Introduction
In this chapter, the concept is bureaucracy is examined. Rather than conceiving of the concept of bureaucracy as a single and unified construct, isolated from external influences, bureaucracy will be examined within a field of intertextual- ity, that is, within a field where various texts and other resources are continually interconnected and folded into one another. “Bureaucracy”, then, is by no means a singularity, a word with one single proper lexical definition, but is instead a multiplicity or a manifold, capable of embodying a variety of meanings (Du Gay, 2005). This post-structuralist approach to the analysis of the concept of bureaucracy is by no means attempting at relativizing the idea of bureaucracy, to make it become something different than what it generally denotes in everyday language, but is rather an analytical strategy for envisaging how the different texts on bureaucracy are co-dependent and co-evolutionary, mutually supporting one another or presenting fruitful antagonist views of the concept. In the follow- ing, bureaucracy will be examined from a historical perspective, then how it is discussed in Max Weber’s foundational texts, and thereafter the research on bureaucracy in organization theory, sociology and political science will be accounted for. Bureaucracy will thus be explored from a number of perspectives and angles. The purpose is to show how the writing on bureaucracy more or less follows a certain narrative, that of bureaucracy as representative of the failure to develop organization forms that are capable of responding to external influences and providing meaningful work assignments for the organization members. This narrative is persistent in the literature on bureaucracy and needs to be examined as what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls a “mytheme”, a recurrent mythological figure appearing in a specific culture.
Modernity, management, bureaucracy: organizing the modern society
While bureaucracy is very much what is inextricably bound up with the emer- gence of the modern state apparatus, examples of pre-modern bureaucratic organization exists. In order to understand the emergence of bureaucracy and its
image in the public mind, one needs to examine the emergence of management thinking as being entangled with the Western canon of thinking. In this section, the roots and the various branches of managerial thinking are examined. In so doing, we start from the dawn of Western thinking and the derogatory view of economic activity in Greek philosophy.
Premodern and religious roots of management
The notion of management is of recent origin and inextricably bound up with modernity and its various institutions and new forms of social arrangement (Shenhav, 1995, 1999). When we in the following speak of modernity, we adhere to Anthony Giddens’s definition:
At the simplest, modernity is a shorthand term for modern society or indus- trial society. Portrayed in more detail, it is associated with (1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to trans- formation by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy.
Largely as a result if these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than say previous type of social order.
(Giddens and Pierson, 1998: 94) In more specific terms, Giddens and Pierson argue that “the emergence of modernity is first of all the creation of a modern economic order, that is, a capi- talistic economic order” (1998: 96).
However, prior to any management discipline or discourse on management, there have been economic and mercantile activities that have been structured, controlled and organized on the basis of systematic and partially formalized knowledge and more or less explicit ideologies. The first evidence of math- ematical thinking in Babylonia and in Assyria testified to agricultural calcula- tions. In Greek thinking, later on, Aristotle distinguished between “the art of household management” (oekonomia) and “the art of moneymaking” (Chrema- tistike) (Swedberg, 1998: 30). Household management was the practical under- taking, of the transformation of nature into utilities such as goods, food items and some specific services, while moneymaking was aimed at earning money out of money-lending and other financial operations and ventures. Aristotle associates the latter form of economic activity with a less moral form of life not worthy of the philosopher. In his Politics, Aristotle (1998a) tells the story of how Thales of Miletus bought all the olive presses on his own and the neigh- bouring island, just to rent them back to the olive-farmers at the time of harvest.
Thales’s venture was aimed at showing how easy it is to make money for the philosopher if he only wanted to, but that the philosopher should dedicate his valuable time to more intellectual demanding matters such as geometry, politics or rhetoric. The derogatory view of Chrematistike among the Greeks would
persist long into the medieval times. The French medieval historian, Jacques Le Goff (1980), shows how the Church struggled to resolve the theological prob- lems associated with money-lending. On the one hand, the growing economies of the late medieval times demanded an effective financial market that could deal with risk allocation; on the other hand, lending money was “to lend time”, and since time belonged to God, money-lending was located within a theologi- cally complex domain. The pragmatic solution was that the Jewish community – who did not obey the Christian credo anyway – was given the permission to handle the money transactions.
In general, in the emergence of the modern society and its institutions and organization forms, the Jews and their religious beliefs played a substantial role:
“The Jews . . . often chose trade as their occupation for religious reasons; it was much easier to follow the rituals of Judaism if one was a trader than an agricul- turalist” (Swedberg, 1998: 15). The Jewish community thus championed the growth of non-agricultural activities beneficial for the economy. In addition, Swedberg (1998: 19– 20) argues, the Jews were preceding the ascetic Protes- tantism that Max Weber saw as the primary motor for modern capitalism in terms of rejecting mystic components of religion and turning religious practice into profane activities and everyday life striving for better living conditions:
The most important contribution of Judaism was . . . not that the Jews had opposed the economic doctrine of the Catholic Church and thereby set free modern capitalism. . . . It was that Judaism had turned religion in a nonmag- ical [Judaism was hostile to magic] and to some extent also nontraditional direction.
In this view, the modern organization and managerial practices have their roots in theological discourses. The most prominent spokesman for such as view is Weber (1992) and his emphasis on Protestantism as the dominant mode of thought preceding capitalist ideologies. For Protestants, religious following did not only imply an adherence to certain rules and practices, but also implied a long-term commitment to hard work and value accumulation in the praise of God. Weber’s thesis, however, is far from uncontested and has been subject to substantial critical reflections. For instance, as several historians have pointed out, Catholic city-states such as Venice and Genua in medieval Italy were the first capitalistic trade centres of Europe, and Muslim trade centres in the Middle East and on the shores of Africa flourished prior to any Protestant capitalism (Braudel, 1992). Other scholars have even argued that Weber has reversed the causality, that Protestantism was an effect of capitalism rather than its impetus (Wren, 1972: 28). Nevertheless, Weber’s basic idea, that certain ideologies and beliefs have long-term and largely latent functions and unanticipated effects, is still often referred to as a major contribution to the history of capitalism. Guillén (1994: 235) points at more recent associations between religion and manage- ment, for instance in the case of the UK where a number of large corporations in a variety of businesses, including banking (Lloyds, Barclays), accounting
(PriceWaterhouse & Co.) and confectionery (Cadbury, Rowntree), were con- trolled by Quaker families.
The premodern forms of managerial control were therefore heavily dependent on what Barley and Kunda (1992) refer to as “normative control”; religious beliefs and practices determined which economic and financial ventures were legitimate or not. The modern forms of management thinking, strongly associ- ated with rational forms of control, were primarily developed in domains such as accounting and book-keeping. One such rational method was the Venetian Luca Paciolo’s double-entry book-keeping advocated in his Summa de arith- metica, geometrica, proportioni, et proportionalita published in 1494 (Wren, 1972: 21). The development of management thinking and practice prior to the industrial revolution and its radical transformation of European societies were unsystematic and largely embedded in the search for solutions to practical con- cerns. During the formative years of industrial capitalism – here opposed to the mercantile capitalism of the premodern period – the issue of management became of central importance in the process of modernization.
The demand for systematic management knowledge
The effects of division of labour had been known since the dawn of humanity, and the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith gave it a proper theoretical account in his Wealth of Nations (1776), a liberal economics book that spoke in favour of free trade and the importance of exploiting what David Ricardo later would call comparative advantages of different regions and nations. Although Smith pointed at the immediate and, in many cases, baffling effects of division of labour, he was also aware of the devastating effects that a far-reaching divi- sion of labour might imply for the working men. Many other writers would return to this perennial issue. One of the most influential was Charles Babbage, who was one of the first – Andrew Ure’s The Philosophy of Manufacturers (first published in 1835) is another classic text – to apply the idea of division of labour directly to companies. According to Babbage, there are five forms of gains from the division of labour:
1 shorter time for learning a skill.
2 less waste in materials.
3 lower transaction costs.
4 no need for the change of tools.
5 skills acquired by repetition.
(Babbage, 1833: 170–172) Babbage also points out that the mechanisms of division of labour are also applicable within “mental labour”: “The division of labour can be applied with equal success to mental as to mechanical operations, and that it ensures in both the same economy of time” (Babbage, 1833: 191). In other words, specialization was one of the keys to a more effective and productive industry and administra-
tion of the state affairs. In terms of specialization and division of labour, two major trends can be discerned. On the one hand, the bureaucratic organization form evolved, based on a series of principles and rules. On the other hand, the management function was made a systematic field of inquiry and was eo ipso professionalized. Before the development of bureaucracy will be examined, the engineering-driven development of systematic management procedures will be examined in greater details.
However, before engaging with the “official history” of management think- ing, one may address the managerial innovations developed in the agrarian economy in the European colonies and in the American South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In a seminal paper (2003), Bill Cooke discusses the relatively marginalized topics of the influence of slavery in management think- ing and practice. Cooke points to the size of the plantations as a decisive factor and a driving force behind the development of systematic managerial practice:
Throughout the eighteenth century, the great plantations of the sugar colonies . . . were the largest private enterprises of the age, and their owners were among the richest of men. The same can be said of the cotton planta- tions in the United States on the eve of the Civil War.
(Fogel, 1989: 24, cited in Cooke, 2003: 1897) Thus the ante-bellum period in the American South was an important period for the establishment of managerial practice and authority. Cooke points out that a range of managerial practices were systematically developed and employed in the plantations in the American South. He writes: “[T]here was a substantial and growing group of people using what are now seen as management practices who were known as managers, running ante-bellum plantations (Cooke, 2003: 1911).
Moreover, Cooke argues that “[w]hite supremacist racism underpinned the cre- ation of the managerial identity”. He continues: “Racism was used to justify the assumption of this right to manage. . . . Black people were categorized as the moral and intellectual inferiors to whites, suitable only for drudgery, and beseeching management” (2003: 1911). For Cooke, Frederick W. Taylor’s negative view of the co-workers is embedded in such supremacist ideas, depict- ing the manager as some kind of intellectually and morally superior being.
Cooke summarizes the argument like this:
The industrial discipline which emerged on the plantations was not dis- connected temporally, spatially or in substance from that which emerged in other parts of the US economy. The imprint of slavery in contemporary management can be seen in the ongoing dominance from that time of the very idea of the manager with a right to manage. It can also be seen in the specific management ideas and practices now known as classical manage- ment and scientific management which were collated and re-presented with these labels within living memory of the abolition of US slavery.
(2003: 1913)
However, the establishment of modern management practices and procedures was not without social costs in Europe either. Pollard (1965), examining the case of Britain from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution up to 1830, argued that workers were, on the one hand, treated as if they obeyed the simplest behav- iourist principles of stimuli and response and, on the other hand, they were disci- plined by religious teaching to follow rules and to abandon old customs. Pollard argue that the social costs for this transformation of society were “needlessly high”:
The task was finally accomplished, though at a needlessly high cost, and a society of peasants, craftsmen and versatile workers became a society of modern industrial workers: but it is doubtful whether, within the context of the present structure of society and industry, the dilemmas of its beginning have been resolved even today.
(Pollard, 1965: 208) In his conclusion, Pollard further emphasizes the significant cultural changes brought by managerial capitalism:
[T]he view of the majority [of the employers] were bounded by the realiza- tion that they were dealing with a recalcitrant, hostile working force whose morale, whose habits of work and whose culture had to be broken in order to fit them for a form of employment in which they had to become obedient servants of the machine, of its owners and of crude monetary incentives.
What was necessary, according to this view, was a reform of ‘character’ on the part of every single workman, since their previous character did not fit the new industrial system.
(Pollard, 1965: 255–256) While the professional co-worker in a premodern organization largely decided for him or herself what was a legitimate amount of output or work pace, in the new regime, the managers were expected to monitor the co-workers’ activities.
This new category of the manager was a category that entered the historical scene rather recently. Chandler (1977: 3) writes: “[A]s late as the 1840s there were no middle managers in the United States – that is, there were no managers who supervised the work of the other managers and in turn reported to senior executives who themselves were salaried managers.” In Britain, Pollard (1965) found that managers were more of an effect of capitalism than its driver. Con- sequently, managers as a social category emerged slowly: “[A] managerial class as such was slow to develop and even by 1830 could hardly be said to be in existence, though well-defined classes of managers had emerged in various spe- cific industries” (Pollard, 1965: 250). Shenhav (1999: 2) points at the struggles and controversies the use of “salaried managers” caused before being made legitimate: “Salaried managers eventually did become a quintessential part of modern organizations, but this coming to power was plagued by conflicts and
rather fierce confrontation with capitalist owners as well as with labour unions and unorganised workers.” The new systematic form of organization thereby implied new forms of management control and managerial practices previously unattended to (see also Veblen, 1904, and Berle and Means, 1991, for an extended argument). Chandler (1977: 1) talks about the emergence of manager- ial capitalism based on management at a distance and bureaucratic organization as the “visible hand” of management: “In many sectors of the economy the visible hand of management replaced what Adam Smith referred to as the invisi- ble hand of the market forces. . . . The rise of modern business enterprise in the United States, therefore, brought with it managerial capitalism”.
Parallel to the bureaucratization of administrative work in the state adminis- tration and in major companies, another major shift in management thinking took place around the turn of the twentieth century. The scientific management movement was emerging from the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME), taking great interest in the day-to-day management procedures in com- panies. Still, similar to the growth of bureaucracies as an effect of a higher level of education, the interest for systematic management knowledge had its root in the increased number of engineers in American society. Jacoby (1985) reports that, between 1880 and 1920, the number of engineers grew from about 7,000 to 135,000 in the USA. The engineers brought with them a scientific mindset and a certain curiosity for social improvements and new forms of arrangement of man- ufacturing activities.
While there was little uniformity in the work routines and practices in facto- ries prior to the emergence of what F.W. Taylor would dub “scientific manage- ment”, the engineering expertise was focused on standardizing and restructuring manufacturing functions. This specialized group of engineers were the carriers of the credo of standardization and the driving force behind the “efficiency craze” in the period after 1910. Guillén (1994: 45) dates the start of the Amer- ican movement to the famous Eastern Rate Case of 1910–1911, where the lawyer and Democratic reformer, Louis D. Brandeis, representing business associations from all over the American East Coast, argued that wages could be raised if scientific principles were implemented in the railroad companies. The restructuring of companies became one of the principal concerns for managers during the period. Taylor’s colleague and follower, Henry Gantt, even argued that “a system of management based on these methods [scientific management]
is just as much a part of our assets as plant, or equipment” (Gantt, 1919: 236;
original emphasis removed). In addition, Gantt envisaged “[a] self-perpetuating system of management based on the efficient utilization of scientific knowledge”
(Gantt, 1919: 249; original emphasis removed). Speaking in those terms, Gantt was anticipating the forerunners of resource-based view strategy theorists (see Barney, 1991) such as Philip Selznick (1957) and Edith Penrose (1959), portray- ing the firm as a set of material, social and intangible resources – “a firm is basi- cally a collection of resources”, as Penrose (1959: 77) put it – and conceived of a “management system” as being a firm-specific resource. Barley and Kunda write: