again, even within small organizations, which are often thought to be adaptable and flexible, the determining factor is the mode of function- ing: small is not necessarily beautiful in the land of the bureaucrats.7
pretext that these are the most interesting classes (for themselves of course), but more realistically because the student–teacher relationships in these courses are tempered by the prospect of very serious exams. At the university level, teaching loads drop to seven or even three hours per week, and at the end of the long journey there is even the possibil- ity of not teaching at all, at which point successful professors can finally enjoy hearing colleagues speak of a “truly successful teaching career”.
Here then is an organization which offers its members the ultimate reward: never having to face the customers and their needs. In classes where one ought to find the most highly qualified, the most seasoned teachers, they are young and inexperienced. Whereas experience should be the guarantee of quality instruction, it is nothing but a way out of the
“front office”, seemingly in accordance with a universal principle of elitist organizations: direct contact with customers is to be avoided. And yet the students have no choice. The teachers they receive are not the ones they need but the only ones the bureaucracy can offer once its own internal procedures for selecting employees and allocating resources have been established. No doubt that the bureaucracy in question has come up with a good deal of unquestionable rhetoric which accounts for its own func- tioning to those on the outside:9 the necessity of conducting research, involvement in administrative tasks, and so on. But clearly, if one wanted to redesign the organization around its actual mission rather than around the needs of its members, the resulting system would bear little resem- blance to what is seen today: the assignment of classes, of teaching hours, of localities would be based on different criteria and would result, like the
“night of August Fourth” during the French Revolution, in the end of privileges. This would be a real revolution, although it would not be all that surprising since it occurred in an organization whose official mission is to teach, rather than to offer its most qualified members the chance to teach less with each successive promotion.
It is also interesting to note that in the world of teaching, whatever or wherever it is, we find the same drive towards specialization and compartmentalization as we did in the health system. The current example of French national education may seem humorous or hopeless – but at the other extreme, can we be sure that an American business school is any different? The top professors – or at least those considered to be the best by their peers – where are they sent? To schools offering MBAs, the “cash cows” of universities, but these programmes are diffi- cult to teach because of the expectation of young students who will grade their professors. So they usually turn to the so-called “tailor-made”
programmes which are geared to provide a much more informal A Requiem for Bureaucracy 65
relationship with participants, and which allow a better grade. Once again, in these American or European institutions, there is a remarkable balkanization of disciplines which forces students to learn about reality bit by bit, subject by subject, knowing that the only way to achieve global understanding is to give in and follow this piecemeal process.
Joint teaching is quite rare, difficult to lead, and most are too afraid to even attempt it. Just like the mythical “multi-disciplinary case studies”
about which many speak but rarely teach. In short, in business schools as well, cooperation is nothing but a farce. People speak to one other, but everything takes place in a thick layer of fog. It is up to the student – the customer, in the true sense of the term as far as the business schools are concerned – to integrate it all, to piece the whole picture together as a system.
This explains our fondness for bureaucracies: they offer their members the opportunity to work in predictable environments – by following the rules of the game you will be protected from the outside world. They make it possible, at least in the most sophisticated and high-tech bureaucracies, to barricade oneself behind hyper-specialization, so as not to have to worry about the rest, everyone else, neither one’s customers and their needs, nor one’s co-workers and what they do. This explains why in these new bureaucracies people are so very fond of technology which provides some substantive grounds for specialization, and which, in a way, legitimizes non-cooperation. Protected by their job status, their entrance exam, their hard-earned tenure, glued firmly to their computer screens through which they have access to a world with- out having to ask anything of anyone, bureaucrats are building a world where there is no more need to sit down face to face with customers to iron out the most obvious problems caused by compartmentalized func- tioning. Everything – courses, grades, exams – is automated, making it impossible to argue, and even if it were, there would be no point in it.
There are those today who see looming on the horizon new bureaucra- cies based upon advances in technology, and it looks like they are right.10Just how customers might be able to resist these is as yet unclear.
The contradiction between these two ways of thinking – the techni- cally driven organizations and the market-orientated ones – is not always as obvious as in the example presented above, which almost everyone takes for granted, whatever the explanation. Often, the contradiction more ordinarily appears as a series of actions which, although they seem perfectly natural and justified, even insignificant, when placed end to end so as to make up the concrete “organization”, wind up producing the opposite of what the customer wants. In such a case,
the struggle against bureaucracy usually runs up against two obstacles:
first, behind the daily routine there are “privileges”, as defined earlier, that is, in terms of the emphasis placed on an organization’s own con- straints rather than those of the customer; second, to do things differ- ently means that we will have to change the way we think, accepting that there can be several ways of handling a problem, of accomplishing the same mission, a change which, at least at first, is not natural for peo- ple caught up in technical, pseudo-scientific routines, and which they fear might weaken them.