Taking a few steps back now, let us refocus our analysis of this kind of organization on two points:
1. We are dealing with a classic technical bureaucracy, as defined in the preceding pages. There’s no point in hiding the fact that we like bureaucracies, provided that we do not run up against them, but are part of them. There are many reasons for this. First, it is a kind of organization that has a clearly visible structure, and we like clarity and security. Behind the idea of clarity, there is protection: if my ter- ritory is clearly defined, no one can encroach upon it, it is mine, I have a monopoly over it. I do what I am supposed to do, and I need not worry about the overall consequences, insofar as the organiza- tion’s underlying principle is that if each person does his or her job properly, the results can only be positive. But above all, the actor is protected from the very thing which is least natural, most difficult, and most costly in human terms: cooperating with others.
Over the years sociologists have come up with various images or expressions for this idea: they speak of “beehive structures”, and of the “fear of face-to-face interactions”.14 However it might be described, the observation is still the same. Jean-Paul Sartre put it brilliantly: “Hell is everybody else!” In the Sartrian sense, coopera- tion leads people into hell, confronting them forcibly with another
way of thinking, leading them into conflict, bringing them to accept conflicting interests and compromise, whereas the rhetoric of daily life (the business place) promotes a “shared vision”, consensus, com- mon goals and common means. This is a harrowing paradox, and is precisely the reason why bureaucracies are, from the point of view of their members, a wonderful solution to the universal question: “How can we live together without having to cooperate?” And thus instead of troublesome cooperation there is the process, the procedures, the rules, the sequence of tasks, and one time-consuming coordinating meeting after another, something in which bureaucrats excel.15
We have already glimpsed that the abundance of means is itself a means of escaping cooperation. If, back at home after a long day’s work, a married couple want to watch different television pro- grammes, there are two ways to resolve the problem: either through non-cooperation, in which case they need two television sets, and the abundance of means does away with the necessity of negotiation and thus of conflict; or through cooperation, although of course that will be more “costly” in human terms. However surprising, it is a per- fectly natural result that an organization built around the customer, that is, in which people cooperate (as we saw earlier in the case of the air transportation industry and as we will again see later on in the case of the automobile industry), is more efficient in the use of means than an organization built on the segmentation of technical tasks, which allows its members to avoid cooperation. Not only do customers ask that we operate at lowest cost, but they provide us with the means to do it! It should now be evident why for our third example we will turn to hospitals and the management of the high cost of healthcare.
2. But that is not all, especially in terms of the problem of cost. If the division of tasks, accompanied by procedures which clearly specify what employees must do, is supposed to provide customers with the goods or services which they have the right to expect,16in reality, this is not at all the case. With less cooperation, employees come up with their own rationales, always justifiable given the specialized technical angle from which they view the situation, and the more it will be necessary at some point to make adjustments.
This is what in the automobile industry and elsewhere is called “modi- fications”. These become more and more frequent as a weakly integrated process goes on, sometimes attaining simply astounding proportions.
They run right through the organization, up to the point where they What is a Bureaucracy? 53
involve the customer either directly, in which case they are called
“weaknesses” in the system, or indirectly and are then translated into a price increase and/or delays in production. Quality, cost, delay (QCD):
these form the “concept” of the automobile industry, just as seamless travelling was that of British Airways. Clearly, so long as customers have no choice, they are given to accept the degradation of this trio (QCD), but as soon as they can, they ask for more, that is, higher quality at lower cost.
What does this mean? What is a modification, not in the technical sense, but from a sociological perspective? It is the cost which an organ- ization requires its customers to pay so as to permit its members to avoid cooperation. A modification is a way of regulating this system, that is, the key element around which employees adjust their strategies of autonomy and avoidance, the cost of which they pass along to the customer whenever possible.
It should be clear that we are not speaking here of those who work directly with the final consumer, but of all those who produce value for this consumer, under the terms specified above (QCD), regardless of where they might be located within the organization, even as high up as the research department, for example.
In this scenario, listening to the customer means the end of the bureaucracy as a way of doing business characterized by the pre-eminence of a technical rationale over cooperation. Whenever it is said or written that the customer must and will climb high within the organization, it is not just an abstract figure of speech. What good would it do to con- vince employees that the customer is important, which would amount to little more than a rhetorical exercise with little practical impact? We must identify in concrete terms the consequences for each person involved, that is to say in terms of how people work (modes of work).
This was done progressively in the automobile industry, first by setting up cross-functional operations, called “projects”.17These consist in giv- ing a project leader the job of integrating the work of everyone involved in the concept or production of a vehicle, part of a vehicle, or of a com- ponent. Freed from their “occupations” in the “projects”, engineers, executives and technicians were supposed to work together towards a common goal. This first breakthrough towards complexity over the expensive simplicity of a sequence of technical tasks nevertheless ran up against an obstacle. The initial assumption was that cooperation would result naturally through individual goodwill, through employee interest in working on a project, and/or the project leader’s ability to win every- one over by his or her charisma or conviction.
This somewhat naive vision has not stood up to the facts. Cooperation, like any other human behaviour, cannot be decreed, it must be created.
I will try in the second part of this work to offer several possibilities for making cooperation possible. For the time being, let us just say that it was necessary as time went on to bestow on project leaders real means for getting work done, in particular in terms of controlling how budgetary resources are distributed, and how project members are evaluated, so as to get them to work together.
At the same time, as we have said before, the organization has today become more complex, more vague according to its members: the vehicle or component projects are intertwined and encroach upon
“occupations”, repositories of technical expertise. It has also become more subject to conflict, less comfortable, but at the same time much more lively and “negotiative”. This conflict was difficult to accept for a long time, especially in France, a country in which open confronta- tion over differing interests is considered incompatible with the defence of common interests.18Elsewhere, on the contrary, this confrontation has been considered not only as one of the conditions of success, but even as one of the keys to its continuance: “the best businesses have good results because they work hard to build coherence among widely differing and often conflicting interests. It is like a good marriage: a cou- ple enjoy lasting happiness because they have worked to build it: a labour of love, but labour all the same.”19Today, accepting this conflict is no longer questioned on principle. It is simply a consequence of customers’ presence within bureaucracies which had traditionally kept them on the outside.