The Bureaucratic Experience: The Post-Modern Challenge

The Post-Modern Challenge

Ralph P. Hummel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780765610102
• eBook ISBN: 9781317458142
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Everyone has trouble with bureaucracy. Citizens and politicians have trouble controlling the runaway bureaucratic machine. Managers have trouble managing it. Employees dislike working in it. Clients can't get the goods from it. Teachers have difficulty getting a grip on it. Optimists argue that soon all of this will be fixed. The new Fifth Edition of Ralph P. Hummel's classic text maintains just the opposite - that despite all the current rhetoric from proponents of total quality management, corporate reengineering, and the new public management, it's still "business as usual" for bureaucracies. The persistent reality of organizational structure remains resilient in the face of feel-good trends and values. For this edition the book has been thoroughly revised and updated, with two key changes: each of the six core chapters has been trimmed and edited to consolidate and streamline the important organizational theory developments since the book's initial publication; and, each chapter contains newly added critiques of the postmodern theory of modern organizations, pursuing the theme that postmodernism covers up the persistent reality of organizational structure.

1

Understanding Bureaucracy

One city planner, shown a plan of a road cutting through a medieval city’s houses: Won’t people object? Second city planner: One must force them to be free!

—From a documentary on the medieval city of Rothenburg on the river Tauber

It was a series of random events that killed thousands and saved hundreds. Not many people did anything right that day, but not many people did anything wrong either.

—A firefighter who escaped the North Tower

What are we calling postmodernity? I’m not up to date.

—Michel Foucault

This is a practical guide to bureaucracy. Or, it will be if you can make it so. Not an easy job, when you consider: “As soon as you step into bureaucracy, the handcuffs go on your mind as well as your hand” (Ishmael al-Amin, Personal communication).

If you can’t at some point in reading this say, “Yeah, that’s how it is on my job, in my life,” you have not made the practical connection. This is not a message from me to you; if you understand, you understand only because in some way you already knew what I was going to say.

Doing something practical means letting go of some illusions and delusions. One illusion is that bureaucracy is compatible with democracy (see Goodsell, 2003). A delusion is that, whatever the faults of modern organizations, these are just anomalies that can be fixed. We all subscribe to this delusion. Without it there is no hope. Yet behind this delusion stands a grim reality. It is captured in defense computers run amuck, international aid that starves populations, but most directly in the desperate phone call of a friend who announces, without introduction or saying who is calling:

“Ralph, it’s worse than you say it is.”

Imagine having adopted a baby. A year later, you get a phone call: “Return the baby!” “What!?” you say. “The father didn’t sign the papers,” they say.

Bureaucratic Experiences

In some way, we have all had our experiences with bureaucracy. Everyone has trouble with bureaucracy. Citizens and politicians have trouble controlling the runaway bureaucratic machine. Managers have trouble running it. Employees dislike working in it. Clients can’t get the goods from it. Teachers have trouble getting a grip on it. Students are mystified by the complexity of it.

Let’s take a closer look at what is so troubling.

Firefighters

New York firefighters are civil servants. Are they bureaucrats, too? Kicked off the fully manned rigs, some of those off-duty took the bus to the World Trade Center. Some came without clear direction. Some came without working radios. Some came against orders. All came because they heard behind the sirens and the alarms a silent call. Sixty of the total of 343 firefighters who died on 9/11 were off-duty. Would better support from the administration of the fire department have helped?

Consultants called for stricter training, routine obedience to orders, tauter command and control, better coordination with the police. These can enhance the ability to take care of our fellow human beings. Can they create or command sacrifice? (Contrast this with the Fire Department of the City of New York, 2002.)

And this is the practical case against bureaucracy. It is at the same time the moral case. Bureaucracy beats what we do freely into order, and it does so blindly. It multiplies the potential of organizations to get things done, but it does not do the doing. Bureaucracies set up the invasion of Normandy; human beings won the battle. Bureaucracy, whether too much of it or not enough, set up the organization of firefighters—it did not create the will to self-sacrifice. No matter how tough the rules, how rational the plans, how tight the tolerances and controls, some human being somewhere has to judge whether, when, and how there is an opening for applying those rules.

This is not only a judgment of technical fit. It is to judge whether what you do next upholds or damages the potential of human beings to whom you do it. We not only judge whether rational plans are objectively reasonable, but whether they fit the human being. Freedom, not order, opens the room for sacrifice. Know-how and freedom are inescapably partners.

One thing we know about you who choose public service, whether you become immersed in bureaucratic demands or not. You, in contrast to those choosing business, are not in it for the money. You do not blanch or pull a wry smile at the word “service.” Service, not profit, is your aim. But service is freely given. No one has warned you that you would be entering not a world of service but a world of control. When you first enter a bureaucracy—and most organizations today are—you are entering an entire new world.

Welfare Managers

In this brave new world, a baby entrusted to a welfare agency may die of neglect while sleeping on the floor of the welfare office while welfare workers for days step gingerly around it—and yet the welfare administrator will be able to say sincerely that “everyone concerned did his or her job conscientiously” (Basier, 1985: B1).

Corporate Executives

In this new world, parallels are enacted (but more easily defended) in the business bureaucracy. When the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen missed a $3.5-billion discrepancy because the communications firm of WorldCom had disguised operating expenses as profits, the New York Times reporters thought “it was conceivable that Andersen’s auditors at WorldCom could have done their job properly and nonetheless failed to detect the problems with the company’s financial reports” (Glater and Eichenwald, 2002: C1).

FBI Agents

In this new world, nearly 3,000 people are killed in an attack on the United States and a tip by lower-ranking officials does not get to the top because, in the words of one whistle-blower, “We have a culture in the F.B.I, that there’s a certain pecking order, and it’s pretty strong. And it’s very rare that someone picks up the phone and calls a rank or two above themselves” (Federal News Service, 2002).

The IMF—International Bureaucrats

In this world of global reach, nations are asked to change their cultures to meet the demands of the macro-bureaucracies—the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank—in other words, that they modernize or be killed in economic competition. In the words of a former global bureaucrat: “To heap paradox upon paradox, because I worked with investment bankers I was surrounded by free-market fundamentalists who roamed the globe preaching a triumphant gospel of deregulation from which all freedoms would flow, yet returned to a bureaucratic roost perfectly Soviet in its rigidity” (Jennings, 2002: 15).

Computerized Citizens

In this world’s most intimate touch, we ourselves become prisoners of a micro-bureaucracy of the mind. We willingly carry it with us even as it distorts our reasoning. Each use of the laptop, palm pilot, pager, and so on trains us daily in a kind of thinking that is so logical that we forget we have to make it sensible. Inner logic becomes the standard rather than the question: Does this serve the ultimate human capacity to set our own purposes? Instruments that technically connect us practically keep us apart. No need for a central power to force us to obey a central law. We happily subscribe to the electronic network. This provides not orders but only a matrix for all thinking, sensing, and acting. Within it we are free to think we are free.

Nitwits begin to say that when air controllers and a computer disagree, the solution is “removing the human from the loop.” In a flurry of sneers at science fiction horribles, conveniently forgotten are examples from the Cold War. Then humans repeatedly saved computers from launching a war based on reading a flock of geese or a rising moon as a missile attack. (Quotation on airliner safety from Johnson, 2002; on missile attack, see Hummel, 2002.)

There is a danger in this wired world. It is not only that the baby died, that the economy was endangered, that peace collapsed, or even that we are hardwired to be part of the techno-bureaucracy. The danger lies not in technology or bureaucracy themselves, but in the ease with which we fall into lockstep with their programs and reproduce their excuses: Everybody did their jobs, but the baby died. Somebody didn’t do their job: same result: Return the baby!

Bureaucratic Patterns

There is a pattern in all this, a consistent pattern of misunderstandings covering up the understanding of what bureaucracy is and does.

Consider its word origins. Bureaucracy: from the Greek for power (kratos) and from the French for office (bureau). In conceiving the thought that an office could rule, the designers had made a discovery: people could orient their actions toward an idea instead of a human leader. This idea could become law for them. And this law would be legitimate, a product of their ow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1. Understanding Bureaucracy
• 2. Bureaucracy as Society: Loss of the Social
• 3. Bureaucracy as the New Culture: “Economics”
• 4. The Psychology of Bureaucracy: Organization as Psyche
• 5. The Language of Bureaucracy: Virtual Words
• 6. The Thought of Bureaucracy: Failure of Imagination
• 7. Bureaucracy as Polity: Politics as Administration
• Epilogue: Bureaucracy, Modernity, and Post-Modernity
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author