Abstract
To take an interest in bureaucracy is not to look back at the past, but towards the future. The central hypothesis of this book is that the end of bureaucracies, as they will be defined in a few moments, is the number one hell to face in the transformation of companies and organizations in coming years. It is no secret: there is not one management textbook or analysis of world trends that is not keenly interested in the end of bureaucracies, regardless of the author’s point of view: “Today in the realm of organizations we see and suffer from cumbersome bureaucracies which, more than ever, are signs of the poor management of meaning.”1 To which Waterman adds a more precise definition: “The problem is as follows: the bureaucracy, our most traditional form of organization, was created to manage the day-to-day problems of organizations: the sales department sells, manufacturing manufactures, and so on. So long as economic activity does not change too quickly, bureaucracies get along fairly well. But things are changing quickly”2 So why has this disjointed, compartmentalized mode of functioning taken the upper hand over other forms of organization? Robert Reich explains it as follows, based on the American situation:
American bureaucratic companies were organized around the model of military bureaucracies for the efficient deployment of plans developed well in advance. It is perhaps not by chance that war veterans who entered the major American companies in the 1950s very naturally re-created at the centre of these companies the military model of a bureaucracy. They were set up along the lines of a military hierarchy, with chains of command, control methods, rank, divisions with division leaders, and procedures outlining the decision-making process. If you have a question, check the manual!3
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Notes
Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, 2nd edition. HarperCollins, London, 1997, p. 40.
Robert H. Waterman Jr, What America Does Right. Plume-Penguin, New York, 1995, p. 283.
Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism. Vintage, New York, 1992.
Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. Putnam Group, 1996, p. 137.
Henry Mintzberg, Structure et dynamique des organisations. Éditions d’Organisation, Paris, 1982.
T. Burns and G. M. Stalker, The Management of Innovation. Tavistock, London, 1961.
Henri Fayol, Administration industrielle et générale. Dunod & Pinot, Paris, 1917.
François Dupuy and Jean-Claude Thoenig, Sociologie de l’administration française, collection U. Armand Colin, Paris, 1983.
Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964;
but also Michel Crozier, Erhard Friedberg, Pierre Grémion, Catherine Grémion, Jean-Claude Thoenig and Jean-Pierre Worms, Oú va l’administration française? Éditions d’Organisation, Paris, 1974.
Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg, Organizations and Collective Action: Our Contribution to Organizational Analysis, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. XIII. Volume editors Samuel P. Bacharach, Pasquale Gagliardi and Bryan Mundell. JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, 1994.
Frederick W. Taylor, La Direction scientifique des entreprises. Dunod, Paris, 1957. A certain number of Taylor’s writings have been assembled and published by the Institut Renault de la Qualité. On the link between Weber, Taylor and democracy, see Jean-Pierre Rouze, “Frederick W. Taylor, inventeur de la démocratie moderne?” Gérer et Comprendre, March 1993, No. 30, pp. 97–105.
A simple and accurate presentation of this can be found in Erhard Friedberg, L’analyse sociologique des organisations, POUR, les dossiers pédagogiques du formateur. L’Harmattan, Paris, 1988.
On this topic, see Christopher Midler, La Voiture qui n’existait pas. InterÉditions, Paris, 1993.
See for example Patrick Hassenteufel, Les Médecins face á l’État: une comparaison européenne. Presses de Sciences Po, Paris, 1997. Quoted by Philippe Arnaud in “Le pouvoir contesté des médecins”. Le Monde, 25 February 1997.
Edgar Morin and Sami Naïr, Une Politique de civilisation. Arléa, Paris, 1997, p. 128.
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© 2004 François Dupuy
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Dupuy, F. (2004). What is a Bureaucracy?. In: Sharing Knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230006157_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230006157_4
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