Chapter 13: Bureaucracy and

Post-bureaucracy
 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
 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
 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
 Weber’s principles of bureaucracy
• Functional specialization
• Hierarchy of authority
• System of rules
• Impersonality
 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’
 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
 Key problems
• Bureaucracy • Post-bureaucracy
– Motivation: excessive – Control: relies on
rule-following normative control
– Customer service: due – Risk: of bad decisions
to poor motivation if people have greater
– Resistance to discretion
innovation and change – Fairness: possibility of
treatment based on
prejudices
 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)
 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
 Mainstream approach: Limitations
• One-sided and restricted focus on
efficiency
– Does not ask the question ‘efficient for
whom’?
– Concerned with ‘how?’ but not ‘why?’
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
 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
 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
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
 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?