Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

History discloses political orders different from each other. These orders evolve as a result of each society’s self-organization toward representative structures that confer validity on its rules and continuity. It was German sociologist Max Weber’s insight that these structures rely on systems of authority, such that every system attempts to establish and cultivate the belief in its legitimacy, as the grounds of authority, for which he found three pure types: charisma, tradition, and instrumental reason.

Bureaucracy, a term that literally means government by offices or agencies with prescribed functions, exemplified for Weber the organizational structure associated with legitimacy grounded in instrumental reason. He devoted considerable attention to bureaucracy in part because he believed that, despite exhibiting no unilinear development or progress, history had demonstrated a trend toward increasing rationalization, or what he referred to as a “dis-enchantment,” so that bureaucracy represents in organizational structure a deeper cultural tendency, especially in the West. In order to grapple with increasing rationalization, he had to understand what it meant for the ordering of society.

Bureaucracy has a distinct character, which Weber delineated. Individuals with documented qualifications fill positions circumscribed by rules, in order to ensure the perpetual fulfillment of the bureau’s function. These rules tend to be stable and exhaustive. The resulting structure trends toward hierarchy. Incumbents are expected to keep their work separate from their private lives, so they can concentrate on their duties, which are based more on the processing of documents or files in the abstract and not on interactions with individual persons directly. Consistent with this tendency toward abstraction, the official is then rewarded abstractly by means of job security and a salary in a money economy, thereby making this career a distinct profession.

James Burnham examined the significance of bureaucratic administration as a profession in The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham worried as a disillusioned leftist that the managerial revolution would derail the transition from capitalism to socialism. His work influenced the British futuristic novelist George Orwell, author of Animal Farm (1944) and 1984 (1949). It also inspired social scientists to conduct empirical studies of his primary thesis, and even in the 2000s Burnham’s book “occupies a prominent place in postindustrial theories of society” (Demers and Merskin 2000, p. 105). Burnham foresaw the rise of a new ruling elite composed of managers with organizational skill and technical knowledge. These managers were going to displace owners and capitalists in day-to-day operations. The research conducted since tends to bear him out.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith extended Burnham’s argument in The New Industrial State (1967), noting that managers as a ruling elite had given way to a group even more embedded in the staff of bureaucracy, a group named by Galbraith as the technostructure. Due to increasing complexity, decision making in bureaucracy requires the specialized scientific and technical knowledge, talent, and experience of multiple persons exchanging and testing information. In this group, one might include engineers, accountants, and lawyers. Without the requisite mastery and information, managers must rely on the resulting apparatus for group decision. Although the apparatus known as the technostructure puts a check on individual initiative and ambition, taken as a whole it works toward its collective survival, autonomy, and growth, in that order. For Galbraith, the technostructure is the decision-making apparatus emblematic of bureaucracy. Seventeen years later, Galbraith saw no reason to amend these findings, except to emphasize the technostructure’s “deteriorative tendencies” (1988, p. 375).

At one time, scholars such as Ludwig von Mises might have wanted to isolate bureaucracy as a phenomenon that thrives only in the public sector, in government, but the evidence suggests that it is precisely in the technostructure described by Galbraith that the public and private sectors intertwine to share an overlapping fate, as large firms in the private sector attempt to manage their environment and as the government increasingly executes the laws by means of the technostructure within private firms. According to Galbraith, bureaucracy has emerged in every sector.

Bureaucracy not only has a distinct character, it also plays a distinct role in the routinization of charisma, the ordering of society into a rational form. Bureaucracy exerts pressure to domesticate creativity and genius, removing the element of mystification that accompanies charisma, in order to bring it into service without allowing it to supplant instrumental reason as the legitimating ground for authority. Bureaucracy thereby tends to channel or frustrate freedom, with astonishing success, which is why Weber famously lamented the “iron cage” that rationalization was building throughout society.

In the second chapter of Images of Organization (1986), Gareth Morgan echoed Weber by associating bureaucracy with an image of organizations that would be construed as mechanistic, structures invented and developed to perform a goal-oriented activity. Not surprisingly, with the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution came the widespread mechanization of organizational structures. Writers such as Frederick Taylor then made the process conscious, offering a scientific approach to managing organizations, on the principle that mechanistic thinking had succeeded in so many other aspects of life. And it had.

Bureaucracy contributes to the goal-oriented activities of any organization. Weber listed these advantages: “[p]recision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs.…” (1958, p. 214). In contradistinction to previous structures, bureaucracy exists to remove less predictable elements such as individual favor from the conduct of business. This means it offers stability to a regime. Disputes are more easily resolved by appeals to reason and rules, which guide officials in their work. Bureaucracy also fits many purposes of large-scale government especially, where other bases of legitimacy have been outlawed or discredited. Since the Enlightenment, Western culture especially has preferred legitimacy based on instrumental reason.

Despite its promise of efficacy, bureaucracy meets with considerable resistance, especially from two sources. One source of resistance has been the concern previously expressed already by Max Weber that bureaucracy inhibits freedom and all that freedom promises. Ralph Hummel sharpened the critique in The Bureaucratic Experience (1994): Over time, given its prevalence and power, bureaucracy shapes human psychology, language, and culture, transforming what it means to be human in exchange for values including security and efficiency. Critics such as Orwell, Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, and in cinema Terry Gilliam (e.g., Brazil, 1985) have depicted an implicit terror and malaise in bureaucratic regimes that can only be described as inhuman. In his 1995 book Kinds of Power, for example, psychologist James Hillman cited the predatory practices of bureaucratic fascism and communism as the logical extension of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on instrumental reason.

The resistance to bureaucracy from this source emphasizes the trade-off that comes with empowering an elite of professionals at the expense of democratic participation in the decisions that affect our lives, since bureaucrats are not supposed to be directly responsive to voters, to markets, or even to beneficiaries of the services provided by that bureau. Weber noted that bureaucracy accompanies the rise of mass democracy, in that it promises status only in exchange for meritorious service and not kinship, for example, or race, yet bureaucracy by no means enhances the power of the people to govern themselves directly.

Principles of diversity challenge the basis for choosing officials as somehow biased in favor of certain privileged social groups who acquire credentials disproportionate to their numbers in the population.

The second source of resistance to bureaucracy derives from the claim that there are more effective ways for organizations to work, since bureaucracy has a number of limitations. For instance, bureaucracy tends to hide its work from scrutiny, even from one bureau to another, whereas in an information age secrets impede innovation and cast doubt on a bureaucracy’s legitimacy. Bureaucracy also offers persistence at times that organizational structures should adapt to changing circumstances. The bureaucrat’s loyalty to the bureau might displace his or her loyalty to the bureau’s originating purpose; accusations leveled at fascist administrators who were “only doing their jobs” have been especially vivid.

Since the 1970s, organizational theorists such as Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot have called for flattened hierarchies, cross-functional coordination, greater transparency, and shorter timelines than a conscientious bureaucracy can meet. These theorists borrow principles from the marketplace, urging bureaucracies to cultivate a more entrepreneurial spirit, taking risk and competing. Theorists also notice the power of flexible networks, rather than rigid silos. Writing in 1999, Richard Brinkman uncovered as evidence of bureaucracy’s weakening hold the tendency of management to pursue short-term profit in part by downsizing elements of the technostructure, yet it can be said that reports of bureaucracy’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

SEE ALSO Bureaucrat; Weber, Max

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brinkman, Richard. 1999. The Dynamics of Corporate Culture: Conception and Theory. International Journal of Social Economics 26 (5): 674–694.

Burnham, James. 1960. The Managerial Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Orig. pub. 1941).

Demers, D., and D. Merskin. 2000. Corporate News Structure and the Managerial Revolution. The Journal of Media Economics 13 (2): 103–121.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1988. Time and the New Industrial State. The American Economic Review 78 (2): 373–376.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1971. The New Industrial State. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. (Orig. pub. 1967).

Hillman, James. 1995. Kinds of Power. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Hummel, Ralph. 1994. The Bureaucratic Experience: A Critique of Life in the Modern Organization. 4th ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Morgan, Gareth. 1986. Images of Organization. New York: Sage.

von Mises, Ludwig. 1983. Bureaucracy. Grove City, PA: Libertarian Press. (Orig. pub. 1944).

Weber, Max. 1958. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Trans. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. (Orig. pub. 1922).

Nathan W. Harter