The Bureaucratic Phenomenon

Michel Crozier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351485616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentlichsarbeit & Verwaltung

In The Bureaucratic Phenomenon Michel Crozier demonstrates that bureaucratic institutions need to be understood in terms of the cultural context in which they operate. The originality of the study lies in its association of two widely different approaches: the theory of decision-making in large organizations and the cultural analysis of social patterns of action.The book opens with a detailed examination of two forms of French public service. These studies show that professional training and distortions alone cannot ex plain the rise of routine behavior and dysfunctional vicious circles. The role of various bureaucratic systems appears to depend on the pattern of power relation ships between groups and individuals. Crozier's findings lead him to the view that bureaucratic structures form a necessary protection against the risks inherent in collective action.Since systems of protection are built around basic cultural traits, the author presents a French bureaucratic model based on centralization, strata isolation, and individual sparkle-one that that can be contrasted with an American, Russian, or Japanese model. He points out how the same patterns can be found in several areas of French life: education, industrial relations, politics, business, and the colonial policy. Bureaucracy, Crozier concludes, is not a modern disease resulting from organizational progress but rather a bulwark against development. The breakdown of the traditional bureaucratic system in modern France offers hope for new and fruitful forms of action.

Part One
The Case of the Clerical Agency

The first of the two cases which we are about to discuss concerns a large-scale Parisian administrative organization which may be described as rigid, standardized, and impersonal, and which seems unable to cope with the human and technical problems engendered by its recently accelerated growth. Its hierarchical structure, its promotional system, and its principles of organization are extremely simple. The behavior of its different categories of personnel, as actors within its social system, is therefore much easier to analyze. The actors appear to be both extremely rational and extremely predictable, as if they were playing a game that followed an experimental model. We shall use the opportunity afforded by such a situation to try to understand better one of the most fundamental problems usually associated with the concept of bureaucracy, the problem of routine.

In the introductory chapter, we shall provide some general data and descriptive comments on the tasks performed, on the actors, and on the processes of action. We shall then analyze and discuss the position of the actors within the organization, as it can be understood from the study of their first and simplest reaction, i.e., their individual satisfaction in regard to their own work situation. In the second chapter, we shall examine the more complex problems of the relationships between individuals and groups, and of the functioning of the hierarchical system. We shall then try to proceed from this starting point to discuss the processes of decision-making and to propose hypotheses which may explain why a general model of routine has developed.

Chapter One
The Over-All Organization and the Employees’ Individual Adjustments to Their Tasks

The Objectives of the Clerical Agency and Its Over-all Characteristics

The Parisian Clerical Agency is the Parisian branch of a large public agency, part of a government department. This branch is quite a large-scale organization by itself. At the time the data we will use were collected, it employed 4,500 people, mostly women, in a single establishment.¹ Its size—in any case huge for an administrative organization—sets it apart from the other establishments of the same public agency, since it employs four or five times more personnel than the biggest provincial establishment. Its purpose is to handle, on a daily basis, simple financial operations requested by a great many customers.²

It is a public service run for the public benefit and not for profit. However, since it provides the French nation with huge sums of money on a short-term basis, it has a great importance for the French treasury.

The Clerical Agency's most important present characteristic is its steady growth.³ This growth is due not only to the general economic growth of the country, but also to the changing habits of the French public. It is not viewed with great favor by the managements of the Agency and of the Parisian branch, since it brings them many difficulties and no rewards. The managements must abide by Civil Service rules, since increase of staff and all other new expenditures are part of the National State Budget. Because of the habitual thrift of the French Ministry of Finance and the usual distrust of parliament for the executive, the necessary authorizations for budgetary expansion always lag behind. The organization must be managed in a parsimonious way incompatible with the requirements of its development.

The main problems are the number of personnel and shortage of office space. New jobs are not created until the need for them is very great; it is thus impossible to build up reserves of personnel and to devote enough time to training. There is a heavy emphasis on productivity, but productivity tends to decrease because of the large percentage of young and ill-trained employees, and because of the poor working climate and the high rate of turnover. The working-space situation is even worse. It had been temporarily solved by introducing shift work, which made it possible for twice as many people to work in the same rooms.⁴ But the Agency has now been obliged to utilize rooms formerly considered unsuitable, and this has started continuous bickering with the unions about the hygiene of working conditions.

Office installations, the internal layout, and general maintenance are equally inadequate. There are insufficient toilets, washing facilities, and locker-rooms for the increased personnel. Workrooms are extremely noisy. Fables and filing equipment are old. The whole building is cold and unattractive. The poor standard of cleaning makes it even sadder.

The technology of the Agency's work is simple and it has remained basically unchanged for thirty-five years. The employees, all female, work in production units on heavy cross-tabulating accounting machines (with six or two tabulators). A pneumatic system facilitates quick communication. Work organization is also simple. It does not involve advance planning, since everything is done on a daily basis, according to the demands of the public. The most important qualities for a successful member of management are experience of possible difficulties and a relentless drive for control. All in all, however, this system is very efficient. The Parisian branch, like all the other branches, provides extremely good service, both quick and trustworthy.

The hierarchical organization is also uncomplicated. It is a pure line organization, with no staff function at all, at least at the branch level. The basic unit is the workroom, with about one hundred employees working in two shifts of fifty each. The workroom is further divided into the regular workroom, and the special section, where half a dozen senior employees and a few members of the supervisory grades handle mistakes, special cases, and requests for information. Two inspectors—one for the special section and one for the regular workroom—and four surveillantes form the supervisory staff of each shift. A section chief heads the two shifts and co-ordinates their work. There is one division head over ten such workrooms. He has about a thousand employees to care for and has two senior section chiefs and a secretary as his own personal staff. At the time of our study there were three regular divisions, with a fourth one in charge of all auxiliary work, incoming and outgoing mail, new accounts, the printing shop, maintenance, etc. Over the four divisions there was one senior division head, the formal head of the branch. He also has a very small staff—one personal secretary, a dozen clerks for handling mail, and a special office, likewise very poorly staffed, for all employment records, the delivery of pay-checks, and many odd jobs. As one would expect, this manager does not plan ahead and direct the adjustment of the organization. His function is, rather, to coordinate the action of the four division heads, to arbitrate among them when necessary, and to try to make them work according to the imperative rules of the Central Office.

The Agency is not autonomous, and its national management is part of the Ministry's bureaucratic structure. Executives are promoted from one section of the Ministry to another more frequently than from the field to the central office. National management has many echelons but not a very large staff. Its organization also is very rigid. Most of its bureaus theoretically have only advisory functions. In fact, however, they operate as the actual heads of the line organization and issue orders that must be applied in the field. These orders usually are presented not as special decisions but as general rules for all branches throughout France. Only the Parisian branch frequently receives special treatment because of the problems created by its size, but even this is done quite reluctantly.

The Different Categories of Personnel

Non-supervisory personnel is predominantly female. Men work only in the auxiliary services, incoming or outgoing mail, the printing shops, and the maintenance sections. In the regular production jobs there are only women, who are in one of three main categories: contrôleurs, agents d'exécution, and auxiliaires. Theoretically, only agents should be working on these jobs, since most of the tasks performed correspond in the official classification to the routine clerical posts for which agents are recruited. Yet only 70 per cent of the employees are agents. Twenty per cent of them are contrôleurs, who should have more responsible tasks while the remaining 10 per cent are either members of a complementary category or auxiliaires—who had not yet been ranked, and whose employment is now forbidden by law.⁵

Three-quarters of the employees come from the French provinces. They do not stay very long in the Agency; over-all turnover is around 15 per cent, and the average seniority is only three and a half years.⁶ This type of recruitment from the provinces is new. Twenty years ago, almost half the personnel came from the Parisian region; but in the last ten years 85 per cent of them have come from the less developed rural regions, especially from the southwest.⁷ This change in the personnel's geographical origin has involved a change in its social origin. Instead of the majority of the employees coming from families of lower-grade civil servants and urban workers, most are daughters of farmers, rural shopkeepers, and craftsmen. This tendency is stronger among the agents, but it can be also seen among the contrôleurs.

At the same time, the level of education of the new employees is much higher. Twenty-one per cent of the agents and 96 per cent of the contrôleurs recruited in the last two years had their baccalaureates,⁸ while none of the older ones had such a diploma. This difference is due to the new requirements of the two concours, and to the general improvement of educational standards. However, the higher educationa level is not compatible with the relative downgrading of this type of routine clerical job, and it is thus a source of maladjustment. Even at the simplest level, it is one of the most potent factors for the regional shift in recruitment. Parisian girls with the required schooling now very rarely accept the salaries and terms of employment of the lower grades of the Civil Service. Only girls who come from underdeveloped areas with few employment opportunities will accept them. Therefore, the more the Ministry emphasizes educational standards the less it will be able to recruit from the Paris area.

Promotion from the lower categories to the higher ones and to the supervisory grades can be achieved only by passing new concours. These concours do not have anything to do with the work at the branch; they sanction a level of education one cannot easily attain outside the schools; preparation for them requires long and strenuous efforts which very few employees are able to make. There are, therefore, very few promotions, especially at the lower level, and almost no supervisors who began their careers as agents in the branch.

Most supervisors, finally, are men. Women, to be sure, are surveillantes, but these are strawbosses', not supervisors', jobs. Male supervisors, inspectors, and section chiefs are relatively old in the job. Eighty per cent of them have worked twenty years or more in the Civil Service. Their average age is forty-five, while that of their subordinates is twenty-seven. Curiously enough, their geographical and social origins do not differ very much from those of the newer employees and do contrast with those of the older employees. This similarity and contrast suggest that the changes in the recruitment of personnel, the immediate material causes of which we have underlined, have come about within the general frame of the older network of human relationships that existed between the metropolis and an underdeveloped area. Twenty and thirty years ago, the southwest was sending its boys to Civil Service jobs in Paris. Now, when its girls seem independent and are looking for employment, they in turn are going; but the old network of relationships has not, in fact, changed very much.

The Organization of Work and Productivity

The basic units of work organization are the four-girl work teams. These teams, to which more than 60 per cent of the employees belong, are in charge of the direct productive function of the Agency —i.e., the carrying out and accounting of the customer's orders. Many employees, of course, do not belong to these teams, but are doing preparatory work or handling special cases and mistakes. Among them are the people working in the special workrooms and all those employed in the fourth division. The Agency as a whole, however, remains a rather rare example of a large modern organization in which everything still revolves around a large set of autonomous and parallel productive units, working independently of one another.

The work-flow in such an organization is extremely simple. Sorting out the incoming mail in the early morning and a second mail in the late morning, processing operations, preparing th...