Committee meetings with their delays, procrastinations, and inconsistencies have long been a favorite source of humor, but, like it or not, committees form an essential and in many ways crucial aspect of the process by which policy is made in industry and public affairs. In modern post-industrial urban societies, institutions of all kinds have become increasingly open to public scrutiny. Regardless of how policies originate, or who proposes them and carries them out, actions of all kinds may ultimately be subject to some public inspection and control of decision making processes. This means that the mechanisms by which policies are adopted must have the visibility of group processes where the evidence for and against is openly debated in ways that are comprehensible to most, regardless of interest and background.

Sociologists of organizational behavior point out that committees are designed to “overcome difficulties in bureaucratic hierarchies caused by jobs needing unfamiliar responsibilities by creating a super person, a committee” (Burns 1969). As such superpersons, committees also make decisions that are suprapersonal above and beyond the decision making powers of any member.

Committees act as courts of appeal for what can be acceptable arguments as well as means of sifting information. It is ‘in committee’ that decision making appears to take place.