilities for each office. One obeys the office or position, not the person. Informal influence operates outside formal bureaucratic prescription. Informal coalitions, charismatic personalities, friends and relatives, and those to whom favors are given are all power centers but not necessarily with the title and trappings of formal authority. Personal power, or autonomy, is the ability to advance self-interests without being unduly con strained by those possessing either formal or informal power. Autonomy is the power to exercise creativity, expertise, or interests outside the organization. 

Although one power culture will dominate in an organization, the other two modes will usually also be present. For example, members of professional organizations generally exercise autonomous power, but authority and informal influence certainly affect the total dynamic. Informal influence is the main way power is exercised in most government and business enterprises, but formal authority and autonomous units are also at play there. The military is an authority-based power system, and it usually struggles to accommodate in formal influence and autonomy. 

Formal Authority 

The systematic study of organizational power began at the beginning of the twentieth century with the writings of Max Weber, whose studies focused on formal authority. Acknowledging that formal power was often derived from charisma, family, or a claim of divine right, Weber favored a bureaucratic organization which emphasized a legal-rational approach to formal authority.[6]

Scholars have been aware that formal authority pervades Mormon doc trine and organization.[7] Joseph Smith declared that God had chosen him to speak and act in God’s name; Joseph’s many revelations elaborating that calling show an authority based on both charisma and divine right. However, “charismatic authority,” as Weber observed, “cannot remain stable but becomes either traditionalized or rationalized or a combination of both.”[8]

The Prophet expanded the legal and rational elements of organizational authority as he developed a presiding hierarchy of the First Presidency, Presiding Patriarch, Quorum of Twelve Apostles, Quorum of Seventy, and Presiding Bishopric. 

This hierarchy also represented a strong kinship network. In the succession crisis that followed the 1844 death of the Prophet, authority was the central issue. The charisma of James Strang, as well as his claims of special appointment from Joseph, won Strang a significant following. The group which later became the Reorganization believed that authority should become more traditional and opted to keep it in the Smith family. The largest faction, those who followed Brigham Young and the Twelve, chose the legal-rational form of authority vested in the office and not in the person.[9]

Central to Weberian theory is the hierarchy of authority: in a pyramidal structure, the higher the office, the greater the authority. Positions are defined by formal and legal rules and procedures which make possible a systematic division of labor within the bureaucratic organization. Specific duties, in turn, are administered and coordinated through the authorities’ chain of command. During Brigham Young’s tenure, the Church grew considerably in size and complexity. Accordingly, in 1877 he further systematized formal authority in a massive “priesthood reorganization” which extended the hierarchy (line authority) to stake and ward levels.[10] The Twelve were relieved of local obligations and given an “increase of responsibility and jurisdiction.” In addition to organizing more uniform stakes and wards throughout Utah, Church authorities issued a general epistle which codified duties and procedures for stake presidencies and ward bishoprics, required new record-keeping practices, and organized Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood quorums.[11]

During the short presidency of Lorenzo Snow from 1898 to 1901, local priesthood leaders became the key links in the jurisdictional chain between members and authorities. They were instructed to arbitrate conflicts between members and serve as local administrators, further freeing the Twelve for travel and general Church responsibilities. 

The priesthood reform movement of 1908-1922 also strengthened the hierarchal line of authority. Each office within that line was assigned specific duties, with particular emphasis on local Melchizedek and Aaronic priesthood quorums.[12] About 70,000 of a total Church membership of 400,000 were members of these quorums, but they had no standard procedures, lessons, duties, or meeting schedules. To inaugurate a more ordered priesthood program, President Joseph F. Smith established a General Priesthood Committee on Outlines which selected, wrote, published, and distributed standard theology manuals to quorums, and (1) initiated regular weekly meetings of quorums (eliminating summer recesses), (2) suggested specific ages at which deacons, teachers, and priests should be ordained and outlined specific duties for Aaronic priesthood offices, (3) introduced systematic ward and quorum records, (4) in structed bishops to assume presidency over lesser priesthood in their wards as well as to preside over all ward priesthood work, and (5) further defined stake and ward priesthood relationships. 

The structure of the “line” organizations was only one aspect of the 1908— 1922 reform movement. By the start of the twentieth century, the Church had many leaders and administrators other than General Authorities, stake presidencies, bishoprics, and quorum leaders. Through the 1870s, diverse auxiliary or staff organizations had, with official sanction, geared new programs and meetings to specific Church populations. 

The organizations for children, youth, and women had begun as “unions,” loose federations of local units. The Sunday School sustained a general super intendency in 1872. In 1880, the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association, the Relief Society, Young Ladies’ MIA, and Primary Association followed suit.[13] By the turn of the century, these auxiliaries were calling missionaries to recruit more activity among the Saints and holding their own annual conferences. The Sunday School held its own stake conferences. In the years to follow, Primaries and MI As graded their classwork, trained their teachers, provided handbooks, and wrote uniform, centrally prepared lessons. The Relief Society introduced mothers’ classes; the Sunday School began a regular program for adults. All the auxiliaries increasingly relied on centralized planning as their general presidencies or superintendencies and boards grew stronger. 

Proud of the provision made by these auxiliaries “for the salvation and care of the members of society of all ages,” the Quorum of the Twelve proclaimed in an 1887 epistle: “By means of these organizations, which are of vast interest to us as a people, everyone from early childhood to maturity, can be led forward step by step, from one degree of knowledge to another until fully qualified to discharge all the duties of perfected and honorable manhood and womanhood.”[14] As other manifestations of the Church’s temporal influence diminished (economic cooperation, political control, and practice of polygamy), these auxiliaries were a means of keeping the Church prominent in the lives of its members. 

The priesthood reform movement of 1908 was partially spurred by the discomfort of some General Authorities who compared the impact of the auxiliaries with the impact of Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood quorums, which lacked similar central direction. In a 1906 general conference address, J. Golden Kimball declared: 

The auxiliaries have been urged forward with great enthusiasm, everywhere, from Canada to Mexico, these organizations are to the front. The Priesthood quorums are apparently weary in well doing, and the officers and members seem to think that their organizations can run themselves. They have become lax in their work and let loose their hold. While the auxiliary organizations have taken the right of way, the Priest hood quorums stand by looking on awe struck. . . . the auxiliary organizations are going away up the hill and we, the Priesthood quorums, stand down in the valley and look on. Perhaps you don’t like that picture, you men of the Priesthood quorums, but I tell you there is a lot of truth in it. . . . I am in favor of the Priesthood quorums taking their proper places, and if they do not do it, they ought to be ashamed of themselves, for they have the power and intelligence, and they hold the authority.[15]

Authority was the central question in the subsequent push for reform. Men and women had been assuming leadership positions in the auxiliaries for more than thirty years—positions that carried some formal authority. This authority had to be defined in relation to priesthood authority. As early as 1880 John Taylor made it clear that women “ordained” to positions in the Relief Society were not being ordained to the priesthood. Tensions around formal authority paralleled the line-staff conflicts of other bureaucratic organizations, and by the end of the priesthood reform movement, the resolution of those tensions could be stated in secular terms: while the staff (auxiliaries) were critical to the institution’s purposes, only the line (priesthood officers) held the power to determine what the central purposes were and how they would be implemented throughout the institution. 

The impact of the reform movement is best expressed by a 1914 article in the Improvement Era, then the official organ of the priesthood quorums. The article praised the movement for producing church wide “realization of the importance of the priesthood quorums as compared with auxiliary organizations.”[16] President Joseph F. Smith himself foresaw the day when there would “not be so much necessity for work that is now being done by the auxiliary organizations, because it will be done by the regular quorums of the Priesthood.”[17]

Given this approach, it was inevitable that priesthood quorums and officers would begin to acquire auxiliary territory. For example, the Young Men’s MIA had provided theological instruction to its members for many years, but when standard yearly priesthood manuals were published and distributed, the YMMIA officers shifted into nontheological territory—music, drama, Scouting, athletics. 

As a result of the reform movement, the Relief Society forfeited actual real estate. In 1908, it was suggested that “the title of all real estate owned by the Relief Society” be changed “to the name of the bishop of the ward in which such property is located.”[18] This move was not entirely successful, but the mood was set. In 1921, the Church Presiding Bishopric, the triumvirate primarily responsible for Church property, strongly discouraged the building of separate Relief Society halls, “recommending that all auxiliary organizations instead give some assistance to the ward bishops in building a ward house, with the understanding that each auxiliary will have headquarters in this house.”[19]

Certainly the housing of the women’s organizations within the Bishop’s Building rather than in a separate woman’s building indicated that the relationship between priesthood and auxiliaries was increasingly superior-subordinate, with the priesthood hierarchy supervising the women’s auxiliaries more closely. Some organizational theorists would argue that such action illustrates the ability of bureaucracy to achieve efficiency. Such efficiency must not be achieved at the cost of unity, a check of the exercise of bureaucratic power. 

In 1914, in the first issue of the new Relief Society Bulletin, Susa Young Gates emphasized the coming order of things. She advised Relief Society sisters who found “a question arising in your minds or between the members of your board, go to your bishop, or to the [priesthood] president of your stake and ask him or them for counsel. Then accept it. . . . This is the order of the Priesthood and this should be understood by all members. Men, as well as women, are subject to this law of the Church.”[20] This contrasted sharply with Eliza R. Snow’s counsel twenty-six years earlier, when she had suggested that women work out conflicts in their organizations through the female leadership.[21]

Managing the auxiliaries became a major task of priesthood officers. General Authorities, officially appointed as auxiliary advisors, served as arbitrators, settling conflicts within the increasingly complex institution. As auxiliaries expanded, they overlapped in curriculum, activities, and assignments and vied in claiming and maintaining institutional territory. By 1919, girls twelve to fourteen years of age were receiving weekday religious instruction through both Primary classes and religion classes. That year Joseph F. Merrill, commissioner of LDS education, proposed that the overlap in course work could be avoided if the Primary would teach only those of elementary school age and allow junior seminaries, under the direction of the Church Department of Education, to instruct students of junior high school age. Primary general president May Anderson resisted, feeling that the Primary was “well equipped” to provide the young girls with both religious instruction and social activities. However, the junior seminaries emerged from arbitration with full responsibility for the girls’ religious instruction. Then in 1934, the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association took over the remaining responsibilities the Primary had for these girls. May Anderson first objected but then supported the decision of the presiding priesthood authorities.[22]

Gospel instruction was originally the Sunday School’s exclusive jurisdiction, but by 1908 nearly every Church program was geared toward gospel teaching. Increasing concern about coordinating this curriculum led to a 1907 committee of auxiliary representatives and a 1912 Correlation Committee chaired by David O. McKay. Later, combined with the Social Advisory Committee, the Correlation Commitee worked for over a decade to define the functions of auxiliary and priesthood curriculum and activities. The First Presidency rejected the restructuring recommended by this joint committee, but concern with coordination continued in a “priesthood-auxiliary movement” in the 1920s and 1930s.[23] A string of commitees looked at the problem through the 1940s, including the Committee of Correlation and Coordination, the Union Board of the Auxiliaries, and a Publications Committee. 

The Correlation Executive Committee, formed in March 1960, distinguished itself from preceding committees by its sweeping changes, a church wide restructuring that has come to be known in the last twenty years as “correlation.” Like most of its predecessors, the 1960 Correlation Committee began by attempting to coordinate the curriculum of the Church’s teaching arms: priesthood quorums, Relief Society, Sunday School, MIAs, and Primaries. But it was readily apparent, as its chairman, Harold B. Lee of the Quorum of the Twelve, remarked, that “consolidation and simplification of church curricula, church publications, church buildings, church meetings” would include “many other important aspects of the Lord’s work.”[24]

The growth of Church membership from 1920 (526,000) to 1960 (1,693,000) was only prelude to the 1970 total (2,931,000). Not only did auxiliary publications and programs proliferate during the 1960s, but other large Church staffs developed, including the genealogy, missionary, and church education departments. Some auxiliaries were managing large, specialized staffs, such as the Primary Children’s Hospital and the Relief Society Social Services. Remarked Lee, “As the Church grows so rapidly and everyone is pushing their own program, you can see how essential (correlation) is.”[25]

Like the priesthood reform movement of 1908-1922, the correlation movement clarified the duties of those in line-authority positions and stressed line over staff. “We must wake the priesthood up to assume their responsibility and we must place greater emphasis on leadership at all levels,” Lee said.[26] In fact, “priesthood correlation” was the official designation for the movement. Stake presidents were told that they, working with their high councils, were responsible for the total program of their stakes. Bishops, with ward councils and priesthood executive committees, were to preside over the entire ward program. This meant, for example, that ward auxiliary leaders who had forwarded their reports to stake auxiliary leaders and thence to general auxiliary heads would instead submit them to bishops, then stake presidents, and then to the Presiding Bishopric’s Office. Furthermore, auxiliaries which had raised and managed their own funds were now placed on the Church budget at general, stake, and ward levels. 

While bishops and stake presidents assumed greater administrative responsibilities, ward priesthood quorums took charge of four major programs—home teaching, missionary work, genealogy, and welfare. All of these line officers were to support “the family,” which began to receive unprecedented attention as “the basic unit of the Church.” The husband or father was this unit’s presiding priesthood officer; his roles included spiritual leader, liaison between family and bishop (often via a hometeacher), presiding officer at a weekly family home evening (for which the Church provided manuals, starting in 1970), conductor of regular priesthood interviews with family members, and source of priesthood blessings. While the chain of command or hierarchical line of priesthood authority had always extended from the prophet and First Presidency to the individual father, certain parts of that line had received special emphasis during different reform movements. Now the chain of command and duties was complete, and the whole priesthood line was clear. 

“The Priesthood is the very life of the Church,” Apostle Melvin J. Ballard had said in the midst of the priesthood-auxiliary movement of 1928. “The auxiliary organizations are but helps in government to the Priesthood.”[27] When the all-Church Coordinating Council divided up Church membership according to age groups—children, youth, adults—auxiliaries helped with, rather than initiated, programs for those age groups. In 1971, the Primary’s Children’s Friend, the Sunday School’s Instructor, the Relief Society Maga zine, and the Improvement Era, which had served the MI As, were consolidated into three official Church magazines, one for each age group; none was auxiliary-sponsored. Auxiliaries which had written their own lessons for de cades began submitting them to a central correlation committee for approval, and later a separate department of instructional development began writing all lessons. Here, too, the auxiliaries retreated to a helping role. 

The size of general boards shrank and their communication with local units substantially decreased. Annual general board visits to stake auxiliary conventions declined to annual stake conference visits, then declined further to annual visits to a handful of regional conferences. Auxiliary instructions to the field reached local leaders only via an official clearing and correlation procedure. For a while, the route included stake presidents and bishops, who received auxiliary information through the Priesthood Bulletin.[28]

The Quorum of Twelve Apostles actively supervised this correlation effort, and with the First Presidency made the final decisions. Specified members of the quorum advised all the auxiliaries, and the quorum began to preside over its own increasingly complex staff, which included regional representatives and Assistants to the Twelve (later, members of the First Quorum of Seventy). Many of the latter managed the growing number of Church departments, consisting largely of professional staffs hired by the Corporation of the President to provide expertise in publishing, translation, education, public relations, building and construction, management, finance, history, and law. Some of these departments had existed for years along with the auxiliaries, but to some of these paid professionals fell work previously done by auxiliaries. Relief Society Social Services and the Primary Children’s Hospital were both relinquished to male-run Church departments under the direction of the Twelve and their assistants. (All Church hospitals were later sold to a private corporation.) 

The correlation movement emphasized not only authority but highly centralized authority. Much of the staff authority held by auxiliaries reverted to the line—men in hierarchical priesthood positions not only made policy, managed, and planned, but developed centralized programs as well. The result was a streamlined worldwide distribution of materials, better translation ser vices, coordinated lessons, standardized meetinghouse libraries, and more uniform local budgets. Correlation addressed members like singles, who had been outside the purview of auxiliaries, upgraded some of the Church’s professional services, and provided for continued coordination through a new Department of Internal Communications (1972). It also meant that the auxiliaries taught lessons they did not write and carried out programs they did not plan through teachers they did not train and funds that were not theirs. “We don’t have as much responsibility,” said LaVern Watts Parmley in 1974 at the close of her twenty-three-year tenure of general Primary president. “We don’t have the Children’s Friend. We don’t have the Primary Children’s Hospital. We don’t write our own lessons. We don’t sell—we used to sell our own supplies. We used to do everything. We used to do all our editing and do all our printing. We did everything. . . . I have at times just jokingly said, T don’t know why they need a president now. We’re just told what to do and when to do it and how to do it!'”[29]

In some ways the “correlated Church” became the essence of Weber’s bureaucracy, with its pyramidal hierarchy of authority, clear-cut chain of command, specialized division of labor, and supremacy of line over staff. But the Church took on other characteristics as its international organization evolved in the 1960s and 1970s, further paralleling developments in secular organizations. It began to resemble multinational corporations, which have a high-status class of specialized administrators or experts to cope with new cultures, new technology, new legal regulations, and the complex coordination problems that come with increased size.[30] In 1972, the Corporation of the President moved its growing staff of experts into a new twenty-six story office building where members of the First Quorum of Seventy (reconstituted in 1976 to include the former Assistants to the Twelve) managed specialized departments, under the direction of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve. Two new administrative layers were added churchwide—regions and areas, overseen by regional representatives and the First Quorum of Seventy, both again under First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve direction. Although plagued by the problems of centralization common to all multinational corporations, the Church effectively used the First Quorum of Seventy to help the Twelve maintain highly centralized control through the hierarchy of line authority, both at headquarters and within the body of the Church. 

Of course, this secular framework of analysis emphasizes the similarities between the Church and other organizations. There are differences as well. First, Church leaders can claim a divine-right authority, not simply power derived from management rules. Second, the leadership is collective. While the prophet and president is clearly in charge, the three members of the First Presidency share their leadership with the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, an oligarchy more than a hierarchy, with a continuously shifting coalition of actors who periodically change their formal responsibilities, their degree of activity, or their positions on certain issues. Third, several nonbureaucratic safeguards are part of Church government. Considerable freedom of action or administrative discretion exists at the ward and stake levels. Outside the General Authority network, it is customary to periodically release persons from their formal hierarchical positions without necessarily advancing them. Thus, the lower bureaucracy is usually temporary. Also counter-bureaucratic is the Church teaching that seeking after power is wrong and that a formal position is an opportunity for service rather than a means to status and reward. 

Informal Influence 

Much concern with formal authority pervades Mormon history, but formal authority has never been the only source of power. D. Michael Quinn has shown that intricate kinship and marriage connections existed among both nineteenth- and twentieth-century General Authorities, and suggested that these “interrelationships may have had the purpose of providing additional unity, stability and loyalty.”[31]

These relationships also legitimatized certain behavioral norms—or aspects of internal culture that were not based on rules and procedures. The norms were less formal, less tangible, and less predictable than a doctrinal rule or management procedure. They could not be systematically traced through Church history because they were not systematic. Yet because the Church acknowledged personal relationships and made them an integral part of its organizational structure, the influence of informal coalitions is unmistakable. General Authorities not only used these informal norms in relating to each other but deliberately institutionalized them in organizational positions outside the General Authority hierarchy. 

A remarkable example of this circumstance is Brigham Young’s appointment of Eliza R. Snow, one of his plural wives, to organize local Relief Societies and YLMIAs in Utah in the late 1860s. At the time, her calling was not formally defined; rather she and Young consulted frequently about various aspects of the work. In fact, extant sources suggest that it was through casual conversations that this husband-and-wife team initiated a new era for Mormon women—a quarter-century of collective and personal achievement whose eco nomic, political, social, and spiritual highlights have been well chronicled and much celebrated in recent years.[32] Snow once said that as soon as she heard Young express disappointment that no women were studying printing and typesetting, she made up her mind “to go from house to house if required to procure young ladies to learn.”[33] Figuratively speaking she did just that, stumping every ward and stake in the territory to preach printing, or grain saving, midwifery, the silk industry—whatever new task her conversations with Young suggested. She, in turn, advised him on women and women’s enterprises such as the Relief Society’s Woman’s Commission Store. As the store’s proprietor, she wrote to Young while he was away in St. George in February 1877: 

One evening, in the parlor, (but, sick as you were then and with so much crowding in your mind, it is not at all strange that you do not recollect it) without my mentioning the subject, you proposed allowing 20 percent com. on your goods, and again, when you were reclining in your chair in your room, I went in to see you on some business concerning the Store, you sent for br. John Haslem, and while giving him instructions about sending the goods down, you repeated the same to him. Another consideration—we never should allow him or any other clerk to dictate terms of commission on your goods. Although we are novices in the mercantile business, we are not green enough for that kind of management.[34]

Although Brigham Young gave no formal title to Eliza Snow’s calling, within a few years Mormon sisters throughout the Church heralded her as “the president of the entire Female Relief Societies” or the “head of the women’s organizations of the Church.” One group she visited greeted her expansively as “the president of the female portion of the human race.” Years after her death Primary teachers were admonished to teach Mormon children a “reverence for the Prophet Joseph, Sister Eliza R. Snow and the Holy Priesthood.”[35] The powerful stature of “Aunt Eliza” was in part due to marriage connections, since she was a plural wife of both Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. Hers was the traditional authority still held in high esteem in Deseret’s family community, and she was quick to distinguish it from line or ecclesiastical priest hood authority. By making that distinction, Snow built a female hierarchy whose form and jurisdiction (from general to stake to ward level) paralleled the male priesthood hierarchy, though clearly subordinate to it. The Relief Society nurtured the YLMIA and Primary, and these three together were a union of the women of the Church, a Mormon sisterhood presided over by the prophet’s wife, the Relief Society “presidentess”—a poetess, priestess, and prophetess with charismatic authority of her own.[36]

Eliza R. Snow’s charisma and relationships gave women in the Church an authoritative beginning. By Eliza’s death in 1887, the Relief Society, YLMIA, and Primary were all strong enough to withstand the tumultuous and fragmenting decade to come, though not as a union. Harsh federal legislation against the Mormons essentially ended plural marriage, forced the old theocratic combination of Church and state to give way to political parties, and replaced cooperative orders with corporate enterprises. Added to these sweeping changes were a rapid succession of Church presidents and an extensive turn over in the Quorum of the Twelve. Given the times, it is not surprising that the Mormon sisterhood did not survive intact. By 1902, the women’s organizations were no longer a union. The attempt to collaborate on the woman’s building was in fact the last manifestation of their former commonality—perhaps an effort to rebuild it. The organizations held separate conferences, published their own periodicals, and looked to their individual presidencies rather than to a central female leader. 

The relation of the women’s organizations to one another and their individual and collective relation to the priesthood hierarchy never had been formally defined, and thus they were organizationally vulnerable. The 1908—22 priesthood reform movement began to define these relationships, in part by terming the women’s organizations “auxiliaries” and clarifying their positions as staff, in contrast to the line authority position of the priesthood. Joseph F. Smith did not disregard the older forms of authority. The majority of men called to the hierarchy during his tenure were related to other General Authorities by kinship or marriage.[37] His wife’s aunt, Bathsheba W. Smith (whose husband, George A. Smith, was Joseph F. Smith’s own first cousin once re moved) was called as general president of the Relief Society shortly after he was sustained as president, but there is little indication that the personal relationship paved the way for the Relief Society as it had in the Snow-Young partnership. 

During the reform movement advisors from among the General Authorities were appointed to work with the women’s organizations, providing them certain but formal access to those in the Church hierarchy. (Male-run auxiliaries -—Sunday School and YMMIA—were already headed by members of the First Presidency or Quorum of the Twelve.) Bathsheba Smith and her successor as Relief Society president, Emmeline B. Wells, both used formal communications to express surprise and dismay over decisions affecting the women’s organizations. An example is the letter from Bathsheba and others to the First Presidency, inquiring about the fate of the proposed woman’s building. The vehicle itself suggests that their informal access to the First Presidency was limited, perhaps because of the personality of Joseph F. Smith or because of his desire to formalize the Church organization. 

Joseph F. Smith’s successor, Heber J. Grant, appointed friends and family to both the hierarchy and the auxiliaries, and, in contrast to Smith, seems to have carried out Church business informally through these relationships. An interesting example of this informal system is the presidency of Adele Cannon Howells, successor to May Green Hinckley (another friend-appointee of Grant’s) in the Primary Association. Adele Howells had known President Grant since childhood, and she and her husband regularly welcomed him and other visiting General Authorities to their elegant Los Angeles home. “Very generous, and very gracious,” is the way one of her cohorts described Sister Howells, who, now in Utah, entertained the Primary’s priesthood advisors at her mountain ranch. Her continued close relationship with President Grant was punctuated by frequent hand-delivered gifts of homemade bread. LaVern Parmley, a counselor to Sister Howells with Dessie Grant Boyle, remembered that President Grant took the entire Primary presidency on long drives.[38]

This ready access to the Church president and other authorities perhaps made possible some creative projects during Howells’s presidency, including murals in the Idaho Falls Temple baptismal room, painted by prominent artist Lee Greene Richards and paid for with Primary children’s nickels. Howells herself commissioned Arnold Frieberg’s renowned Book of Mormon scenes which appeared in the Children’s Friend in 1952. By contributing dimes to “buy a brick,” Primary children raised nearly $20,000 toward a new Primary Children’s Hospital. Another $12,000 was raised when the Primary board sold one thousand silver dollars contributed by President Grant in 1938 to enthusiastic donors. Most of Howells’s innovations were short-term projects whose effects were not so much upon the Primary program as upon the children themselves. The impact of the new hospital, however, was long-lasting; it was dedicated in April 1952, a year after Howells’s death. The network Howells established with local Primary officers and leaders also endured. She sponsored luncheon meetings for Primary stake presidents and their boards and she and the Primary general board traveled widely. As a result, the leaders of the Primary continued to have access to those within the hierarchy as well as to their own constituency. In oral history interviews, LaVern W. Parmley, Howells’s successor, talked at length about personal relationships with Presidents George Albert Smith and David O. McKay and recalled when she had personal contact with all the Church stake Primary presidents.[39]

Parmley was neither a close friend nor a relation of General Authorities when she was called as general Primary president, but her twenty-three-year term placed time on her side. She took office at the end of Heber J. Grant’s twenty-seven-year tenure, continued through George Albert Smith’s seven-year administration, and completed her service shortly after the close of David O. McKay’s nineteen-year presidency. These long periods of stable personnel and minimal pressure for organizational change were an ideal setting for establishing and maintaining informal networks. 

Belle S. Spafford, Relief Society general president, was in a similar situation. Her tenure as president spanned twenty-nine years, following a full decade of general board and presidency service under Louise Y. Robison and Amy Brown Lyman. Spafford later recalled the time, just after she had been sustained in office, when President George Albert Smith “called me to his home one Sunday morning.” He asked her to tour the missions along the Atlantic seaboard and bring back a detailed report. She was to start her visit with a personal reception by Bess Truman at the White House and then proceed to the National Council of Women meeting in New York. He told her, “It will give you prestige to go to the Council having come from the White House.” In addition, she was to look up his Smith family relations on the trip, many of whom were members of the Reorganized Church. “He said he would like us to stay in their homes,” remembered Sister Spafford.[40]

The Church profited from this wholesome exchange of favors, as did President Smith, Spafford, and the Relief Society. Through this rebuilding of the informal influence, the plans for a women’s building came to partial fruition in the Relief Society Building, dedicated in 1952. “I recall one day looking out of my little, crowded office window, which was in the north corner of the Bishop’s Building facing Main Street, and I saw President Smith with his long legs stepping off the land,” said Sister Spafford. “In a few minutes he came in. I said, T saw you out the window. What were you doing?’ ‘Stepping off the land.’ He said, T was trying to determine whether it was adequate for your building.’ ” 

Even though, as Sister Spafford contended, “the Brethren don’t call you every day and ask what you want,” the First Presidency took the matter under advisement (“We want you happy,” President McKay kept telling her), and the Relief Society was eventually given its first choice for a building site, which incidentally was, as had been promised, in the shadow of the temple.[41]

Informal organization is a correlate of formal bureaucracy, brought about in large measure by the human needs formalized efficiency often ignores. In formality avoids excessive red tape and encumbering regulations, and responds quickly and creatively to a range of uncertainties. It also addresses such unintended consequences of formal bureaucracy as overzealousness, stifling prescriptions, or uniformity at the expense of creative performance. Many managers recognize the informal organization as a companion to the formal hierarchy.[42] Brig ham Young, Heber J. Grant, George Albert Smith, and David O. McKay seem to have relied on it, as can be seen in their relationships with the women leaders. 

But informal networks based on personal relationships are vulnerable to change. The informal support given to nineteenth-century women’s organizations faded in the wake of Eliza R. Snow’s death and prolonged political and economic upheaval. The death of President McKay, coinciding with the sweeping changes of the correlation movement, obscured the networks built up by Spafford, Parmley, and others. Like the priesthood reform movement, correlation has emphasized the formal relationships of organizational charts. Auxiliary heads and department heads have been distanced from the men at the top as well as from their constituencies below. 

Informal influence is critical, but tentative and erratic. It depends on the tenure, openness, and good will of those within the ruling oligarchy and the dynamics of organizational growth and change. General Authorities and other officers in the hierarchical line, as well as staff officers (auxiliary and department heads), wield informal power within these limitations. All are individually capable of gaining or losing influence, and all but General Authorities may gain or lose line or staff positions because of it. Programs therefore rise and fall, and emphases change.

Women’s influence on the structure is even more tentative. Because women do not hold ecclesiastical priesthood offices, they are excluded from the ruling oligarchy, not only of General Authorities, but also on local levels. Women comprise a full half (or more) of the membership of the Church, but they can speak for and act in behalf of women only insofar as they can wield informal influence. Of course, women are only one of many constituencies who lack representation in the hierarchy, but they are the largest group and the only group for whom formal representation is not just unlikely but impossible. 

Autonomy 

The Church established by Joseph Smith was in part a reaction against the excesses of individualism and pluralism that plagued antebellum America. Those who joined with the Prophet voluntarily yielded some of their independence to a controlled community organized according to revelation and governed by godly men. From the outset this theocracy was highly authoritarian. At times those in the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy directed not only the community’s religious life, but its economic, political, and social life as well. Many members sought or willingly received counsel on such personal matters as place of residence, occupation, or even marriage partners. Nevertheless, Mormons have always been able to exercise their personal freedom by rejecting Church directives in whole or in part. The power of an individual to decide which organizational rules he or she will embrace and which he or she will resist is the power of personal autonomy,[43] a force which can counter some of the organization’s own autonomy. 

The Church is a voluntary organization. Members not only choose to belong but determine the extent of their personal involvement by giving or withholding commitment or compliance. Organizationally the Church succeeds only insofar as it gains compliance from its members. Through formal and informal norms, it consequently pressures members to comply. In the twentieth century, the Church has quantified tithe paying, welfare work, and sacrament meeting and temple attendance, measures which would seem to in crease the price of noncompliance. 

Exercising autonomy in any organization requires a certain amount of gamesmanship to stay within the organization but not be bound by it. Those who do not store food can remain in the LDS community, but those who do not remain chaste are excommunicated when their deviance is known. Many members who privately supported the ERA remained members; Sonia John son, who organized national opposition to the Church’s stand, did not. Within an authority-based system, active resistance is not likely to be tolerated since it directly challenges those in authority. Those who actively resist must ultimately comply (or prove their loyalty on equally critical or more critical issues), re treat to inactivity, or leave the organization. Recently K-Lynn Paul showed that even those who actively participate may show some resistance through “passive aggression”—that is obstructionism, intentional inefficiency or stubbornness “to reflect the disagreement or hostility one dares not express openly.”[44]

The United States is currently seeing a pervasive movement among younger workers towards achieving personal autonomy.[45] While more traditional workers adhere closely to the dictates of formal and informal power systems—deferring gratification to obtain organizational rewards (position, status, and economic opportunities) —this new group of workers seeks to maximize life style opportunities and is willing to give up some of the organizational rewards to get it. This change in national values and attitudes may have had an impact on Latter-day Saints, many of whom are loyal to the Church community without being attracted to positions within its organizational structure. 

Organizational experts disagree about the effect of increased organizational complexity on personal autonomy. Increasing coordination and more formal organization can be seen as “clamping down” on individualism. A highly differentiated division of labor, carefully prescribed duties, and close supervision may inhibit deviations from official procedures. On the other hand, Michel Crozier has pointed out that in France, a country whose national culture places high value on personal freedom, employees prefer large, formal organizations to small ones. A large organization cannot define rules so tightly or supervise behavior so closely that one cannot maneuver to get free time, to subvert undesirable assignments, and to ignore paper work. The French traditionally have resisted participative management, Crozier points out, because such methods require face-to-face commitments that bind them to the formal and informal norms of the work group.[46]

As the Church grows in size there is more opportunity for diverse groups with similar opinions and interests to cluster together. Some members find that their needs and questions are not addressed by Church programs or that their feelings and expertise go unheeded by Church officials at various levels. In fact they may best be heard by one another in informal study groups, through journals such as DIALOGUE, Sunstone, and Exponent II, and professional organizations such as the Mormon History Association, the Association for Mormon Letters, the Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists, and the Society for the Sociological Study of Mormon Life. They may feel more welcome in these parallel organizations than within the Church’s formal structure. 

However, the Church itself also makes some provision for personal initiative. All things are to be done “by common consent.” Ecclesiastical authority is filtered to the memberships through line priesthood offices available to every worthy male. These positions and the staff or auxiliary positions are considered “stewardships” where assigned members are to be “wise servants” who, without being commanded or “compelled in all things” do “many things of their own free will and bring to pass much righteousness.” 

Personal initiative may be acceptable but not autonomy from the organization. An individual who uses his or her stewardships to become independent of the norms of the greater hierarchical system is seldom tolerated, let alone rewarded. Emma Smith became the first president of the Relief Society in Nauvoo just as the practice of plural marriage (which she opposed) was being introduced by her husband, the Prophet Joseph Smith. Society meetings were terminated after two years, with John Taylor later observing that “Sister Emma made use of the position she held to try to pervert the minds of the sisters in relation to that doctrine.[47] 

In some instances, unrestricted assignments have been functional for the institution, particularly when there has been a need to break new ground, generate new ideas, or change direction. Early missionaries wrote, published, and distributed their own tracts. During the Depression in the 1930s many stakes experimented with different plans for taking care of their poor and unemployed, with Pioneer Stake, headed by Harold B. Lee (who later helped establish the Church welfare plan), showing remarkable success. Church curriculum was developed by teachers in wards before it was taken over by stakes, and later auxiliary general boards. Ward and stake leaders exercise autonomy as they adapt official programs or develop new ones to meet local needs. 

However, the institutional hierarchy has always retained the option of releasing members from assignments or of co-opting whole programs, sometimes with little regard for stewardship. In 1935, Ephraim E. Ericksen, professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, was among those released after more than a decade of service on the YMMIA general board when the liberal socio-recreational program he had helped establish conflicted with the conservative views of John A. Widtsoe, apostle and new Church Commissioner of Education. Eriksen worked on the committee Widtsoe appointed to review the auxiliary’s goals and programs but submitted a dissenting memo when Widtsoe presented the final decision, feeling the committee had had too little input. Told that “the church is run by inspiration, not by committee,” Eriksen went away asking: “Why should I continue to serve in an organization that does not really want what I have to give? . . . Does an authoritative Church really believe in the cooperative effort of its members?”[48]

Relief Society sisters took pride in independently buying and storing hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain in their own granaries for some forty two years. But in 1918, the Presiding Bishopric sold the grain to the U.S. government, only afterwards apologizing to the women for their “oversight” in not asking for permission to strike the bargain.[49] This incident is not simply a naked power play but, as documented by Jessie Embry, reveals shifting organizational needs. The function of storing grain was no longer critical to the Church as self-sufficiency was no longer a prime goal. Better agricultural methods had also outdated the Relief Society’s project. 

It is a fact of organizational life that those who perform a critical function and who possess expertise vital to the organization gain discretionary power or personal autonomy within the organization. The Relief Society assumed it still held discretionary power in the matter of grain storage. The organizational hierarchy, knowing the grain storage function was no longer critical, did not recognize—did in fact “overlook”—the women’s power. As another variation on this theme, the function itself may remain critical but if the expert loses the cutting edge of expertise, organizational autonomy wanes. 

For example, in 1932 general Primary president May Anderson persuaded the Presiding Bishopric that the Primary Children’s Convalescent Hospital could handle minor surgery for children more economically than the LDS Hospital. Furthermore, “In our Children’s Hospital there is opportunity for Sun day School, Primary, Day School, moving pictures, play and play things, pets, outdoor [recreation] where there is plenty of freedom for games, noise, etc.,” Anderson wrote, and the Presiding Bishopric agreed.[50] When LDS Hospital later rearranged its surgery fee schedule, it received young surgical patients while the Primary built a new children’s hospital, completed in 1952. Eventually, however, the argument of expertise was used against the Primary and its hospital was integrated into the Church’s correlated Health Services Corporation, then sold to private interests. 

The flourishing Corporation of the President has introduced professionals into the Church’s organization. General Authorities have become increasingly dependent upon this core of salaried, full-time experts (few of whom are women) in building, finances, public relations, production and distribution, information, social work, and education. These experts have in most instances replaced the auxiliaries as functional specialists. Added to these are academic professionals at BYU, which has to some extent, come to be regarded as the Church’s research and development center. The bureaucracy’s officials include highly trained personnel who can exercise expertise, control scarce information, allocate resources, and control access to the General Authorities. While the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve scrutinize and to some extent control the efforts of these employees (as evidenced by the appointment of a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy as managing director of each major function), the expertise of the specialists may make it difficult for authorities at any level to overrule them. 

The Church organizationally thus exercises considerable energy in gaining conformity from its subunits and members, but individuals and groups within the organization have also found a variety of appropriate ways to exercise autonomy. The exercise of this autonomy creates considerable and welcome diversity among Mormons and is a fruitful source of organizational energy, but larger questions remain to be addressed. What, for instance, are the effects on the Zion community of moving most of that diversity outside the bounds of the organization have also found a variety of appropriate ways to exercise result in a trade-off between conformity and pluralism in which unity is impossible? Although this issue of authority and autonomy has waxed and waned in importance over the years, it seems to be a critical one now. 

Conclusion 

The importance of authority in the Mormon Church is buttressed by LDS doctrine. Historically the Church has embraced available bureaucratic organizational forms. Its hierarchy of formal positions and duties has grown out of increasing, successive emphases on formal authority. True, informal influence existed from the Church’s beginning when personal as well as formal relationships bound together the highest ecclesiastical officials and has flourished during periods of administrative stability. As in any bureaucracy, however, informal networks have shifted or dissolved with changes in formal leadership and direction. Autonomy, probably most critical to individual members’ lives, has played a less important role in the Church power structure than authority or informal influence. 

To some degree Church bureaucracy manifests problems common to every bureaucracy. As an efficient mechanism for organizing, planning, and implementing work, it has increased missionary and temple work, expanded Church production, building, and distribution, and generally coordinated rising complexity. But bureaucracy is not often an effective means for enhancing human potential. If the mission of the Church is directly concerned with human potential, is bureaucracy its best organizational option? 

While the organizational structure of the Mormon Church may have been rooted in the “primitive church,” its 150-year history has reflected if not borrowed secular forms of organization. Because current General Authorities include many men from large corporate settings, we may expect that secular organizational thinking will continue to have some influence. It may be useful, therefore, to consider some secular solutions to the built-in conflict between the Church’s form and its mission. 

Scholarly organizational models that view institutions as growing from infancy to maturity provide conceptual predictions of responses to forces pushing for change through periods of stability or tension. By Larry E. Greiner’s model, for example, the Church is currently in the fourth phase of a five-phase developmental process (creativity, direction, delegation, coordination, collab oration).[51] In the coordination phase, an organization uses complex formal mechanisms to achieve greater coordination and efficiency. Top executives directly initiate and administer these new systems. A numerous staff at headquarters concentrates on control and review. Such bureaucratic formalization and elaboration, says Greiner, will lead to a “red tape crisis” as the proliferation of systems and programs begins to hinder problem-solving and innovation. Phase Five, says Greiner, simplifies formal mechanisms. Teams collaborate to form critical task forces. New channels of information are opened up to decision-makers. Experimentation and innovation are encouraged. Social control and self-discipline replace bureaucratic controls. Could such a developmental scheme help us project positive ways for change in the Church organization? Is the simplified consolidated meeting schedule, emphasizing greater individual and family initiative, an example of movement toward a new phase? 

An evolution from correlation to collaboration would diminish bureaucratic emphasis on formal authority, an unlikely development as long as Latter-day Saints equate priesthood with formal authority. Yet a broader definition of priesthood, implied by Gib Kocherhans in the Ensign, would hasten the move toward collaboration. For Kocherhans, “the key to priesthood leadership is relationship,” a willingness “to invest love, concern, and interest in others,” so the leader “can become a positive and powerful influence in their lives without the need to resort to coercive means.” Kocherhans’s emphasis on personal relationship rather than hierarchical office reflects the most essential teachings of Jesus Christ, which obscure rather than highlight divisions based on rank, gender, experience, or wealth.[52]

Other useful redefinitions would reduce LDS preoccupation with the male priesthood hierarchy. Could the gospel’s confirmation of the essential partnership of man and woman be made manifest at every level of Church government? Could further understanding of the law of consecration and steward ship create a greater sense of personal responsibility and ownership in the community? If the organization placed greater emphasis on love and free agency, would collaboration play a larger role, as the principle of common consent suggests it should? 

This essay has chronicled the role of formal authority through Mormon history, but centralized control obviously has not created an ongoing crisis for the organization. In fact, it has helped resolve other crises—the leadership crisis at Joseph Smith’s death or the identity crisis of priesthood quorums that led to Joseph F. Smith’s priesthood reforms. The twentieth-century expansion of Church auxiliaries and departments (a flowering of informal influence and autonomy) led to a control crisis which highly centralized coordination re solved. In Greiner’s five-phase model “each phase is both an effect of the previous phase and a cause for the next phase.”[53] Thus coordination responding to the control crisis has itself caused a red tape crisis which demands a new response—collaboration. 

Whether the Church in the 1980s will approximate Greiner’s model with its evolving configurations of power remains to be seen. But evolution is inevitable. “To say that there will be a stated time, in the history of this Church, during its imperfections and weaknesses, when the organization will be perfect, and that there will be no further extension or addition to the organization, would be a mistake,” declared Apostle Orson Pratt in 1877. Recognizing that a prophet’s voice could be heard and followed in a variety of situations, he predicted that “organization is to go on, step after step, from one degree to another, just as the people increase and grow in the knowledge of the principles and laws of the Kingdom of God, and as their borders shall extend.”[54]

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[1] Minutes of the Relief Society General Board, 3 Oct. 1896, microfilm of typescript, Historical Department Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, here after cited as LDS Church Archives. 

[2] Minutes of the Relief Society General Board, 26 Mar. 1901. 

[3] Bathsheba W. Smith, Martha S. Tingey, and Louie B. Felt to the Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 23 Jan. 1907, First Presidency, Incoming Cor respondence, LDS Church Archives. 

[4] Minutes of the Relief Society General Board, 19 Feb. 1920. The $8,000 contributed by the Relief Society to the Bishop’s Building was returned to them in 1952 for their own building. 

[5] Marilyn Warenski, Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of the Mormon Woman (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1978), pp. 3, 18. 

[6] Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) ; Max Weber, “The Presuppositions and Causes of Bureaucracy,” in Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). See especially “The Types of Authority and Imperative Co-Ordination,” pp. 324-86.

[7] Mario S. DePillis, “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism,” DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT 1 (Spring 1966) : 88; D. Michael Quinn, “The Mormon Hierarchy, 1832-1932: An American Elite” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976), pp. 162-63. 

[8] Weber, “The Types of Authority,” p. 364. 

[9] D. Michael Quinn, “The Succession Crisis of 1844,” BYU Studies 16 (Winter 1976) : 187-233; see also Quinn, “The Mormon Hierarchy, 1832-1932: An American Elite,” pp. 33-80, exploring kinship relations in the early hierarchy. 

[10] The most comprehensive study of the topic is William Hartley, “The Priesthood Reorganization of 1877: Brigham Young’s Last Achievement,” BYU Studies 20 (Fall 1979) : 3-36. 

[11] “Epistle of The Twelve Apostles and Counselors to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in all the World,” Woman’s Exponent 6 (1 Oct. 1877) : 65.

[12] The movement is described in detail by William Hartley, “The Priesthood Reform Movement, 1908-1922,” BYU Studies 13 (Winter 1973): 137-56. 

[13] Earlier dates for general presidencies and boards appearing in some sources refer to persons who provided local units with some centralized leadership before having been officially designated president or superintendent. See James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1976), pp. 336, 378-79. 

[14] “An Epistle to the Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Woman’s Exponent 16 (15 Oct. 1887) : 73. 

[15] J. Golden Kimball address, 6 April 1906, General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret News [1906]), p. 19, here after cited as Conference Reports.

[16] “Priesthood Quorum’s Table,” Improvement Era 17 (May 1914) : 692—93.

[17] Joseph F. Smith address, 6 April 1906, Conference Reports, p. 3. 

[18] Minutes of the Relief Society General Board, 1 May 1908, microfilm of typescript, LDS Church Archives. 

[19] Minutes of the Relief Society General Board, 21 Dec. 1921. 

[20] [Susa Young Gates], “Address,” Relief Society Bulletin 1 (Feb. 1914): 3. 

[21] E. R. Snow Smith, “To the Branches of the Relief Society,” Woman’s Exponent 13 (15 Sept. 1884): 61. 

[22] May Anderson to the First Presidency, 10 May 1929, Primary Association General Board Minutes, 1891-1974, manuscript, 15 May 1929, LDS Church Archives. 

[23] See Richard O. Cowan, “The Priesthood-Auxiliary Movement, 1928-1938,” BYU Studies 19 (Fall 1978) : 106-20. 

[24] Harold B. Lee address, 30 Sept. 1961, Conference Report, p. 81. An overview of the planning and implementation of priesthood correlation is Bruce D. Blumell, “Priesthood Correlation, 1960-1974,” typescript, LDS Church Archives. 

[25] Harold B. Lee remarks to Correlation Committee, as quoted in Blumell, “Priesthood Correlation,” p. 9. 

[26] Ibid. 

[27] Melvin J. Ballard, “New Priesthood-M.I.A. Plan,” Improvement Era 31 (June 1928): 744.

[28] To get materials from auxiliary general boards to stake and ward auxiliary leaders, the Church has variously used the Priesthood Bulletin and different auxiliary bulletins. See Blumell, “Priesthood Correlation, 1960-1974,” pp. 27-28, 35-36; LaVern W. Parmley, Oral History, interviews by Jill C. Mulvay [Derr], 1974-1976, typescript, pp. 160-61, James Moyle Oral History Program, LDS Church Archives.

[29] Parmley, Oral History, pp. 29, 32-33. 

[30] Richard A. Johnson et al., Management, Systems and Society (Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Goodyear Publishing Co., 1976), pp. 415-19; David A. Heenan and Howard V. Perl mutter, Multinational Organizational Development (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 50—86; Henry Mintzberg, The Structuring of Organizations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), ch. 20. 

[31] Quinn, “The Mormon Hierarchy,” p. 79. 

[32] An excellent introduction to the first part of this period is Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, “A Decade of Mormon Women: The 1870s,” New Era 8 (April 1978): 34-39. Topical and biographical essays relevant to the period are contained in Claudia Bushman, ed., Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah (Cambridge, Mass.: Emmeline Press Limited, 1976) : and Vicky Burgess-Olson, ed., Sister Saints (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978). 

[33] Eliza R. Snow address, [Cooperative or General] Retrenchment Minutes, Salt Lake Stake, 19 July 1873, manuscript, LDS Church Archives. 

[34] Eliza R. Snow to Brigham Young, 10 Feb. 1877, holograph, LDS Church archives.

[35] “Review of Primary Associations and Instructions,” Juvenile Instructor 25 (15 Nov. 1890): 685. 

[36] An excellent assessment of the life and legend of this remarkable woman is Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, “The Eliza Enigma,” DIALOGUE : A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT 11 (Spring 1978): 31-43. 

[37] See Quinn, “The Mormon Hierarchy,” pp. 72-74. 

[38] Parmley, Oral History, pp. 19, 45-46; see also Carol Cornwall Madsen and Susan Staker Oman, Sisters and Little Saints: One Hundred Years of Primary (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1979), ch. 7. 

[39] Parmley, Oral History, pp. 14-17. 

[40] Belle S. Spafford, Oral History, interviews by Jill Mulvay [Derr], 1975-1976, James Moyle Oral History Program, LDS Church Archives, p. 87. 

[41] Ibid., pp. 116-17. 

[42] Early scholarly works on the informal organization include Elton Mayo, The Human Problems in Industrial Civilization (New York: MacMillan, 1933) ; F. J. Roethlisberger, Management and Morale (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941); F. J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939) ; and Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938). More recent studies on informal influence include D. R. Twomey, “The Effects of Power Properties on Conflict Resolutions,” Academy of Management Review 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1978) : 144-50; J. R. Lincoln and J. Miller, “Work and Friendship Ties in Organizations: A Comparative Analysis of Relationship Networks,” Administrative Science Quarterly 24 (June 1979) : 181-99; A. J. Grimes, “Authority, Power, Influence and Social Control: A Theoretical Synthesis,” Academy of Management Review 3 (Oct. 1978) : 724-35; David Kipnis et al., “Intraorganizational Influence Tactics: Explorations in Getting One’s Way “Journal of Applied Psychology 65 (1980) : 440-52. 

[43] Much of the recent literature in organizational behavior focuses on the needs and demands of the individual as he or she comes into conflict with the organization. See, for example, Stanley M. Herman and Michael Korenich, Authentic Management (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1977); Lynn Z. Bloom et al., The New Assertive Woman (New York: Dell Books, 1975) ; Samuel A. Culbert and John J. McDonough, The Invisible War (New York: John Wiley, 1980); Louis Bonks, “Here Come the Individualists,” Harvard Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 1977; Virginia E. Schein, “Individual Power and Political Behavior in Organizations,” Academy of Management Review 2 (Jan. 1977) : 64-72. 

[44] K-Lynn Paul, “Passive Aggression and the Believer,” DIALOGUE : A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT 10 (Autumn 1977) : 86. 

[45] Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1980); Daniel Yankelovich, “New Rules in American Life: Searching for Self-Fulfillment as the World Turns Upside Down,” Psychology Today, April 1981, pp. 35-91.

[46] Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 55, 87. 

[47] John Taylor address, 17 July 1880, “R.S. Reports,” Woman’s Exponent 9 (1 Sept. 1880): 53-54. 

[48] Scott Kenney, “E. E. Eriksen: Loyal Heretic,” Sunstone 3 (July-Aug. 1978): 32; see also Scott Kenney, “The Mutual Improvement Associations: A Preliminary History, 1900-1950,” Task Papers in LDS History, No. 6 (Salt Lake City: Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1976), pp. 28-30. 

[49] Minutes of the Relief Society General Board, 23 May and 18 July 1918. See also Jessie L. Embry, “Relief Society Grain Storage Program, 1876-1940” (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1974), pp. 42-59, and her “Grain Storage: The Balance of Power Between Relief Society Autonomy and Priesthood Authority,” this issue. 

[50] General Superintendency Primary Association to Presiding Bishopric, 7 June 1932, Primary General Board Minutes, 15 June 1932; also Primary General Board Minutes, 27 Sept. 1933. 

[51] Larry E. Greiner, “Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow,” Harvard Busi ness Review, July-Aug. 1972, p. 46. 

[52] Gib Kocherhans, “The Name Melchizedek: Some Thoughts on Its Meaning and the Priesthood It Represents,” Ensign 10 (Sept. 1980) : 14-19. 

[53] Greiner, “Evolution and Revolution,” p. 41. 

[54] Orson Pratt address, 20 May 1877, Deseret News Weekly, 18 July 1877.