Weberian Bureaucracy and Its Relevance to Organisations Today: A Critical Analysis
by This is a humble homage to Max Weber which critically analyzes the relevance of his bureaucratic organisational model to organisational forms today.
26 Aided with the genius of Thomas Kuhn (1996: 148), we can state that the validity of this hypothesis cannot be verified by positive assertion, i.e. by proof; falsification of this (and any other) hypothesis must be through the introduction of a valid alternative. Hence, even if we can argue that bureaucracy can be traced back to ancient civilisations (Weber 1974: 204-209), this attests only to bureaucracy’s inevitability in the past; but does not say anything about its inevitability in today’s world, or in the future.
27 A rational starting point would be to scrutinise the internal and external organisational environment. According to Beetham (1996: 17), one of the most influential organizational typologies is that developed by Burns and Stalker (1961), where they argue that the decisive variable for organizations is the rate of change in their environment. In this vein, externally, we must ascertain the impact of chaos (which according to Farazmand [1997] is a defining feature of today’s environment) on the relevance of bureaucracy to today’s organisations. For our purposes, chaos means that there is a chance element, rendering long-term future development unpredictable (Stacey 1993).
Given the importance of rules and regulation to bureaucracy on the one hand, and the difficulty of setting up such systems under uncertainty on the other; it could be argued that chaos cannibalises bureaucracy. Nevertheless, in answering the question: “can bureaucracy be dead or be considered irrelevant in today”s age of chaos?’, Farazmand (1997: 5) argues that bureaucracy is in fact thriving Farazmand indicates that changes brought about by inherently chaotic instruments such as the free market (e.g. through downsizing), enhance the bureaucratic grip of the elite over society. The capitalist need for order in the form of tight control over society (e.g. in the form of prisons) is accentuated due to the introduction of inherently chaotic policies such as privatisation. This then leads to an expansion of the government bureaucratic apparatus in the form of ever larger police and security forces, to ensure providing the order on which chaotic policies can be promoted.
As to the internal environment, “New Age” trends (which may be understood as: “an internalized form of religiosity…it is at heart all about Self-spirituality” [Heelas 1996; cited in Casey 2004: 78]) in the workplace and tendencies toward individualism seem to emphasis the on-going transformation in management paradigms. For example, Casey (2004) indicates that a number of flagship organisations such as IBM, General Electric, and Nike have initiated programmes to encourage employee participation in spiritual activities such as mediation, prayer-meetings, and the study of Holy Scriptures.
28 I cannot escape the hunch that in this analysis is the seed for an elegant explanation of bureaucracy as an inevitable ebb and flow between ossification and fluidity in power relations. Constructs such as Levi-Straussian cyclical time (life-cycle concept) (Levi-Strauss 1966) and Schumpeterian creative destruction (punctured equilibrium) (Schumpeter 1950) can be a reasonable starting point. Unfortunately, to given such a hypothesis proper evaluation will absorb more than the intellectual sphere intended for this particular essay, but might be suitable for higher level courses or possibly as part of graduate work.
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