A Requiem for Bureaucracy

Abstract

We enjoy bureaucracies. Those in which we work, that is, not those which we have to confront and which bind us with constraints. We are, in fact, both the bureaucrat and the customer: we apply pressure and we resist it, we demand change and yet we cherish the advantages that are already ours. There is no real contradiction here, as a number of writers have already pointed out.¹ Our ability to play both roles is to a large extent the result of how difficult it is to identify, or “flesh out” bureaucracy, so to speak, when it is defined in terms of the line of thought governing the implementation of its modes of functioning, and in terms of the employee benefits associated with them. So long as this definition remains relatively abstract and general — the ability to produce general and impersonal rules and to apply them, for example — so long as it underscores the trivial, day-to-day aspects of bureaucracy, just as Balzac² described the bureaucrat — paperwork, drawn-out procedures, little contact with others — bureaucracy resembles any large organization, a military model³ or a form of public administration. And so bureaucracy is referred to as “them”, even for bureaucrats themselves, who are all the more ready to point out the ungainliness of the world they work in, since doing so allows them to point out their own flexibility⁴