A Very Short Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organizations
This is a document containing the most important pieces of text from the book “A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about studying organizations” (Chris Grey, 2013). fifth edition
Samenvatting Boek Kernthema’s
Bestuurs- & Organisatiewetenschap
Grey, Chris (2013). A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about
studying organizations. Fourth edition. London: Sage. ISBN 9781473988194.
Inhoud
Chapter 1: Bureaucracy and Scientific Management .............................................................................. 2
Chapter 2: Human Relations Theory and People Management .............................................................. 8
Chapter 3: Organizational Culture and Self-Management .................................................................... 11
Chapter 4 Post-Bureaucracy and Change Management........................................................................ 20
Conclusion: Why Should Studying Organizations Matter to You ........................................................... 31
,Chapter 1: Bureaucracy and Scientific Management
I keep coming back to the iconic figure in early organization theory, the German sociologist Max
Weber (1864–1920). One of Weber’s great insights was that what might hold a society and
organizations together was some sense of authority – that people somehow submitted to the will of
others because they believed those others had the right to give the orders. Apart from moral
objections to using coercion and fear to hold organizations together, doing so has many practical
problems. For one thing, people can’t be relied upon to do what they’re told unless they are
constantly checked on, because they do not think the person giving them orders has the right to. The
bigger problem is that such organizations are always vulnerable to a bigger, stronger, more vicious
person or people taking them over. Authority is both morally and practically more durable.
From Weber, we get the idea that some societies or organizations get held together by the charisma
of their leaders: the reason why their will is obeyed is because of their characteristic ability to inspire
the devotion and obedience of others. Authority comes from power, charisma and tradition.
Inspiring leaders also often owe part of their charisma to a propensity to violence.
According to Weber, in modern societies these forms of authority were being increasingly supplanted
by something different: rational-legal authority. Here, obedience was secured through a kind of due
process: formal, logical, reasoned. Within organizations, this authority takes the form of rules,
procedures and duties. The authority comes from the job itself, not the person. When a new person
takes over the role, the authority transfers to them.
The differences and tensions between charismatic, traditional and rational-legal authority can be
illustrated by the recent presidency of Donald Trump. Part of his appeal, to his supporters, was based
on his force of personality or charisma. Part of it was traditional, in the sense of the traditional
authority of any presidency, but also the way that, a bit like a traditional monarch, he would put
family and favored friends into positions of power. Part of it came from the rights and responsibilities
of the system of rules.
The kind of organization that emerges from the complete application of the rational-legal principle
isn’t just about the authority of its leader, it is one which is entirely defined by rules and a series of
hierarchical relationships – a bureaucracy. People’s jobs are defined: you work on the checkout of the
supermarket but don’t stack the shelves. Then they are refined: you stack the grocery shelves but
someone else does the pharmacy section. And the more the organization grows, the more refined, or
specialized, the jobs become. You do your job exactly in a way established for you by rules which you
are taught when you start the job. Rational-legal organization entails the complete removal of
discretion – meaning judgement or choice – from work. Appointment to a job and promotion are
based strictly on experience and qualifications, not on personal relationships or preferences:
arbitrariness disappears.
Weber was by no means a partisan for the emergence of rational-legal or bureaucratic
organizations. On the contrary, he was alarmed by their rapid spread through the state, business and
institutions to the point where he feared that the world was becoming enclosed in an ‘iron cage’ of
rationalization. But why were they becoming dominant? Because, says Weber, they represent the
most technically efficient and rational form of organization.
What is rationality?
What does it mean to be rational? It means that people don’t just do what they are told blindly, but
act on the basis of individual reason or ‘rationality’. Yet the rationality envisaged by bureaucracy
seems to be the exact opposite of this, for it is precisely the use of one’s own reason that is
,prohibited when the capacity for discretion is removed. The rationality of bureaucracy resides in the
system of rules, not in the judgement of individuals, except those, usually high up in the organization,
who make the rules and who do retain discretion to some degree. And so from its inception,
bureaucracy sets up a dichotomy of systemic and individual rationality.
Max Weber identified another kind of dichotomy. Bureaucracies are rational in one particular sense
of the word – formal or instrumental rationality. The idea here is that the means adopted to achieve
a particular end are the most efficient for that purpose. This might mean that they minimize wastage
and maximize production.
Weber’s other kind of rationality was substantive or value rationality. Here the question was
whether the ‘ends’ of action were in and of themselves rational. Thus, suppose that I decide to
murder someone at random. This is substantively irrational – the end or purpose is irrational, the act
of a madman. But if I do so with a swift karate blow to the heart, this is formally rational (because it is
the most efficient means) despite being substantively irrational. Bureaucracies are formally rational
but they don’t ‘do’ substantive rationality. This does not mean that they are never substantively
rational, but it does mean that they may not be and need not be. They simply don’t consider that
domain of rationality because they are not concerned with ends, only with means.
Once we move from extreme cases, it gets more difficult. For who is to say what is substantively
rational? It is a question of values (Weber also called substantive rationality ‘value rationality’), and
whereas there are some values which are so widely shared as to approach universality, there are far
more cases where there is little or no agreement. People may have quite different views about how
they themselves would like to be treated. We may overwhelmingly agree that genocide is wrong; we
may not agree about abortion or euthanasia.
The fundamental point is that bureaucracies don't care about substantive rationality, they don't
care about ethics, they are just about getting the job done as quickly as possible. This doesn't mean
that they couldn't, in fact, be doing an ethically good job (for example, a charity). They could; just as
easily as they could be doing an ethically poor one. It's just that this would be irrelevant, either way,
to bureaucratic logic. The problem is that actual bureaucracies do not necessarily — and, moreover,
often do not — embody the ethic of fairness, transparency, accountability and 'due process'.
Bureaucratic dysfunctionalism
I find it helpful to think about a set of classic studies of bureaucracy, sometimes called the
‘bureaucratic dysfunctionalist’ literature. This literature suggests that bureaucracies in practice have
not just the problem of a deficit of substantive rationality but, even, a deficit of formal rationality.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter found that managers in a bureaucracy liked to appoint those who shared their
own background, gender and education. Nowadays we sometimes refer to this as 'unconscious bias',
where we assume that someone from our own background is 'the right fit' for a job.
Gouldner’s (1954) investigation of a gypsum mine revealed the presence of ‘mock bureaucracy’,
where an impressive array of rules and regulations, the hallmark of formal rationality, existed. The
only problem was that they were ignored. It’s common to have safety regulations that staff don’t, in
fact, respect.
Perhaps the best-known version of bureaucratic dysfunctionalism is Merton’s (1940) argument about
‘goal displacement’. Bureaucracies have an inbuilt tendency, because they focus on means and not
ends, to degenerate into a situation where the means becomes an end in itself. In other words,
following the rule becomes the point, not the point of the rule. Suppose a security guard is taking
care of a factory. He is told to follow a rule, and the rule is that no one is to be admitted without a
, pass. The purpose or end of the rule is to protect the factory. The means is the security guard
checking passes.
Formal and informal; intended and unintended
All of these examples and arguments serve to point up two interesting things. Both of them seem to
me to be central to understanding organizations. The first is that there is a disjuncture between the
formal and the informal organization. Trivial examples might be that ‘formally’ you have to be at
work by 9 a.m., or that you cannot use work Internet access for private purposes, but ‘informally’ you
don’t have to be in exactly on time, or can use the Internet privately if you’re not busy and don’t do it
too much.
Bureaucracy has been criticized for dehumanizing people. It is not hard to see why. In the ideal-type,
people are no more than parts of a well-oiled machine – devoid of discretion, passion, prejudice and
personality. Devoid, in a sense, of agency – the capacity to make choices and act of their own free
will.
Then there is a second implication, especially arising from goal displacement. What is done in
organizations – for example, establishing rules – will always carry with it the possibility, and in fact
near certainty, of having both intended and unintended consequences. It suggests that whenever
people act towards some purpose, the outcomes will be a mixture of what was hoped for by the
action and what was unforeseen and possibly undesired.
For example, some engineers at Volkswagen rigged diesel emission tests in order to maximize sales.
The unintended consequence? A global scandal which massively damaged the company’s image and
consequently the saleability of its cars.
Unintended consequences are perhaps most important when we think about management. They
mean that the capacity of managers to get things done is often confounded and, moreover, that
much of management consists of dealing with the unintended consequences of previous actions. But
since that ‘dealing with’ will itself give rise to further unintended consequences, this means that
management – and organization generally – are perennially failing in the sense that their ends are
never finally achieved.
The so-called structure–agency or structure–action dualism has as its two poles the propositions that
social structures effectively determine what happens, and people have little or no individual effect or
– on the agency side – that all we have is individuals making choices, and social structure is just the
aggregate of these. So, for example, debate about crime often polarizes between Bureaucracy and
those who say that crime levels are effectively determined by the extent of poverty, unemployment
and social deprivation (structure) and those who see it entirely in terms of individual decisions as to
whether or not to commit a crime (agency).
Much social theory in the last few decades has, in various different ways, suggested that it is a false
dichotomy. Structure–agency is not an either/or but a both/and. Anthony Giddens has proposed a
‘duality’ of structure and action so that action reproduces structure whilst structure conditions and
shapes action. The classic example is language. To speak a language in a way that others understand
means following the existing rules, or structure, of language that existed before we were born and
which we must learn and adhere to. Yet at the same time, a language only exists because individuals
speak it and, as a matter of fact, they constantly adopt new words, slang and ways of speaking, which
is why language changes over time. In this sense, language users are agents or actors but they both
exist within, and enact, the structures of the language they speak. This means that agency can never
be written out of organizations and so the perfect machine-like organization is a myth. We cannot
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