The Social Foundations of the Bureaucratic Order

This article views the bureaucratic form of organization as both an agent and an expression of key modern social innovations that are most clearly manifested in the non-inclusive terms by which individuals are involved in organizations. Modern human involvement in organizations epitomizes and institutionally embeds the crucial yet often overlooked cultural orientation of modernity whereby humans undertake action along well-specified and delimited paths thanks to their capacity to isolate and suspend other personal or social considerations. The organizational involvement of humans qua role agents rather than qua persons helps unleash formal organizing from being tied to the indolence of the human body and the languish process of personal or psychological reorientation. Thanks to the loosening of these ties, the bureaucratic organization is rendered capable to address the shifting contingencies underlying modern life by reshuffling and re-assembling the roles and role patterns by which it is made. The historically unique adaptive capacity of bureaucracy remains though hidden behind the ubiquitous presence of routines and standard operating procedures –requirements for the standardization of roles– that are mistakenly exchanged for the essence of the bureaucratic form. The reigning myth today is that the evils of society can all be understood as evils of impersonality, alienation, and coldness. The sum of these three is an ideology of intimacy...[that] transmutes political categories into psychological categories. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man The End of the Bureaucratic Age Popular belief associates bureaucracy with routine, initiative stifling office work and an introvert organizational culture of rigid administrative procedures and redundant complexity. Although social reality seldom appears as simple as the popular image wants it to be, this oversimplified picture of the bureaucratic form of organization has nevertheless been widely shared and persistent. Critical humanism and artistic aversion of bureaucratic systems have allied with left-inspired criticism of the organiza1 The novels of Franz Kafka, the Trial and the Tower stand here as major examples. Though perhaps visionary images of some terrifying aspects of modernity in general, the novels can certainly be read as metaphoric descriptions of bureaucratic institutions. The artistic criticism against state administration is expressed well in the spirit of Dadaism and Surrealism but such a suspicious attitude towards large administrative systems can be re-encountered across most artistic movements throughout the last century. It is important to keep that in mind to understand the neo-romantic elements of the current criticism of bureaucracy.