| THE DYNAMICS OF BUREAUCRACY By: Jerry S. Maneker Bureaucracies operate according to codified rules and without regard for people! It is not uncommon for a person to be given a pink slip on a Friday and told not to return to work. When I was employed in a publishing house in New York many years ago, a faithful secretary of ten years was treated in this way. They expected us to give them two weeks notice before leaving, but they felt ok about firing people at the drop of a hat. Bureaucrats are, to use the sociologist Robert Merton’s words, “methodical, prudent, disciplined.” Discipline is unquestioning obedience to a command; bureaucrats have discipline. Their authority exists in the position they occupy and they view power as legitimate and feel a moral compulsion to obey a command that is given them. The famous nineteenth century sociologist Max Weber wrote, “The content of discipline is nothing but the consistently rationalized, methodically trained and exact execution of the received order, in which all personal criticism is unconditionally suspended and the actor is unswervingly and exclusively set for carrying out the command.” “Discipline in general, like its most rational offspring, bureaucracy, is impersonal. Unfailingly neutral, it places itself at the disposal of every power that claims its service and knows how to promote it.” Bureaucracy is the most rational and efficient way of coordinating complex tasks and, therefore, it is ubiquitous and becomes deeply entrenched once it is in place. A hierarchy, division of labor, written down rules, and impersonality, characterize it. Bureaucracy is also characterized by rational-legal authority, where authority is placed in the position one occupies and is independent of any personal characteristics one may have. The difference between “power” and “authority” is that authority is power that is viewed as legitimate by the person giving the command and by the person receiving the command. There are three types of authority that exist: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal. Traditional authority is authority based on tradition. For example, the Queen of England has authority based on the fact that her lineage carries the royal line. Charismatic authority is based on personal qualities such as heroism or spirituality that lead people to follow the person’ s agenda. For example, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Adolph Hitler were charismatic figures. One need not be good to be charismatic! Rational-legal authority knows nothing of tradition or charisma. The individual’s qualities have no bearing on what authority he or she wields in a bureaucracy. The position he or she occupies contains the authority. This last point is important in that bureaucracies deal with positions and not people, per se. For the Christian, or for any sensitive and compassionate person, working in a bureaucracy can be extraordinarily difficult. Many decisions that are made hurt people but there’s nothing personal in the motives of those who hurt others in a bureaucracy as it is strictly business and viewed as necessary to the functioning of the organization. Having worked in universities for thirty-three years, I am well aware of bureaucratic machinations. Many professors are nothing more than docile employees, bureaucrats, who blindly follow orders that come from the administration. Many others curry favor with those they feel can help their paltry careers. So many are obsequious careerists, cynical opportunists who are merely bureaucrats. They view themselves as professional, but neither control their fees nor control their working conditions. They suffer from what Karl Marx called, “false consciousness.” False consciousness is lack of awareness of one’s true condition; it is delusional. Many faculty are deluded and that delusion manifests itself in many pretensions as those pretensions are all that they really possess when the layers are peeled from the onion of their careers. To use Bertrand Russell’s phrase, many faculty “would rather die than think.” If such bureaucratization occurs in universities, it certainly occurs in most other sectors of society. The degree of impersonality and discipline that exist in bureaucracies have permeated into many other aspects of life. For example, bureaucratic coercion into being methodical, prudent, and disciplined has eroded critical thinking skills. Hence, the proliferation of so many mindless commercials and a watering down of the news to nothing more than mere entertainment. In a society with so many formally educated people, how is it possible for there to have been such a dumbing down where it is not uncommon for college graduates to read with some difficulty, and lack the rudiments of basic English grammar? After working all day, it is a rare person who is interested in critically evaluating news sources and seeing the nuances of the world around him or her. The proliferation of bureaucratization may be seen to be the major culprit in the dumbing down of our culture. In his excellent book, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom delineates how far we have intellectually regressed both in society at large and in universities. From the content of courses to the nature of popular music there can be seen to have been devolution. We have paid a very high price for our bureaucratization! |