Summary of Bureaucracy

Weber (1978) tried to describe the prevalent organizational form – bureaucracy at that time. 

Why we have bureaucracy?
Bureaucracy emerges because of two reasons. First, Recruiting people on the basis of their social resources, such as status or power may harm the performance of the organizations. Therefore, bureaucracy is developed to provide equal opportunities to employees on the basis of their competence to improve the performance of the organizations. The standards are achieved by separating the people and their roles (Kallinikos, 2006). Firms standardize the requirements of the role performance; formalizing the process of role taking, recruitment and appointment. Any individuals that satisfy the special requirement of the job can be hired.
Second, the ends of the individuals and the organizations are not always the same. Individuals tend to achieve their own ends by using power and leverage in the organizations. How bureaucracy is built to solve this problem? Bureaucracy set up building rules and reducing rules. 1) Building rules: any parts that can be written down to reflect regular activities. 2) Reducing rules: professionalization packages all the rules in professionals and employing these profession actors can reduce the rules organizations need to make themselves. 

Four groups of main characteristics:
Weber (1978) summarizes three sets of characteristics of bureaucracy.
First, bureaucracy form through rationalization increases the use of calculation to master things through rules and instruction systems. The process of bureaucratization 1) reduces people’s freedom, initiative, power  2) trap people in the iron cage, where everyone obey the rules.3) dominant authority neutralizes other countervailing power and legitimate itself as power over its members.
Second, the ethos of bureaucracy is the idea that things are done according to rule rather than caprice. For example, Kallinikos (2006) observes that the institution of bureaucracy is an “outcome of complex cultural and social developments. These reflect, among other things, the institutional embeddedness of property rights and the employment contract an dthe legal and socio-political processes for assigning jurisdictions and laying out the rules of accountability in democratic societies.”
Third, means of rewarding efforts for bureaucracy is through fixed salaries and performances are graded by ranks.
Fourth, the bureaucracy protects individuals’ arbitrary use of power with authorities. Authority comes from the leaders. Leader is determined by knowledge (length of service, disciplinary formation, progression through a career structure). Leaders are bounded by an emotionally strong sense of duty as vocation (a mastery of technical rationality)

Critics and future development
There are mainly five critics of bureaucracy.
First, bureaucracy is inflexible and inefficiency reaction to the environment. Therefore, bureaucracy is inefficient with inefficient administration, pettifogging legalism, red tape. (Osborne and Plastrik, 1997) Bureaucracy is inactive in responding to massive change, environmental dynamism and considerable uncertainty are the norm. Power does not represent interests with multiple stakeholders.
Second, it stifles the spontaneity, freedom, and self-realization of their employees (Perrow, 1973). Therefore, entrepreneurship should decentralize the decision making process and empower employees.
Third, treat informal control as abnormal phenomenon of organizations, which is later complemented by institution theory.
Fourth, discrepancy between expertise of the subordinate and that of his superior
Fifth, Most of the new phenomena cannot be fully explained. For example, post bureaucracy organizations show three main characteristics: 1) Most of the organizations start to outsource their activities. 2) Recompose: network form organizations (keep the institutional part but throw away the organizational form part) 3) Role and individual properties are separated. One individual has different roles at the same time.
To address these new changes, detailed theories have been developed. First, a typology of bureaucracy is developed by arguing that there are two kinds of formalizations, one is enabling, where employees’ potentials are encouraged. The other is coercive, where employees’ behaviors are forced (Adler and Borys, 1996).  Factors that influence the two process: 1) asymmetries of power in the organizations 2) the absence of reality checks: external stimuli is the key to keep adaptive adjustment. (driven by demanding customers or clients )
Why enabling logic will be more prevalent?
First, the enabling logic has considerable and growing legitimacy in the broader culture. Second, demand from the task environment and competition change the distribution of power. Third, automation increases enabling formalization because routine jobs are incorporated into the automatic system, leaving the operators with a higher proportion of learning tasks to doing tasks. Firms design jobs that need more skill and discretion

By Kate Jue Wang

References: 

Adler, P., & Borys, B. (1996). Two types of bureaucracy: Enabling and coercive. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(1), 61–89.

Weber, Max, (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
 
Kallinikos, Jannis. "The institution of bureaucracy: administration, pluralism, democracy." Economy and Society 35.4 (2006): 611-627.

Perrow, C. (1973). The short and glorious history of organizational theory. Organizational Dynamics, (2), 3–15.