Chapter 13: Bureaucracy and Postbureaucracy

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Chapter 13 Bureaucracy and Post-bureaucracy
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Chapter aims

• Explain bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy
• Explain the problems of each from mainstream
  perspectives
• Identify critical approaches to each model
• Explain the strengths and weaknesses of the
  critical approaches

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Overview

• Bureaucracy
• Based on rules, hierarchy, impersonality and a
  division of labour
• Dominant form of organization for more than a
  century
• Mainstream critique Has problems of poor
  motivation, producer focus and inertia
• Critical critique Preoccupation with efficiency,
  dehumanizing
• Post-bureaucracy
• Based on trust, empowerment, personal treatment
  and shared responsibility
• Mainstream critique Has problems of loss of
  control, risk and unfairness
• Critical critique Preoccupation with efficiency,
  an extension of control

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Weber on bureaucracy

• Weber the founding father of bureaucracy
• Observed that society held together by authority
• 3 types of authority
• Charismatic personal authority of individuals
• Traditional established authority of
  institutions
• Rational-legal system of rules devised for
  rational reasons
• Weber argues society increasingly based on
  rational-legal authority

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Webers principles of bureaucracy

• Functional specialization
• Hierarchy of authority
• System of rules
• Impersonality

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From bureaucracy to post-bureaucracy

• Alleged shift from industrial to
  post-industrial society since 1970s
• Shift from mass production of standard products
  to niche products
• Employee demand for flexibility and autonomy
• Alleged development of a new organizational form
• The post-bureaucracy

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Hecksher on post-bureaucracy

• The ideal-type
• Rules are replaced with consensus and dialogue
  based on personal influence
• Responsibilities are assigned on merit rather
  than hierarchy
• People are treated as individuals rather than
  impersonally
• The boundaries of the organization are opened

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Key problems

• Bureaucracy
• Motivation excessive rule-following
• Customer service due to poor motivation
• Resistance to innovation and change

• Post-bureaucracy
• Control relies on normative control
• Risk of bad decisions if people have greater
  discretion
• Fairness possibility of treatment based on
  prejudices

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Dysfunctions of bureaucracy

• Are bureaucracies as rational as they appear?
• 2 arguments
• Over-attachment to rules can be inefficient
• Goal-displacement (Merton, 1940)
• Work to rule (Blau, 1955)
• Rules can be ignored, leading to inefficiency
• Prejudices (Crozier, 1964)
• Mock-bureaucracy (Gouldner, 1954)

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The end of bureaucracy?

• Death of bureaucracy predicted for 40 years
• Shift to flexible specialization
• Rise of the network society
• Sceptics argue bureaucracy very much alive
• No evidence of a global decline in manufacturing
• Talk of trust and empowerment more rhetoric than
  reality

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Mainstream approach Limitations

• One-sided and restricted focus on efficiency
• Does not ask the question efficient for whom?
• Concerned with how? but not why?

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Critical approaches to bureaucracy

• Based on an alternative reading of Weber
• Argues that Weber never saw the ideal-type
  bureaucracy as desirable
• Distinction between
• instrumental rationality doing the thing right
• substantive rationality doing the right thing
• Argues that Weber saw bureaucracy as
  substantively irrational
• iron cage of rationality
• Critical approaches concerned about substantive
  rationality

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In defence of bureaucracy

• Du Gay (2000) responds to criticisms that
  bureaucracy lacks a concern for morality
• Ethic of impersonality and fairness prevents
  treatment based on prejudice
• Post-bureaucracy has no such safeguard

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Critical approaches to post-bureaucracy

• Not reassured by rhetoric of trust and
  empowerment
• Interpreted as another top-down form of control
• Some argue it is a more intense form of control
  since it controls beliefs as well as behaviour
• Normative control
• Post-bureaucracy weakens job security and
  intensifies time pressures
• Greater stress for employees

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Critical approach Contributions

• Shift away from narrow focus on efficiency
• Greater recognition of political and ethical
  values
• Shows that post-bureaucracy also involves an
  instrumental rationality
• Highlights the increase in insecurity and anxiety
  of post-bureaucratic work

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Critical approach Limitations

• Oversimplification
• Seeing bureaucracy as bad and any alternative
  as good
• Determinism
• E.g. seeing bureaucracy as inevitably replacing
  other forms of organization
• Offers utopian solutions
• How realistic is the critique?