they once thought was acceptable, legitimate, even natural, becomes intolerable. Above all, they have seen that things can be done differ- ently. They have become critical thinkers; they are more educated, in a way, and it is increasingly tough to get them to believe in “scientific solutions” which are in fact nothing more than partisan deals.
3. Finally, the very concept of a market is changing; it is broadening, providing new avenues of choice to customers who had seemed cap- tive. Let us take a closer look at what is going on in the Internal Revenue Service, a government bureaucracy which up till recently seemed off limits. By way of “loopholes”, advantages granted to this or that taxpayer, exemptions applicable in this or that situation, a fully fledged “tax market” has been created which, needless to say, only benefits taxpayers in the highest tax brackets. These fiscal de- localization phenomena, however limited in respect to the number of taxpayers who actually use them, are nonetheless signs of the effect globalization has had on “taxpaying” customers. They are clearly not yet signs of a victory. They show that the battle has begun, and that even those bureaucrats who thought themselves among the most secure are going to have to change their modes of functioning, that is, the ways in which their organization treats those who little by little will no longer be “slaves” but fully fledged customers.
In the new realm of the nano-second, the traditional functions of management control and coordination seem unbearably slow and completely unable to respond, in real time, to the speed and volume at which the organization absorbs information.13
Further on, he adds: “The arrival of production technologies makes it possible for information to be dealt with horizontally rather than verti- cally, which in effect brings down the traditional pyramid of the com- pany in favour of networks functioning in one plane.” This goes back to an earlier, more general comment by Robert Reich: “The core of a com- pany is increasingly little more than a façade behind which one finds an abundance of decentralized groups and sub-groups which are in con- tractual relationships with other equally diffuse work units, throughout the whole world.”14Even production and operations specialists, who no doubt remain implicitly attached to the product-centred way of think- ing, make the jump, even if, as we will see, there is a great deal of hesi- tation. In regard to the management of a “lean production” project, Christer Karlsson and Pär Ahlström write:
Different aspects of the project are integrated rather than coordinated.
Rather than coordinating different activities and diverse groups of per- sonnel from several functional spheres, employees work together.
Direct contact and meetings replace the particular functions and resources related to coordination … The team is integrated, which is the result of physical proximity, something which takes place when- ever individuals work together in developing a new product.15 From these excerpts,16we can formulate a better definition of coopera- tion as opposed to coordination, and even understand why it is such a threat to bureaucracies. Cooperation and coordination have in common that they concern both macro- and micro-organizations. The size of the group in which they are operative is therefore not a distinguishing factor.
Two features of cooperation work together as a cost-reduction mech- anism by changing the way in which the organization’s members work together.
● First, cooperation does not require a specialized governing body to put it into practice, whereas coordination does. It implies direct con- tact between the different parts, the face-to-face negotiation of deci- sions, of choices, of action to be taken. Here we go back to the controversy over markets and hierarchies, as first mentioned by
Oliver Williamson,17 and, using his distinction, we could say that cooperation depends on the market, whereas coordination depends on the hierarchy, that the first is an adjustment among members, whereas the second is the application of bureaucratic procedures behind which members protect themselves and each other, and which in the end enable them to continue on in their own line of thinking: using specialized vocabulary and transforming every meet- ing into what Sainte-Beuve described as “a place where one waits for the previous speaker to have finished before taking the floor”.
● But the principal difference is this: coordination is sequential, whereas cooperation is simultaneous. Coordination implies that tasks will be clear (in appearance, at least), they will take place in suc- cession, and they will be subject to modification as time goes by. So, going back to the example of the airline industry, there is an attempt to “coordinate” the activities of ground and flight personnel insofar as they occur in succession, one after the other. But, in the end, this coordination actually prevents individuals from cooperating, from confronting one another, enabling them to remain secure in their verticality. We saw earlier, in the case of the automotive industry in particular, that this approach either wears itself out, causing the sys- tem to fail, or requires an ever-increasing number of resources to maintain quality products or services.
The simultaneity of cooperation could be a solution – even if only partial – to this problem. It gets individuals to sit down one on one, or more specifically it means that a flight attendant will have to leave the plane when necessary and assist passengers in the waiting room. It means that the pilot will have to get increasingly involved in ground operations, just as the luggage crew in Hong Kong has to take into account how luggage was loaded many hours earlier in London. At the same time, simultaneity compels the different parties to come to an agreement right then and there. It tears down de factoall protective bar- riers, be it those provided by the clarity of tasks, those created by job descriptions, and perhaps in time, those offered by conditions of employment and job benefits. This description is the exact opposite of bureaucracy, which explains why bureaucrats are so opposed to such changes, but more importantly why cooperation is not the usual mode of functioning. As I said, it is not ‘natural’ for anyone, because it entails confrontation and conflict, and because in general people prefer avoid- ance and disinterested consensus. We also see why cooperation cannot simply be proclaimed, it cannot be obtained by some simple proof that A Requiem for Bureaucracy 75
it is better to cooperate. It has to be understood by each and every individual. It has to be made possible, rational for those involved, as will be argued in the following section. This is more or less what a Japanese manager meant when he said:
One of the essential tasks is to create an environment in which all of our employees want to cooperate freely and to make them want to constantly improve themselves. With this in mind, it is essential that we provide them with all kinds of information, regardless of their rank or title. Every employee has the right to consult “all” informa- tion available through our computer networks.18
This is a very Japanese approach to getting people interested in co- operation, but it serves as a good starting point for creating a favourable environment for the implementation of new ways for employees to work within their organizations.
Since they do not understand this dimension, some organizations skip the creation of a favourable environment and attempt to use some more or less sophisticated form of pressure: this is to try to change bureaucracy by force, using bureaucracy against bureaucracy, and in the long run such a practice seems doomed to failure.19This is what Edgar Morin and Sami Naïr describe with zeal in their chapter entitled “Libéralisme, démocratie et avenir” (Liberalism, democracy and the future):
Since the start of the 1980s, in both the private and public sectors, the system has tended to impose increasing harsh forms of “manage- ment” … This is why we are experiencing the very real destabilization of methods of leadership and human resource management.20 The human resource director cited in Chapter 2 wanted to turn his executives into Olympic heroes …
Indeed, these are the issues facing us, and it would be foolish to claim that it is going to be easy. We know that giving up bureaucratic forms of organization comes at a high cost to individuals, or at least that is what they fear whether they are confronted with the idea or it is forced upon them. In the author’s view, this explains to a great extent the severity of change phenomena, as well as the tendency to back away from these challenges, which only increases the ultimate cost of change.
Finally, we see that the lack of a methodological approach and the lack of an understanding of human behaviour within organizations, lead us to draw solutions from draconian and stressful forms of management,
which in the end only raise the human cost of the process, therefore solidifying resistance a little more, which in turn requires more pres- sure, and so on.
A vicious circle is created through resistance to change in which every- one is a loser. If this is the case, is there some other way of approaching the problem, some way to lessen the human cost and create conditions in which change is “workable” for those involved? The author’s response is yes. The approach offered here, as we will see, begins with knowledge and the sharing of knowledge, and culminates in the opportunity to
“think the unthinkable”. I will illustrate the process with examples – case studies – which demonstrate as best as possible how it might be applied in the real world. They will help us see that nothing is predetermined, and provided that we are able to think about reality in new ways, that we can show others how to do likewise, and that we can be more confi- dent about everyone’s ability to come up with solutions, then even the most “case-hardened” bureaucracies should be able to generate and put into practice their own possibilities for change.
A Requiem for Bureaucracy 77
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5
Change, Yes, but Change What?
The characteristics that we have seen for a bureaucracy – or more precisely a technical bureaucracy – make up a system. This means that they have developed coherence in relation to one another, that they mutually reinforce and strengthen each other and make it extremely difficult and perilous to define and implement a controlled process of change. This explains the quantity and diversity of literature on change (we will return to this later on) as well as the ever-renewed quest among executives for a “philosopher’s stone”, a recipe that allows one, with a minimum of risk-taking, to find out what one needs to do in order to have it accepted by the social structure and put into operation while at the same time controlling its effects. For a better understanding of the problem that this poses, let us take a quick look at the five points which today form the nucleus of such bureaucracies when forced to change under pressure from the customer, if they do not want to disappear or implode and at the same time produce a pointlessly high human cost:
1. compartmentalization and verticality, constructed in line with the technical logic of speciality and task;
2. clarity, perceived as virtuous in itself, but where one has seen that it ends in the creation of internal monopolies, and finally by the organization’s manipulation by its members;
3. non-cooperation, which resolves the individual problem of difficulty in facing others, but at the same time dramatically increases the cost of running the whole system;
4. endogeneity of criteria for personnel management, that is, the fact that such criteria are defined in relation to the constraints of an organization’s members themselves, and not in relation to the tasks that such an organization is supposed to accomplish;
5. lastly, the outsourcing phenomena that encompass the four above characteristics and render them possible by placing the cost – and not only in financial terms – on the “environment”, that is, in more concrete terms on the customer.
To conclude, let us once again emphasize that these characteristics are found in all types of organization, as soon as this has a total or partial monopoly in place, whether this is de jureorde facto.