The Social Foundations of the Bureaucratic Order

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2021

Anthropology is a latecomer to the study of bureaucracy. Nonetheless, the anthropological study of organizations—of which bureaucracies are a subtype, as larger organizations are always bureaucratically organized—was initiated by anthropologists as early as the 1920s. Since the 2010s, the anthropology of bureaucracy has slowly consolidated into a discernible subfield of the discipline. It brings to the study of public administrations a double added value: (a) a specific concern for the informal aspects of bureaucracy, (b) the emic views of bureaucratic actors and their pragmatic contexts, based on long-term immersion in the research field, as well as (c) a non-Eurocentric, global comparative perspective. Anthropologists have focused on bureaucratic actors (“bureaucrats”), the discursive, relational, and material contexts in which they work, the public policies they are supposed to implement or to comply with, and their interactions with the outside world, in particular ordinary citi...

Bureaucracy as an organizational form has always been a controversial issue and placed at the very heart of most discussions within organizational theory. One side of this prolonged discussion praises this administrative form as the ‘rational’ way to run an organization. It provides needed guidance and clarifies responsibilities, which enables employees to become more efficient. However, the opposition claims that in a non-linear world, where industrial organizations are forced to confront the challenging task of sensing and responding to unpredictable, novel situations of highly competitive markets, such an organizational form stifles creativity, fosters de-motivation and causes pressure on employees. Dealing with a bureaucratic form of organization and its consequences begs for a context. It would be appropriate to quit ‘taking sides’ and develop a sound analysis of this phenomenon under the conditions of today’s global workplace environment. This chapter intends to delineate the conditions under which bureaucracy has emerged and the way it has been interpreted since its inception and develop a sound and appropriate analytical approach to its functioning given the prevailing conditions of the contemporary workplace.

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2011

Evolution of the Post-Bureaucratic Organization

This chapter rejects the claim that the replacement of bureaucracy by post-bureaucratic has become inevitable. It interrogates the claim in a number of ways: by unpacking the notion that each age has a unitary mode organizing and instead argues that there is pluralism; by illustrating that past organization was not purely bureaucratic; by arguing that explosive growth of information communications technologies has not only enabled post-bureaucratisation but also bureaucratic intensification; by separating out a number of elided terms such as ‘modernization' and post-bureaucratisation; by demonstrating the confirmation bias employed by some leading post-bureaucratic age aficionados; and by providing evidence from diverse social arena and territories of bureaucratic intensification. It concludes that whilst there may be a positive role for the notion of post-bureaucracy as an ideal which may aid in illuminating and constraining excesses of bureaucracy, the wholesale replacement of...

Organization, 2018

This article explores the complexities encountered in attempts to strengthen the ethos of bureaucracy in public organization. It does so by stressing the ethical and organizational conflicts generated in the aspiration to revive this ethos. Empirically, this exploration is done by examining a code introduced in the Danish state-bureaucracy in the aftermath of a number of political-administrative scandals. We show how the ethos of bureaucracy on the one hand has been repressed and displaced and, on the other hand, in light of the scandals, now reappears as something indispensable. At the same time, the article exposes how the revitalization attempt encounters considerable obstacles. By situating the code in relation to changing bureaucratic structures, semantic ideals, and civil servants’ reflections, we show how the revived ethos takes on monstrous proportions. Despite this transfiguration, we argue that the failed attempt at revitalization is no cause to dispense with the ethos of ...

2007

A central issue in critical organization studies has been whether the transformation from bureaucratic to post-bureaucratic principles of exercising power increases or decreases individuals' freedom at work. This essay develops the argument that the transformation from bureaucratic to post-bureaucratic power implicates neither an increase nor a decrease of individuals' freedom, but a reconfiguration of the nature of individuals' freedom. By way of an analytical distinction between freedom as autonomy and freedom as potential it is argued that the two dominant views in critical organization studies are partly misplaced. The post-bureaucratic subject does not emerge as a 'slave' that is subtly forced to subordinate its very self to corporate values, as one strand of critical organization studies has it, nor as a 'silent rebel', that escapes totalitarian subordination through micro-routine-resistance and ironic distance, as the other strand has it, but as an 'opportunist', who, in the process of trying to seize on given opportunities, must fight against any form of subordination-even the subordination to his or her own self. Rather than totalitarianism, it is concluded that the risk of post-bureaucracy is its tendency to make freedom a privilege of those with potential, and of pushing others into vicious circles of opportunism. This glorification of freedom has been accompanied by a critique of bureaucratic principles of organizing work (Du Gay, 1994; 2000; Du Gay et al., 1996). Allegedly, bureaucracy is founded on a number of unfortunate divisions, which restrict individuals' abstract © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias © 2007 ephemera 7(4): 555-574 Freedom at Work articles Christian Maravelias 574 Willmott, H. (1994) 'Will the turkeys vote for Christmas? The reengineering of human resources', in

Organization Studies

This article is concerned with the changing premises of human involvement in organizations underlying current employment and labour trends. The appreciation of these trends is placed in the wider historical context signified by the advent of modernity and the diffusion of the bureaucratic form of organization. The article attempts to dissociate bureaucracy from the dominant connotations of centralized and rigid organizational arrangements. It identifies the distinctive mark of the modern workplace with the crucial fact that it admits human involvement in non-inclusive terms. Modern humans are involved in organizations qua roles, rather than qua persons. Innocent as it may seem, the separation of the role from the person has been instrumental to the construction of modern forms of human agency. An organizational anthropology is thereafter outlined based on Gellner’s conception of ‘Modular Man’. Modernity and bureaucracy construe human beings as assemblages of relatively independent b...

2014

The term bureaucracy is a fundamental feature of business lingo and organizational management by extension. When the concept of bureaucracy is stretched to the limit, then dysfunctions arise. Goffman (1961) describes a process, which he termed mortification, involving the separation of an individual from their identity for the purpose of forcing them to conform to superiors and the organization as a whole. As a result, the individual engages practically a new identity to maintain membership in the group or organization. This leads to the question: is this only an organizational identity or do new personality traits emerge? Within the context of bureaucracy, the exercise of individual power is inherently evident, as bureaucracy was designed by individuals. However, it is clear that individual impact would be constrained based on status or level of the hierarchy where one is placed. Since business requires organization, and organization requires people, there must be an effective negotiation of individual versus organizational impact in order to yield the most profitable outcomes for all stakeholders.

Telos, 1985

Focusing on the relations between "Bureaucracy and Culture," the conference program promised to have sections on intellectuals, the labor movement, prisons, mass culture, the new class, state terrorism, etc. As is usually the case in even the best organized conferences, however, most speakers paid only lip service to their assigned theme and chose to discuss instead whatever they happened to be working on. The predictable result, of course, was that when these various Leibnizian monads were forced by the collective discussion to focus on the issues at hand, they simply fell back on recycling well-worn political stances to confront specific questions with automatic easy answers. Hence, from the very first day, the conference evolved into a predictable internal debate within the liberal-left intelligensia. To the extent that, unlike the three earlier conferences on bureaucracy, this time the participants included three Telos editors, the more interesting debates gradually turned into a clash between the Telos position and the traditional left analysis. Richard Wolin provided the opening address and then placed the question of critical theory's analysis of bureaucracy at the top of the agenda. After all, aside from warmed-over accounts of Weber or panglossian technocratic apologies, the analysis of bureaucracies in the previous three conferences as well as in the predominant literature have been particularly sterile. There is always the promise of alternatives but, as Antonio commented about the first such conference, 1 very little ever emerges. Of course, critical theory itself has not been extremely successful in going much beyond Weber, yet it provides analytical tools for more meaningful accounts-especially in a situation where the framework within which the bureaucracy functions has been qualitatively altered. The "one-dimensional" or "totally administered" societies of Marcuse and Adorno were still predominant social tendencies at the time they were theorized and both authors had no chance of analyzing the post-1968 realities when those tendencies reached maturity. In such a situation, the disappearance of civil society as an autonomous sphere free of bureaucratic penetration, and the collapse of virtually all political opposition, qualitatively alters the nature and function of bureaucracy. From rationalizing agencies facilitating the universalization of the commodity form paving the way for more advanced modes of capitalist organization, bureaucracies became costly obstacles to further social development obstructing rather than facilitating social rationalization. Thus, Weber's theory of bureaucracy goes the way of his theory of religion: an interesting historical tool to make sense out of the trajectory of Western civilization, but carrying very little contemporary socio-political import. Before critical theory can fully develop a theory of bureaucracy both adequate to the present and able to go beyond Habermas' reformulation (without any substantial improvement) of Weber, it is necessary to cleanse the amorphous heritage of "classi-1. Robert Antonio, "Bureaucratic Approaches to the Bureaucracy: A Conference Repon, "in