Every task in our daily lives relies on an impersonal system of formalities and procedures designed and enforced by massive groups of people with or without their approval of the system. It both allows us access to every service and possession we require, while forcing massive amounts of people to conform to a rigid set of rules that may harm many individuals within that group. Governments, legal systems, and cooperations all are structured by a strict system. We call these systems bureaucracies, and while we seem to need them, there is a seemingly inescapable dehumanizing quality about them, which gives them a power greater than the sum of their parts.

German political sociologist Maximilian Weber identified bureaucracies as possessing six characteristics. They are “a type of secondary group designed to perform tasks efficiently, characterized by specialization, technical competence, hierarchy, written rules, impersonality, and formal written communication”(Ferris, Kerry and Stein 2008:157) In other words, members with various jobs are assigned to specific tasks within a hierarchical system. Members with a higher rank monitor subordinate activities. Individual needs and problems are de-emphasized and the predictable, systematic running of the organization according to pre-established rules are given president. Sometimes these rules are upheld so systematically that even in times when the bureaucracy does not perform its intended function while following them, the rules are still strictly adhered to.

One good example of bureaucracies failing to achieve their normal function because of rigid conformity can be found in Clifford D. Shearing and Phillip C Stenning’s article “From the Panopticon to Disney World”. He notes how the organization of Disney world effectively keeps large amounts of people following strict instructions in order to maximize efficiency by repeatedly reminding them that it was for customers’ own benefit to follow them. While the structure is generally effective, when this stated goal comes in conflict with the bureaucratic rules and regulations, the rules take precedent.

“…an incident that occurred during a visit to Disney World by Shearing and his daughter, during the course of which she developed a blister on her heel. To avoid further irritation she removed her shoes and preceded to walk barefooted. They had not progressed ten yards before they were approached by a very personable security guard … who informed them that walking barefoot was, ‘for the safety of the visitors’ was not permitted. When informed that, given the blister, the safety of this visitor was likely to be better secured by remaining barefooted, at least on the walkways, they were informed that their safety and how best to protect it was a matter for Disney Productions to determine while they were on Disney property and that unless they complied he would be compelled to escort them out of Disney World.” (Massey, Garth 2006:298-9)
It seems no one has benefited from this situation. Disney has made itself a bad name with one customer by being unnecessarily coercive, the customer has conformed at a personal cost, and the employee has enforced a rule which presumably goes against his usual morality. The bureaucracy perpetuates its pattern independently of success in individual situations.

Why are bureaucracies so uncompromising and impersonal? The process of rationalization: “the application of economic logic to all spheres of human activity in order to increase efficiency” (Ferris, Kerry and Stein 2008:40) seeks to maximize profit for a cooperation while minimizing cost. What is more, the process that George Ritzer calls ‘Mcdonaldization’ describes how this bureaucratic mindset spreads throughout our lives and decreases the need for personal contact and personal decisions. While many of us individually find the rigid impersonality of bureaucracies abhorrent, we each reinforce it through our daily interactions until an immutable society is formed. Weber foresaw this problem of hyper-rationalization, morbidly describing modern life as an “iron cage” formed by the “technical and economic conditions of machine production”.

Perhaps, though, these problems are not insurmountable. Since a bureaucracy is made possible by the cooperation of many individuals, it follows that the conceptions and actions of the individuals therein support the bureaucratic foundation. Along this micro-sociological vein some known psychological phenomena come to mind that may, if not explain a possible cause of the inflexibility of bureaucracy, at least provide a possible explanation as to why it perpetuates among group members so easily.

Groupthink is a tenancy for cohesive group members to enforce conformity and work towards consensus when making decisions. Against every group member’s individual benefit, however increasing and maintaining the cohesion of the group itself, groupthink discourages dissent and creates an unofficial censorship. It is less intentional and more effective than formal sanctions against personal expression. This process may be at work within many bureaucratic systems. The Disney employee for example may not have found it morally appealing to force a little girl to walk on a blister while on his own, but within a group where the opinion that forcing guests to keep their shoes no matter what is essential, he may have felt compelled to uphold the expected behavior. He may have either consciously feared repercussions as other observing or higher-ranking personnel form their opinion of them as a good or bad employee, or he may have unconsciously internalized the group expectations.

Pressure for conformity can be even more subtle than this however. A person feels a natural pressure to conform to a consensus without any encouragement from or access to groupthought. Participants in Salomon Asch’s conformity experiment (1958) when given a set of lines and told to chose which among them was the same length as a sample line, consistency agreed with confederates when all of them were agreed on an obviously wrong answer. New members of a bureaucratic group are at a disadvantage in that all other members of the group seem to be in consensus about the rules. Participants also have the pressure to obey the authority of their supervisors. Stanley Milgram showed in his 1961 experiment involved participants who believed to be administering shocks to others on the orders of an authority figure. It turned out that people are willing to go to lengths that they would usually consider amoral at the prompting of an authority figure. Weber defined bureaucracies as being characterized by hierarchy, so there will always be an authority present who an individual is at risk of being influenced by. It seems that this problem of over-compliance to authority is inherent by definition.

Only a few solutions for the problem of bureaucracies have been formally proposed. In Japan for example, there is a management technique called Kaizen. Kaizen is a corporation strategy where low-ranking workers generate ideas for the higher-level workers to implement. This allows new workers to take some of the power and authority upon themselves, and possibly escape the social pressures of conformity (since they are new) and groupthink (since they are encouraged to dissent). This also keeps a stream of new perspectives and ideas flowing through the organization, as new minds are constantly arriving and coming up with improvements. This might also give the bureaucracy a chance to correct flaws within the system.

It has also been suggested that by creating primary groups, such as close friendships, within the secondary group, interactions become more humanized. People gain empathy for one another and are able to make interactions unique and individualized.

I believe that the best way I personally could help society reshape its bureaucratic structures is by encouraging other members to exert whatever influence they have to change problems in the system. Bureaucracies should be mapped out in practice. While often time the only guide one has to bureaucratic functions is the written rules, they do not always work by these principles. By mapping out how a bureaucracy actually functions by trying and recording different venues through it, the system could be simplified and greatly improved. Once we start understanding the mechanisms these systems run by, we can begin influencing them for the better. We have seen that bureaucracies already have self preserving qualities, once we have been able to rearrange bureaucracies to suit their own goals in practice rather than just in principle, we may be able to help the problem.

References

Ferris, Kerry and Jill Stein 2008. The Real World. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.

Garth, Massey 2006. Readings For Sociology. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company Inc.