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British Journal of Management, Vol. 13, 51–66 (2002)
‘Bureaucracy-lite’ and Continuities
in Managerial Work*
Colin Hales
Westminster Business School, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS, UK
email: [email protected]
This paper questions three frequently asserted, interrelated claims about developments
in management: that centralized, regulated bureaucratic organizations characterized
by hierarchy and rules are inevitably giving way to decentralized and empowered postbureaucratic organizations characterized by internal networks and an internal market;
that, as a consequence, the traditional managerial role of command and control is being
superseded by one of facilitation and coordination; and that, in turn, managerial work
as routine administration of work processes is being supplanted by the ‘new managerial
work’ of non-routine leadership and entrepreneurship. It is argued that these claims
often rest on caricatures of bureaucracy and network organization and are neither new
nor well supported by evidence. Against these claims, the paper adduces case-study
evidence which shows that, despite claims about ‘decentralization’ and ‘empowerment’,
organizational change may entail not a radical shift to network organization, but more
limited change to a different form of bureaucracy in which hierarchy and rules have
been retained but in an attenuated and sharper form – ‘bureaucracy-lite’. Consequently,
managerial roles continue to be defined in terms of individual responsibility and
vertical accountability for an organizational sub-unit, and managerial work continues
to be preoccupied with monitoring and maintaining work processes, routine direction
and control of staff and processing information in order to deal with the ambiguities
inherent in the dimensions of managerial ‘responsibility’.
Introduction
A recurring feature of management discourse
throughout the 1990s was the claim that, as a
result of radical changes in forms of organization,
patterns of managerial work were undergoing
equally dramatic changes. The apparently inevitable
demise of sclerotic centralized bureaucracies, in
* I am indebted to Ziv Tamangani, Nurol’ain Mustapha
and Andrew Ghillyer for their contribution to the
empirical material on which this paper draws. An
earlier version of this paper was presented at the 15th
Annual Employment Research Unit Conference on
‘Work Futures’, Cardiff Business School, September
2000. I am also indebted, therefore, to the participants
at this conference for their helpful comments, as well as
to the two anonymous BJM reviewers whose helpful
comments and suggestions for development and clarification have been incorporated into the paper.
© 2002 British Academy of Management
favour of aerobic decentralized networks, was
bringing a seismic shift in the role of managers
from the routine internal direction and control
of self-contained organizational sub-units to the
more uncertain leadership and coordination of
fluid teams and with it a concomitant reorientation of managers’ work activities. This paper
offers a conceptual and empirical counterweight
to these claims.
The paper begins by adumbrating the key
characteristics of the organizational forms from
which and to which change is, seemingly, flowing:
bureaucracy and network organization. It is
argued there has been a tendency to ignore the
well-documented variations in the dimensions
of bureaucracy which mean that organizational
‘re-structuring’ often entails changes within the
basic bureaucratic model rather than paradigmatic shifts to radically new organizational forms.
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52
Evidence from studies of organizations that had
ostensibly ‘decentralized’ into autonomous business units is adduced to show that there was little
change either to what managers were expected
to do or what they actually did. Evidence is also
presented of similarly attenuated changes in
organizations claiming to have ‘empowered’ firstline managers. Despite their claims, none of the
organizations had undergone radical organizational
change in that they had retained the defining
features of bureaucracy – hierarchical forms of
control, centrally-imposed rules and individual
managerial responsibility and accountability.
It is argued, therefore, that where the principle
of hierarchical control is retained (regardless
of any reduction in the number of hierarchical
levels), and centrally-imposed regulations are
retained (regardless of changes in their focus)
the result is not ‘post-bureaucratic’, ‘network’
organizations, but attenuated and more efficient
versions of bureaucracy – ‘bureaucracy-lite’. Where
hierarchy and rules are retained, individual managerial responsibility and vertical accountability
for an organizational sub-unit are also retained.
Finally, it is argued that distinct continuities
in managers’ work, in particular a continuing
preoccupation with routine administration, flow
from the retention of individual managerial responsibility and accountability and the inherently
problematic character of its ‘role’, ‘causal’ and
‘moral’ dimensions.
From bureaucratic to post-bureaucratic
organization?
It is implicit in the claims about the arrival, or
imminent arrival, of ‘post-bureaucratic’ or ‘network’ forms of organization that these represent
a decisive, paradigmatic shift away from earlier
bureaucratic or hierarchical forms. However, the
precise nature of these earlier forms is often
treated as self-evident and the emphasis is not so
much on an analysis of their distinguishing
features as on an indictment of their frequentlyrehearsed ‘pathologies’: over-specialized, segmented
work roles, excessive regulation or over-weaning
hierarchy, together with the ‘dysfunctional’
consequences – delay, inflexibility and failure to
adapt – that flow from them.
Certainly, the broad contours of bureaucracy
are familiar enough, having loomed over both
C. Hales
the organizational terrain and its representation
in organization theory ever since Weber’s classic
‘ideal type’ encapsulated the essential character
of the then nascent large-scale state and industrial
organizations (Weber, 1964). So ubiquitous are
the analyses of bureaucracy that the bureaucratic
model need not be rehearsed here in detail
(See, for example: Albrow, 1970; Beetham, 1987;
Blau, 1970; Crozier, 1964; duGay, 2000; Fayol,
1949; Gouldner, 1955; Hall, 1963; Hoggett, 1991;
Jacques, 1976; Merton, 1966; Mintzberg, 1979;
Mouzelis, 1975; Perrow, 1972; Presthus, 1979;
Rueschmeyer, 1986; Thompson, 1980; Udy, 1959).
Indeed, there is a sense in which Weber’s ideal
type is not entirely appropriate for present purposes because for Weber, bureaucracy was of
interest not as an established, or indeed moribund,
but as an emerging form of organization. The
characteristics of bureaucracy to which Weber’s
ideal type primarily attended were those which
set it apart from earlier, pre-bureaucratic or traditional forms, not only of organization but authority
(or domination) generally. Hence, there is considerable emphasis on features such as the separation
of official duties from personal interests, expertise
as the basis for recruitment and advancement and
the sway of impersonal rules legitimated by their
foundation in rationality rather than personal
charisma or tradition.
If, however, the current take on bureaucracy
is not as an emerging form of organization, but
as one that is on the wane, viewed not through
the lens of known pre-bureaucratic forms, but
of possible post-bureaucratic forms, description
of the bureaucratic model needs to be re-focused.
In essence, bureaucracy in its established form is
where the work of specialist or expert administrators is arranged in a detailed division of labour
of closely-defined and specified roles, coordinated
and controlled by a combination of detailed,
centrally-imposed rules and procedures and a
hierarchy of graded levels of responsibility linked
by vertical reporting relationships and accountability. Thus bureaucracy can be seen as a ‘structure of control’ applied predominantly, though
not exclusively, to the managerial/administrative
component of an organization (Hales, 2001;
Hoggett, 1991; Littler, 1982; Rueschmeyer, 1986),
central to which are rules and hierarchy combined
in a symbiotic relationship. Managers/administrators are constrained by both bounded, defined
responsibilities which are arranged hierarchically
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and by procedures which are transmitted and
monitored hierarchically. Thus, managerial
behaviour is both guided and circumscribed by
a hierarchy of positions and their associated levels
of responsibility and a hierarchy of rules ranging
from broad policy to specific operating procedures
(Mouzelis, 1975; Perrow, 1972) which form a
‘mesh of regulations and predictabilities’ (Littler,
1982). Rules are transmitted and enforced through
the system of ranked authority, super- and subordinate relationships and vertical reporting
relationships that constitutes the hierarchy,
which operates as both a form of vertical division
of labour and a ‘chain of command’ and which
is itself rule-governed (Beetham, 1987; Meyer,
1995; Mouzelis, 1975). In bureaucracy, both
‘authorship’ and ‘guardianship’ of rules (i.e. who
makes them and who enforces them) rests with
senior managers/administrators (Littler, 1982).
It is the reliance upon hierarchy and rules
per se, as mechanisms of coordination and control,
and not their specific form or extent, that defines
bureaucracy. Of course, in practice, bureaucratic
forms of organization are prone to a proliferation
of both rules and hierarchical levels. As some
commentators have pointed out (Hecksher and
Donnellon, 1994; Meyer, 1995; Perrow, 1972), it is
not bureaucracy per se but the badly-managed
bureaucracy, where there is an excess of regulation
and hierarchy, that tends to give rise to the welldocumented ‘dysfunctions’ of over-caution, ritualistic behaviour, delay, procrastination, abnegation
of responsibility, lack of consultation and distorted
communication (see, for example, March and
Simon, 1971; Merton, 1966). Consequently,
bureaucracies have always been susceptible to
periodic ‘re-structurings’ in which regulatory and
hierarchical excesses are purged through the
purification rituals of ‘burning the rule-book’
in order to simplify procedures, and ‘cutting out
the fat’ and ‘delayering’ in order to reduce the
number of management levels. The result is not
‘de-bureaucratization’ but a ‘cleaned-up’ bureaucracy (Hecksher, 1994).
Variations among and changes in the character
and quantity of rules and the size and shape of the
hierarchy mean that it has long been recognized –
if, recently, somewhat forgotten – that bureaucracy is not a unitary form but an organizational
genotype subject to considerable phenotypical
variation (Hales, 2001). Even Weber’s (1964)
original concept admits of variation in forms of
53
authority, expertise and centralization, and Fayol’s
14 classical ‘principles of management’ (Fayol,
1949) include a number of dimensions of administration that can take various forms or exist to
different degrees.
In fact, much of the concern of empirical
studies of organizational structures in the 1960s
and 1970s was with documenting these variations.
Hierarchy was shown to vary in terms of the length
of the chain of command, with organizations relatively ‘tall’ or ‘flat’ (Carzo and Yanouzas, 1969)
and with ‘spans of control’ relatively wide or
narrow (Van Fleet and Bedeian, 1977) and hence,
bureaucratic organizations were shown to vary
in ‘shape’ from that of the traditional pyramid
(Kaufman and Seidman, 1970). Bureaucratic organization was also shown to be compatible with different forms of specialization, based on products,
markets or geographical areas as well as functions
(Koontz, O’Donnell and Weihrich, 1984), different forms of rules (Gouldner, 1955) or the degree
to which and way in which work roles are narrowly defined (Child, 1972).
This, in turn, gave rise to the notion that
features of bureaucracy were dimensions or
continua which could configure in different ways
to produce a variety of ‘bureaucratic’ organizational forms. For example, Hall (1963) identified
varying ‘degrees of bureaucracy’, Burns and
Stalker (1968) identified a number of ‘pathological forms’, Samuel and Mannheim (1970)
drew up a six-fold typology of bureaucracies and,
most notably, the Aston researchers used the five
dimensions of specialization, standardization,
formalization, centralization and configuration
to identify ‘full’, ‘workflow’ and ‘personnel’ forms
of bureaucracy (Pugh et al., 1968; Pugh and
Hickson, 1973).
Among those pointing up these variations,
however, have also been those claiming to have
discerned forms of organization that, if they
were not antithetical to bureaucracy, appeared
to represent something radically different. Thus,
Pugh and Hickson (1973) identified ‘latently
structured’ organizations and, more influentially,
Burns and Stalker (1968) identified ‘organic/
organismic’ organizations which they contrasted
with ‘mechanistic’ (or bureaucratic) forms. Thereafter, this other polar type has repeatedly resurfaced – as ‘adhocracy’ (Mintzberg, 1979; Toffler,
1970), ‘organic’ again (Donaldson, 1985; Hage,
1977), ‘post-bureaucratic’ (Child, 1977; Hecksher,
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1994; Hoggett, 1991), ‘post-modern’ (Berquist, 1993;
Clegg, 1990; Volberda, 1998), ‘minimalist’ (Seabright
and Delacroix, 1996), ‘holographic’ (Morgan, 1997)
or, simply, ‘new’ organization (Drucker, 1988;
Galbraith, 1993; Palmer and Dunford, 1997;
Quinn, Anderson and Finkelstein, 1996). Most
recently, the term ‘network’ organization –
originally coined in Burns and Stalker’s analysis,
it should be noted, lest it be thought that at
least the nomenclature is new – has been in vogue
(Castells, 1996; Charan, 1991; Hastings, 1993;
Powell, 1990; Savage 1996; Snow, Miles and
Coleman, 1992).
The characteristics of the post-bureaucratic,
network organization are nowhere near as clearly
delineated as those of the bureaucratic model. This
is partly because of some confusion between an
‘internal’ network, describing relationships within
an organization, and an ‘external’ network,
describing the relationships among a number of
organizations. It is the first of these that represents
the alternative to the bureaucratic form of organization whilst the latter represents the alternative
to the notion of ‘an’ organization as an independent, self-contained entity. The indeterminacy of
the internal network organization also arises
because much of its description is couched in terms
of negatives – an absence or minimal presence of
features associated with bureaucracy. For example,
Mintzberg defines adhocracy as ‘the absence of
standardization’ (Mintzberg, 1979, p. 87).
Broadly, however, the internal network
organization is conceived as a loose federation
of informally constituted, self-managing, often
temporary, work units or teams within which
there is a fluid division of labour and which are
coordinated through an internal market, rather
than rules, and horizontal negotiation and collaboration, rather than hierarchy (Halal, 1994).
Instead of a hierarchy of vertical reporting
relationships there is a ‘soft network’ (Hastings,
1993) of informal lateral communications, information sharing and temporary collaboration based
on reciprocity and trust, which may be facilitated
by an invisible ‘hard network’ of electronically
distributed information (Nohria and Berkley,
1994). With freely-available information and shared
expertise, the ‘organization’ is simply a collection
of temporary, contingent, self-organizing teams,
constantly forming and dissolving according to
work demands and trading and collaborating with
each other as required.
C. Hales
To these structural features, Hecksher (1994),
in one of the few systematic analyses of the
post-bureaucratic or, as he terms it, ‘interactive’
organization, adds a number of features that define its modus operandi: institutionalized dialogue,
the exercise of influence through persuasion, trust
based on interdependence, a sense of mission,
widely shared information, principles as guidelines to action, meta-decision-making processes,
problem-driven relationships, peer evaluation,
public standards of performance and flexible
time-frames.
What sets the post-bureaucratic, internal
network organization apart from bureaucracy and
its many variants, therefore, is the absence of
a rigid division of labour, hierarchy and rules.
This ramifies into five key distinctions. First, the
division of labour is based on market- or productbased multi-functional teams across which specialist expertise is contingently distributed, rather
than on functional departments and fixed specialist roles in which expertise is concentrated. Second,
teams are deemed collectively responsible for
their performance, rather than individual managers being held responsible for the actions of
those under their ‘command’. Third, with teams
accountable to all those with whom they engage
in internal market transactions, accountability is
collective and lateral, in contrast to the individual
vertical accountability of managers reporting to
other, more senior managers. Fourth, internal
organizational relationships are predominantly
lateral and market (or quasi-market)-based,
centred on the trading of outputs where market
value is the key criterion, rather than vertical and
rule-based, centred on monitoring work processes
where compliance with regulations is the key
criterion. Finally, dialogue and persuasion under
conditions of shared principles and trust replace
acquiescence to invariant rules under conditions
of clear power and authority relations.
‘New organizations and the ‘new’
managerial work
Predictions about the inexorable rise of ‘postbureaucratic’, network organizational forms are
often coupled with predictions about fundamental
changes in the nature of managerial work (Dopson
and Stewart, 1990; Drucker, 1988; Handy, 1990;
Hecksher and Donnellon, 1994; Kanter, 1989;
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Mintzberg, 1998; Morgan, 1993; Peters, 1989, 1995;
White, 1994; Zuboff, 1988). Again, the decisive
change is the supposed atrophy of bureaucratic
hierarchy and rules. Middle and junior managers
are freed from the stifling constraints of regulatory controls and the demands of hierarchical
reporting relationships to manage business units
in entrepreneurial ways. ‘Empowered’ employees
working in self-managed teams are freed from
managerial direction and control, leaving managers
to function as leaders and coordinators.
Consequently, the distinct, traditional role of
‘manager’ as someone who is individually responsible
for the planning, coordination and control of the
work of staff under their specific command, within
the constraints set by policy and regulations, is,
supposedly, disappearing. ‘Managers’ in the traditional sense are replaced by a particular brand of
professional ‘knowledge worker’ charged with
a more general, less constrained entrepreneurial
or leadership role. With almost everyone a
‘manager’ (if only of themselves) the new ‘leaderorchestrators’ (Drucker, 1988; Mintzberg, 1998)
engage in the fuzzy, complex task of facilitating
and coordinating the divers efforts of a variegated
network of players. Nuanced inspiration, expert
advice, complex coordination, collaboration,
negotiation and proactive instigation of change
replace the mundanities of command, control and
administration. ‘New’ managers engage in team
leadership, negotiating integrated effort across
boundaries, inspiring and promoting organizational learning, and conceiving, instigating and
facilitating change. In these endeavours, they
seize their new-found freedom from hierarchical
scrutiny and regulatory constraint by exercising
judgement, unleashing creativity and taking risks.
In short, the ‘new’ managers cast off the dowdy
feathers of administration for the rich plumage of
leadership.
If this depiction of claims about the new
managerial role appears somewhat stylized, it is a
fair reflection of the claims themselves, which are
distinctly light on the concrete changes to managerial behaviour that might result from this new
role. So far as they can be discerned, however, the
implications for managerial work appear to run
broadly as follows. First, not only is the manager’s
job less distinct but it also embraces a wider range
of tasks and activities that are more concerned
with managing a business than a specific function
or work process. Second, the emphasis of the
55
manager’s job shifts away from routine administration – planning and monitoring the conduct of
work, processing routine control information and
handling disturbances to workflow – and towards
non-routine ‘entrepreneurial’ behaviour – allocating resources and instigating product and
process innovation. Linked to this, ‘people management’ shifts from day-to-day management, in
the form of the direction, control and monitoring
of work performance, to leadership, in the form
of consultative coordination, support, advice,
coaching, development and inspiration. Finally,
managerial attention switches from the vertical –
managing downwards and reporting upwards – to
the lateral – communicating, liaising, negotiating
and collaborating with a wide range of contacts
across both internal and external organizational
boundaries.
This thesis has not been without its critics.
A number of writers have cast doubt, from a
variety of perspectives, on both the extent and
true character of postmodern or network organizations (Alvesson, 1995; Berg, 1989; Ezzamel,
Lilley and Willmott, 1994; Hilmer and Donaldson,
1996; Parker, 1993; Thompson, 1993; Thompson
and O’Connell Davidson, 1995; Warhurst and
Thompson, 1998; Whittington and Mayer, 2000).
They argue that demonstrably and radically different organizational forms are confined to a few
recurring and celebrated cases, and that claims
about the adoption of such forms are little more
than misleading rhetoric on the part of senior
managers, given that many forms of organizational change have entailed an extension or
intensification of, not a departure from, bureaucratic control. The impact of recent organizational developments on managerial work has also
been questioned, either by those asserting that,
despite the ‘hype’, the fundamentals of management have not altered (Eccles and Nohria, 1992;
Warhurst and Thompson, 1998) or by those who
argue that the main outcome of organizational
restructuring is managerial jobs that are broader
in scope but more pressurised (Thomas and
Dunkerley, 1999; Vouzas, Burgoyne and Livian,
1997) or ‘a smaller number of middle managers
[with] greater responsibility for a wider range of
duties for which they are now clearly accountable’
(Dopson and Stewart, 1990) .
Yet, after a decade or more of assertion and
counter-assertion, evidence on the extent of
organizational change and the impact that this has
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56
had on managerial work remains at something
of a premium. Since much of the debate has been
about the extent of these changes, survey evidence
would be of particular value but is, as yet, not
available. The evidence presented below is casebased, rather than survey-based, and as such, can
only offer counter-examples of the depth to which
claimed organizational change has penetrated in
certain instances, rather than demonstrating the
spread of such changes. However, in that the cases
are of organizations claiming to have renounced
bureaucracy in favour of more ‘decentralized’ or
‘empowered’ structures and to have done so in
order to give managers greater freedom to act,
they do represent if not test cases, then cautionary
tales about how far claim and reality always match
and how far organizational change necessarily
impacts on the managerial role.
‘Decentralization’ and managerial work
in Zimbabwe and Malaysia
The findings of two research studies (Hales and
Tamangani, 1996; Hales and Mustapha, 2000) call
into question whether ‘decentralization’ necessarily
always gives rise to new forms of managerial
work. The two studies, conducted in the retail and
hotel sectors in Zimbabwe and the electronics
and textile manufacturing sectors in Malaysia,
were concerned to investigate the impact of different organizational forms on managerial work.
It might be objected that Zimbabwe and Malaysia
do not represent the most appropriate research
sites for exploring claims about the shift to
post-bureaucratic organization and new forms of
managerial work. There are two possible strands
to this objection: first, that this shift is more likely
in mature industrialized societies where competitive pressures towards greater flexibility are
more acute; and, second, that cultures, such
as Zimbabwe and Malaysia where there is high
‘Power Distance’, are more likely to retain
hierarchical forms of management (Hofstede,
1991). There are, however, rejoinders to these
arguments. In the first place, claims about new
forms of organization and managerial work are
often couched in universalistic, culture-free terms,
citing global competitive pressure and ‘chaos’
(e.g. Peters, 1989), rather than the exigencies of
operating in particular cultural milieux, as the key
drivers. Second, although the Zimbabwean retail
C. Hales
organizations could be said to have had a ‘local’
character, both in terms of their ownership and
the markets in which they competed, this was not
true of the Zimbabwean hotel companies and
certainly not the case with the Malaysian manufacturers, which were all part of multinational
enterprises competing in world markets. To varying degrees, therefore, most of these organizations were exposed to both global environmental
‘turbulence’ and to old and new management discourse associated with a global business culture.
Both studies employed a comparative case
study design. In each study, the role expectations
and work activities of middle managers in two
centralized and two decentralized organizations
were compared, with data collected on four key
variables: organization structure, through semistructured interviews with senior managers and
documentary evidence; the sources, content and
strength of role expectations surrounding unit/
departmental managers, through in-depth interviews, based on the ‘managerial wheel’ technique
(Hales and Nightingale, 1986) with identified
members of the managers’ role sets; unit/departmental managers’ own role perceptions, through
in-depth interviews also based on the ‘managerial
wheel’; and unit/departmental managers’ allocation
of their time among different work activities, through
structured observation and activity sampling.
In the Zimbabwe study, five senior managers,
four unit managers and 15–20 members of the
unit managers’ role sets were interviewed in each
organization and the work activities of two unit
managers in each organization were recorded in
detail over the course of a working week, supplemented by activity sampling of two additional
managers in each hotel organization and three
additional managers in each retail organization.
In the Malaysia study, problems of securing access
resulted in a more attenuated research design,
with three senior managers, two or three middle
managers and 10–12 members of the middle managers’ role sets interviewed in each organization
and the work activities of one middle manager
recorded in detail over the course of a week. In
both studies, senior managers were the primary
source of interview data on the nature of and
changes to organization structure, members of the
middle managers’ role sets were the source of
interview data on how middle managers’ roles
were defined by others’ expectations, whilst the
middle managers themselves were the source
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of interview and observational data on how they
both perceived and conducted their roles.
In the centralized organizations, senior managers
were responsible not only for taking strategic
decisions, but also for directing and controlling
unit or department-level operations either through
formal directives or, more usually, through the
development and imposition of detailed standard
operating procedures and regulations. This left
middle managers chiefly responsible for implementing, monitoring and reporting on compliance
with procedures and standards with only minimal
formal discretion over how their units/departments
operated. In the more decentralized organizations,
middle-managers were granted more formal
autonomy over unit/departmental operations, such
as staffing, marketing and expenditure within
budgets, whilst control through centrally-imposed
operating procedures had been replaced by controls over managerial recruitment and selection
and, crucially, over unit/departmental performance.
In short, ‘decentralization’ meant that middlemanagers had become accountable, not for how
their units/departments operated, but how they
performed in the market, and were accountable
not to regional or area managers but directly to
senior managers at head office.
Although both studies identified some differences in middle managers’ work roles and, to a
lesser extent, work activities that could be linked
to the different forms of organization structure in
which they were located, even more striking were
the continuities in managerial roles and managerial
behaviour across the different organizations. Middle
managers in all the organizations, regardless of
whether they were centralized or decentralized,
were expected to and did focus on three key areas:
•
•
•
staff administration – day-to-day maintenance
of staffing levels, allocation of duties, supervision of work, appraisal of work performance
and handling minor conflict, grievances and
disciplinary matters;
general work administration – routine work
planning, problem-solving and monitoring
progress to try to ensure the smooth functioning of work operations;
managing routine information – monitoring
and contributing to day-to-day flows of information, attending meetings, explaining policy,
giving advice and disseminating information
about their unit/department.
57
In addition, and usually contrary to others’ expectations, they spent a significant proportion of
their time on non-managerial tasks, in particular
assisting subordinates with their work.
The obverse of these shared preoccupations
was a tendency for managers either not to acknowledge as part of their role, or not to engage in,
activities directed at change, development or
improvement. Even in the decentralized organizations where considerable lip-service was paid
to managers acting in ‘entrepreneurial’ or businessoriented ways, middle-managers gave little
attention to such things as staff development (e.g.
training, mentoring, coaching, staff participation),
introducing improvements in work processes (e.g.
through innovative work methods) or improving
unit/departmental performance (e.g. developing
new products/services, seeking new markets or
finding new suppliers).
Therefore, although the middle managers in
the two studies were located within different forms
of organization, they all performed their role
primarily in terms of routine administration and
day-to-day ‘fire-fighting’ rather than non-routine
leadership and future-oriented development. In
part, this was a matter of both interpretation and
ability on the middle managers’ part. Most of
those working in the decentralized organizations
had acquired ways of working under earlier, more
centralized and procedurally-driven operations
and had not been retrained to respond to the new
system. Indeed, if anything, the emphasis on unit
performance made them more cautious, not less,
and more inclined to adhere to tried and trusted
ways of working. However, it was also a case of
differences in the forms of organization themselves being more apparent than real. Superficial
formal differences between the ‘centralized’ and
‘decentralized’ organizations hid more fundamental substantive similarities. Even the ‘decentralized’ organizations had retained hierarchies in
which individual managers were responsible for a
clearly delineated sub-unit and accountability was
enforced through a vertical reporting relationship
to a single immediate boss. Furthermore, managerial behaviour remained circumscribed by rules, if
not about the conduct of unit operations then
about expected levels of performance, which had
been devised and imposed unilaterally by senior
managers. The only differences were in the height
of the chain of command through which and the
criteria by which managers were held accountable.
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In the interviews with senior managers, a
number of reasons for this lack of substantive
change emerged. First, in many cases, senior
managers saw no contradiction between creating
performance-driven units/departments and retaining hierarchical controls: the former were grafted
on to, rather than replaced, the latter. Second,
however, senior managers emphasized that
middle managers’ newly acquired ‘freedom to
manage’ did not mean freedom to do as they
pleased without having to account for their
actions. Few spoke of middle managers as people
who could and should be trusted to manage their
units/departments appropriately.
‘Empowerment’ and managerial work
in two UK organizations
Additional evidence from two UK public-sector
organizations – Citycorp and Parcelco – also
suggests that organizational change may be far
less radical than is claimed and may occur within,
rather than away from, essentially bureaucratic
forms. Again, it might be objected that publicsector organizations also do not constitute the
paradigm case for the development of postbureaucratic organization and new forms of
managerial work, since they are the natural home
of bureaucracy and the bureaucrat. However, this
objection is highly problematic. It certainly carries
no weight if it simply rests on the tautology that
stems from defining ‘bureaucracy’ as any state
or public-sector organization. Even if a broader
and more appropriate definition is employed, the
argument comes up against a substantial set of
claims – variously termed ‘the new public management’ and ‘entrepreneurial governance’ – that,
through forms of privatization and ‘marketization’,
public-sector organizations should take on more
flexible, post-bureaucratic forms with more entrepreneurial forms of management (Osborne and
Gaebler, 1992) or, indeed, have done so (Clarke
and Newman, 1997; duGay, 2000; Hoggett, 1991).
On the other hand, it has been argued that publicsector organizations have become more bureaucratized as control by professionals has given
way to tighter managerial control (Warhurst and
Thompson, 1998), often in response to more stringent forms of external audit (Power, 1997). Either
way, public-sector organizations are very much
C. Hales
terrain on which the claims of post-bureaucracy
and new managerial work can be examined.
The two cases are drawn from a comparative
study of five organizations in the UK which had
claimed, at a research symposium, to be implementing ‘empowerment’ programmes (Hales
and Ghillyer, forthcoming). In each case, data
were collected by a combination of: in-depth,
tape-recorded interviews with senior managers,
line managers, supervisors/team leaders and
production/service workers; scrutiny of documentary evidence; and observation conducted
over two week-long visits to each site.
At Citycorp, three senior managers and
eleven middle managers/senior engineers were
interviewed twice and seven Group engineers
were also interviewed. At Parcelco, seven senior
managers were each interviewed twice and eight
Business Unit General Managers and a further
fifteen middle managers at unit level were each
interviewed once. In both cases, senior manager
interviews focused primarily on the nature and
purpose of the ‘empowerment’ programmes that
had been instigated, whilst interviews with middle
and junior managers focused on the nature of
their jobs and work patterns before and after the
change programme. In both cases, documentary
evidence, in the form of annual reports, agendas
and minutes of meetings, market-testing reports
(Citycorp) and sales, quality and customer-service
reports (Parcelco), was also collected.
Both organizations were ostensibly re-organizing
in order to ‘empower’ front-line managers. The
reality, however, was somewhat different. At
Citycorp, internal organizational change was triggered by competitive tendering and outsourcing
of services. As the municipal engineering division
of a large local authority, Citycorp had previously
acted as both client for and provider of a wide
range of engineering services. It had been divided
along functional lines into six departments –
Highways, Engineering, Transport, Traffic Control, Surveying and Administration – each headed
by an Assistant City Engineer (ACE) reporting to
the City Engineer. Within each department there
was a clear hierarchy of senior and associate
engineers, technicians and clerical staff.
In the mid-1990s, Citycorp was obliged to put
its construction and property services out to competitive tender and thus to differentiate between
those staff whom it would retain in a ‘client’
role and those who would have to compete with
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outside companies, as ‘consultants’. If fully implemented, these changes would have significantly
reshaped the work of both the ‘client’ engineers,
who would have become concerned with managing a market relationship with consultants,
and the ‘consultant’ engineers and technicians,
who would have had to manage themselves as a
competitive business unit.
In fact, the changes at Citycorp and the consequent impact on managerial work were far more
modest. First, only the Engineering function was
designated for any kind of substantive change;
other functions were left untouched with, at most,
a change of name (e.g. ‘Administration’ became
‘Corporate Services’). Second, within Engineering, employees were assigned, with some degree
of arbitrariness and horse-trading, to ‘Client’
and ‘Consultant’ units in a 35:65 proportion.
Compulsory Competitive Tendering, where the
Consultant unit would have been required to
compete with outside contractors, was eschewed
in favour of ‘Voluntary Competitive Tendering’,
where outside firms were invited to bid for a fiveyear contract as ‘host’ consultants on condition
that they employed the Citycorp Consultancy unit
as a whole. Finally, far from the engineers being
allowed to run the Consultancy unit free from
direction and regulation by senior management,
previous hierarchical reporting relationships
remained but in different guises. The Consultancy
unit continued to be headed by an Assistant City
Engineer (ACE), as before. The ‘new’ structure
instigated by the ACE, ostensibly to permit
a more ‘dynamic’ relationship with the ‘host’
consultants, amounted to little more than a twee
relabelling of the previous hierarchy of positions.
Thus, as senior manager, the ACE designated
himself as the ‘Finder’, responsible for strategic
issues and generating new business, whilst the
engineers became either ‘Minders’ (Associates)
with middle-management responsibilities for
liaising with the Client group, or ‘Grinders’ (Team
Leaders) with first-line management responsibility for project operations. Technicians were
pooled in an ‘Implementation Group’, managed
by an Associate, from which individuals were
assigned to project teams as and when required.
Despite some fairly grand claims by the ACE
about ‘fundamental changes’, the result was, in the
view of those affected, ‘business as usual’ resulting from ‘a token gesture’. Staff continued to
work for the parent authority; the line-management
59
structure of ACE, engineer and technician
remained, with the only minor change being
the consolidation of the Senior Engineer and
Associate Engineer positions into one; and, in
practice, technicians were assigned to particular
project teams on a permanent basis rather than
retained in the pool. In short, a hierarchical
structure of managerial responsibilities remained,
with the ACE responsible for the unit as a whole,
Associates for work linked to particular clients
and Team Leaders for particular projects, with
each remaining accountable to an immediate
boss. As one Associate put it: ‘the work I’m doing
hasn’t changed – I’m now further up a shorter
totem pole, that’s all’. Despite the rhetoric of
‘empowerment’, neither Associates nor Team
Leaders had any influence over decisions affecting the unit as a whole. For example, the working
party that was set up to enable engineers to decide
on the selection of the host consultant became
simply a vehicle for extracting information on
which the ACE took a unilateral decision. In
the short-listing and selection of potential host
consultants, the engineers were merely invited
to comment, in an unrealistically short time, on
three pre-selected candidates. Furthermore, Team
Leaders had little operational autonomy over
individual projects, except by default when the
ACE and Associates had no time to become
directly involved.
Interviews with senior managers and engineers
suggested a number of reasons why the empowerment programme represented an attempt,
not to replace but to relabel and reorient an existing hierarchical structure. For senior managers,
particularly the ACE, the programme was, in
part, a compromise: attempting to create a more
‘entrepreneurial’ orientation in the face of opposition from engineers who had worked in local
government for many years and had no wish to
move, in effect, to a branch of the private sector.
The outcome, as the ACE admitted was a ‘mishmash’, resulting from a ‘snakes and ladders exercise’. It was also, however, prompted by a wish to
retain control and to ‘lean on’ the engineers to
become more market-oriented. For their part,
engineers and middle managers expressed cynicism
that they had been, as one put it, ‘railroaded’ and
displayed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for responding as they were supposed to. Neither were
they able to do so, since the promised training in
their new role had failed to materialize.
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60
At Parcelco, change took the form of internal
reorganization around business units in order to
improve market competitiveness. As the parcelhandling division of a national delivery organization, but run as a semi-autonomous business,
Parcelco had previously been organized into ten
regions, each subdivided functionally into Sales
and Operations. In its nine years of existence, it
had yet to turn a profit, despite repeated rationalizations and cost-cutting – in part, because it
continued to operate in all sectors of a market in
which price competition, particularly for business
traffic, was intense and profit margins were low.
In an attempt to break even and avoid being
sold off or absorbed into other parts of the
organization, Parcelco undertook a restructuring
programme in which the ‘express’ and ‘standard’
delivery networks were integrated, thereby cutting 600 jobs, and reorganized into eight Business
Units. Although couched in a rhetoric of quality
(‘Organising for Quality Leadership’), the principal aim was to rationalize operations and reduce
costs. Central to this was the claim to give the new
Business Unit General Managers a high degree of
operating autonomy free from head-office interference. Sales and Operations managers within
Business Units were no longer to report to head
office but to the unit General Manager (GM).
The GMs themselves would be responsible for
unit operations and staffing and accountable for
‘Key Performance Indicators’ relating to costs,
revenues, new business and service quality. The
creation of an internal market mechanism to
apportion overhead and support costs to units
and to price internal transfers was intended to
give a more accurate picture of unit costs and
revenues against which GMs could be judged.
Head office itself was to be slimmed down, with
support services required to compete for internal
business against outside contractors, and with a
reduction in staff engaged in gathering operational data. The stated intention was for this to
lead to substantial changes in managerial behaviour, both at head office, where direct control
would give way to ‘leadership and support’, and
among unit-level managers who would become
more ‘business-focused’ and ‘entrepreneurial’.
One year into the programme, however, there
were few changes of substance to reflect the
redrawn organization chart. Much of the old
hierarchy was still in place. Area and Regional
Managers had been retained and, perhaps for
C. Hales
want of a role, had strengthened their control
over personnel matters: consequently, unit GMs’
‘autonomy’ over staffing was minimal. Indeed,
the GMs’ job responsibilities had been drawn up
in considerable detail in new procedural manuals,
so any freedoms they enjoyed were highly circumscribed.
Developments at head office confirmed the
general view within Parcelco that only ‘lip service’
was being paid to organizational change. Although
there had been reductions in head-office staff, this
usually entailed transfer to ‘Personnel Services’
or ‘Special Projects’ (somewhat cruelly dubbed
‘car parks for those with nothing to do’). Far from
diminishing, the collection of operating data by
head office (or ‘information hoovering’ as it was
dubbed) continued with a vengeance, not least
through the oxymoronic ‘Vital Few’ form which
required 1000 separate data entries every month.
The view at unit level, therefore, was that, whatever the rhetoric, head office was still primarily
concerned with ‘fault finding and blame’. Moreover, head office continued to set budgets without
consulting GMs and continued to intervene in
day-to-day unit operations. For example, when an
important magazine delivery contract was lost,
head office responded by imposing staffing cuts
and reorganizing staff duties at unit level. Head
office also unilaterally closed a small but profitable depot without consultation, in order to rationalize the network and reduce short-term staffing
costs. Direct control, rather than ‘leadership’ or
‘support’, continued to be the preoccupation of
head-office managers.
Similarly, at unit level, GMs continued to exercise personal day-to-day direction and control
over staff and work operations. Rather than
developing a more entrepreneurial focus by
seeking to increase revenues and develop new
business, GMs retained a managerial focus on
cost-cutting under pressure to meet Key Performance Indicators. Rather than ‘empowering’ delivery
and depot employees, GMs felt compelled by cost
pressures to encourage experienced employees to
leave and to replace them with inexperienced
staff on short-term contracts whose work they
then deemed in need of close monitoring.
Reasons for the disparity between the rhetoric
and reality of empowerment at Parcelco emerged
from the interviews with managers. When
senior head-office managers talked about the
changes that had been instigated, they emphasized
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‘Bureaucracy-lite’ and Continuities in Managerial Work
‘accountability’ for ‘clear performance measures’ as
a means, first and foremost, of improving cost
efficiency; there was, conversely, no mention of
business-unit managers developing business and
generating new forms of revenue. For their part,
middle managers at business-unit level saw this as
the intensification of a ‘blame culture’ with an emphasis on ‘fault finding’ through, as one middle
manager put it, ‘a myriad of measurements to tell
us precisely how badly we’ve failed’. Consequently,
middle managers felt that they were not trusted
and quite deliberately played safe to ‘make the
numbers’ by, as another put it, ‘getting involved in
cost and control issues on the operational side,
the nitty-gritty stuff’.
W(h)ither hierarchy and rules? Network
organization or bureaucracy-lite?
The evidence from these various studies is, it must
be admitted, somewhat disparate and piecemeal.
Even if claims about post-bureaucratic organizations and new managerial work were couched
in the form of testable hypotheses, the evidence
presented would not constitute a conclusive test.
However it does offer a set of counter-cases that
point in a broadly consistent direction and provide empirical grounds for why these claims might
be questioned.
Ostensible or claimed moves away from
bureaucracy and towards ‘decentralized’ or
‘empowered’ organizations where hierarchy and
rules are banished can be illusory and hence any
changes in managerial behaviour predicated on
such moves can fail to materialize. Neither the
resulting forms of organization nor the work that
managers do end up being all that ‘new’. Despite
the claimed ‘decentralization’ into business units
or ‘empowerment’ of first-line managers, none of
the organizations described here could be said to
equate with, or even approximate to, the postbureaucratic, internal network model. The business units into which they had been ‘reorganized’
were not arranged as a loose federation within an
internal market in which control is through forms
of contract (Hoggett, 1991) but remained firmly
located within a system of hierarchical control.
Responsibility for unit performance continued
to be vested in individual managers who were
accountable vertically to identifiable ‘bosses’ and
who were judged on the basis of conformance
61
with centrally-imposed rules about appropriate
levels of performance. Although managers now
managed ‘business units’ (rather than departments),
were accountable to more senior managers than
before and were held responsible and accountable
for performance (rather than operational conformance), they continued to operate in organizations
in which the very visible hand of a rule-governed
hierarchy, not the invisible hand of a marketdriven network, held sway.
What the findings of the cases show is that,
despite the claims, the absence of any substantive
change to organizational structures or middlemanagers’ roles was the result of both senior
managers’ reluctance to instigate, or follow through
on, substantive change and of middle managers’
reluctance to respond to what minimal change
there had been. Although in some cases structural
conditions were created in which middle-managers
might operate with more (if limited) latitude,
there was no training or change in recruitment to
facilitate this. More importantly, senior managers
were so reluctant to relinquish control that they
constrained middle managers’ freedom to operate
by the obligation to meet performance targets – if
anything, a more stringent discipline than conforming to process regulations. Middle managers,
in turn responded with a mixture of cynicism and
caution: cynicism that they had been promised
something that did not exist and caution in
attempting to meet performance targets through
tried and tested methods of micro-managing their
units/department operations, rather than risky,
entrepreneurial activities.
The result was that these organizations were
only different in that the elimination of one or
two layers of management had reduced the
size and height of the hierarchy through which
regulatory control and coordination was imposed
and the focus of rules had switched from processes to performance. If they were no longer
archetypal bureaucracies, neither were they anything radically new: they were, rather, attenuated
versions of the bureaucratic formula – ‘bureaucracylite’, so to speak. Far from this representing some
kind of radical departure from bureaucratic
control, it could be argued that, with a reduced
hierarchy, through which responsibilities were
distributed and rules were transmitted and
monitored, and with rules more sharply focused
on outcomes, bureaucracy-lite is more consistent
with the ethos of bureaucratic control than the
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62
more bloated versions (‘bureaucracy-max’ so to
speak) where rules and hierarchical layers have
proliferated. It is worth recalling from Weber’s
original analysis that central to the growth of
bureaucracy was the replacement of traditional
and charismatic forms of authority (or domination), where obedience arose out of custom or
personal fealty, by rational-legal authority, where
obedience was secured on the basis of the compulsive logic of means-ends rationality. Bureaucracy, as Weber insisted, represents – in intention,
if not necessarily in practice – the embodiment of
the principle of efficiency: the attempt, at least, to
govern administrative behaviour by a rational,
impersonal means-ends calculation that minimizes
costs and maximizes control.
As the waves of downsizing throughout the 1990s
suggested, this is precisely what the reformulation
of bureaucracy into ‘bureaucracy-lite’ seeks to
achieve: to retain the tight control over managers’
behaviour offered by the combination of rules and
vertical reporting relationships, whilst reducing the
size, and hence the cost, of the hierarchy through
which rules are transmitted and enforced, as
well as shifting the focus of rules away from the
inherent uncertainties of work processes towards
sharper performance criteria. Bureaucracy-lite is,
therefore, symptomatic of the resilience of bureaucracy generally, even though its imminent demise
has been confidently predicted for over thirty
years (Bennis, 1966) and tentatively envisaged
for even longer (Jacques, 1996). As has already
been noted, much of the evidence of variations in
organizational forms suggests not alternatives to
but alternative versions of bureaucratic organization. Ever since Burns and Stalker’s study, hard
evidence of the widespread existence of organic,
internal network or post-bureaucratic organizations,
beyond a few recurring and loudly-celebrated
individual cases, has been at a premium. Indeed,
even now, much of the writing on ‘new’ forms of
organization continues to be offered as prediction
or prescription, rather than description, and the
post-bureaucratic network continues to be treated
in the literature as a desideratum, coming phenomenon or an extrapolated ideal type that does
not yet exist (Hecksher, 1994).
If, therefore, it is prudent not to expect the
imminent arrival of internal network organizations, at least not to any appreciable extent, then
it may be equally prudent not to assume that the
radically new forms of managerial work predicated
C. Hales
upon them have arrived either. The reason for
this is that, although bureaucracy-lite may shift the
focus and redefine the scope of middle-manager
responsibility, it does not alter the fact that this
‘responsibility’ continues to be defined by a
system of hierarchical relationships and rules.
In bureaucracy-lite, middle-managers remain
individually responsible and vertically accountable, to a boss, for the extent to which ‘their’
organizational sub-unit conforms to centrallyimposed regulations. This, in turn, means that
their activities and preoccupations remain much
as they were. The question remains, however:
why these activities and preoccupations? In what
follows, I will attempt to sketch out an answer to
this by examining the link between managerial
roles that continue to be defined primarily in
terms of individual responsibility and vertical
accountability, and managerial behaviour that continues to revolve around routine administration.
The continuation of managerial
responsibility and the persistence
of managerial routines
Individual managerial responsibility and vertical
accountability are fraught with ambiguities, which
go some way towards accounting for the persistence of certain managerial behaviours. The nature
of these ambiguities can be better demonstrated if
three distinct, if intertwined, facets of managerial
responsibility are identified – role, causal, and
moral responsibility. Each of these is inherently
problematic.
Managers’ role responsibility is the obligation
to discharge those duties which are understood to
attach to the social position of ‘manager’. However,
much of this role is ill defined and contentious.
Ambiguity, uncertainty and disagreement continue to surround much of what managers do, or
are supposed to do. Part of the manager’s job,
therefore, has always been to negotiate their role
in the face of this ambiguity and uncertainty and
to act in ways consistent with it (Stewart, 1982;
Watson and Harris, 1999). Consequently, managers tend to gravitate towards those activities
which are conventionally understood as ‘managing’,
and hence conform, wittingly or unwittingly, to
certain taken-for-granted expectations about what
managers should do. ‘Managing people’, ‘sorting
out work problems’ and ‘handling information’
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‘Bureaucracy-lite’ and Continuities in Managerial Work
are just such conventional expectations. By giving
priority to these activities, managers reproduce
the taken-for-granted understandings of what
management essentially entails (Hales, 1999).
There was evidence in the cases described
above that middle managers working in organizations that had been ostensibly, but not evidently,
‘decentralized’ or ‘empowered’ were handling this
confusion by playing safe and doing those things
which they associated with ‘being a manager’.
They were strengthened in this choice by the
expectations that others had of them. Whilst they
had a vague awareness that there might be other,
more ‘entrepreneurial’ things that they could be
doing, they knew that what they had to do was to
manage, on a day-to-day basis, the people, processes and materials of ‘their’ unit. These were still
the ‘fundamentals’ on which they believed they
would be judged and to which they gave priority.
Managers have causal responsibility in so far as
they are deemed personally instrumental in bringing about particular outcomes. For managers, this
means being responsible and accountable for the
operation and/or performance of an organizational sub-unit. This responsibility is, however,
indirect, consisting of what they are able to get
others to do, rather than what they necessarily do
themselves. Thus outcomes deemed attributable
to the individual manager are the outcome of a
collective effort which the manager can only
attempt to influence. Managers seek to reduce
the uncertainty inherent in this by attempting to
exercise close control over those whose actions
directly determine the outcomes for which the
manager is held responsible. Even where trust
between managers and managed is relatively
high, managers are compelled to attempt to
manage this uncertainty by influencing others’
efforts, however subtly, and are perforce preoccupied with day-to-day ‘people management’.
Moreover, this may be more likely to focus on
routine, day-to-day direction and control, rather
than the longer-term development of employees’
capacity to direct and control themselves, the
more that managers are subject to short-term
evaluation of performance.
Thus, the middle managers in the cases described
above considered that, whatever organizational
changes had or had not taken place, they were
still ‘managers’ with ‘staff’ for whose actions and
performance they were accountable. Since, if anything, they felt themselves more accountable to
63
their boss than before (even if it was a different
person), they, in turn gave considerable and deliberate emphasis to ‘managing downwards’ and
micro-managing ‘their’ staff. For example, for
all the middle managers in the organizations in
Zimbabwe and Malaysia, day-to-day ‘staff administration’ was, by far, the most time-consuming
category of activity; in Parcelco, business-unit managers responded in kind to their lack of empowerment by tightening controls over their staff.
Managers’ moral responsibility is the obligation
to act (or abstain from acting) that is sanctioned
by the attachment of praise or blame. The vigour
of recent debates over the issue of whether there
are agreed moral principles to which managerial
actions should adhere suggests that this aspect of
managerial responsibility also remains ambiguous
and unresolved. Without benefit of an unambiguous ethical code against which their actions
can be measured, managers are obliged to handle
moral ambiguity in the course of what they do:
managerial work constantly entails the situational
negotiation of moral dilemmas and ‘moral mazes’
(Jackall, 1989). Central to this is the acquisition,
interpretation, manipulation and dissemination of
information. Managers are not merely entangled
within webs of morally neutral information but
are also compelled to try to spin that information
in particular ways in order to accrue praise
and avoid blame. It is not simply the volume
of organizational information but its moral and
normatively constitutive potential which demands
constant managerial vigilance.
Thus the middle managers in the studies knew
that to be ‘out of the loop’ of organizational
information was suicidal. Those in Zimbabwe and
Malaysia, regardless of organizational context,
spent a great deal of their time sending and
monitoring information through reports, memos
and formal and informal meetings. At Parcelco,
business-unit managers resented head-office
‘information hoovering’ but saw non-response to
requests for information – indeed, any response
that was not carefully measured – as out of the
question. Engineers at Citycorp loathed the ‘endless, futile meetings’ but felt they ‘had to be there’.
Conclusion
Pronouncements of the imminent, inescapable
and overdue demise of bureaucracy and its
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64
supercession by radically new, decentralized forms
of organization are not new. During the 1990s,
however, these pronouncements became more
voluble and insistent until they came to be treated,
at least in popular management discourse, almost
as axiomatic. Hierarchies were being ‘flattened’
(in every sense) to make way for flexible, low-rise
business units and empowered teams and the
dead hand of regulation was being replaced by
the subtle strokings of the internal market’s
invisible hand, as blundering bureaucracies gave
way to nimble networks. Linked to this was
the claimed demise of the traditional manager,
preoccupied with command and control, reactive
‘fire-fighting’ and the mundanities of routine
administration, and the emergence of the ‘new’
manager, engaged in collaboration and coordination, proactive development, leadership and
entrepreneurship. Certainly, the rhetoric of these
claims has been powerful and this has, no doubt,
served an ideological purpose. The ‘death of
bureaucracy’ story has portrayed even the crudest,
cost-driven restructuring as a bold venture into
the brave new world of networks and the ‘rise of
the new manager’ story has been to console and
re-energize the survivors of 1990s corporate
downsizing. The reality of these claims may be
another matter.
Although there has been a pandemic of
organizational ‘change programmes’, ostensibly
concerned with ‘bureaucracy bashing’ through
‘decentralization’ and ‘empowerment’, the substance of these changes may be quite different
from their stated intentions. At least in cases such
as those described in this paper, there has not
been a wholesale dismantling of hierarchies and
tearing-up of regulations. Rather, hierarchies, as
systems of imperative coordination through vertical
responsibility and accountability, have remained
but in an attenuated and more efficient form.
Centrally and unilaterally-imposed rules designed
to give a heavy steer to managerial conduct have
also remained, but have come to focus on the evenmore exacting criterion of performance. Where
this has happened, the result has been, not postbureaucratic, internal network organizations, but
‘bureaucracy-lite’: all the strength of bureaucratic
control with only half the hierarchical calories.
Where change is to different forms of bureaucratic control, rather than radically new forms
of organization, there remains something all too
familiar about the nature of the managerial role.
C. Hales
Retention of the principle of hierarchy and of
centrally-imposed rules has meant that the defining characteristics of the managerial role continue
to be individual responsibility for the performance
of an identifiable and bounded organizational
sub-unit, vertical accountability to an individual
boss for that performance, and evaluation on the
basis of how far that performance matches
imposed criteria. This is despite the implications
of shortened hierarchies for managers’ careers,
notions of self identity and commitment to the
organization (Thomas and Dunkerley, 1999).
Where there is little fundamental change in
the nature of the managerial role, there is little
change in the substance of managers’ work activities. Managers continue to be preoccupied with
routine, day-to-day monitoring and maintenance
of work processes, managing staff and processing
information, to the exclusion of instigating change,
developing staff and seeking new business
opportunities. Central to this fixation with routine
administration and ‘fire-fighting’ – ‘keeping the
show on the road’ – is the pressing, yet uncertain,
nature of managerial responsibility and accountability. These uncertainties surrounding many
aspects of the managerial role lead managers to
gravitate towards those aspects that are recognizably ‘managerial’; being held causally responsible
for the performance of others compels managers
into continuous ‘micro-management’ of ‘their’
staff; and being held morally responsible for their
own and others’ actions, managers are driven to
immerse themselves in the minutiae of organizational information in order to negotiate moral
outcomes in their favour. In short, even where
organizations have sought a different structural
recipe, the result is not necessarily an internal network organization, but new formula bureaucracy,
‘bureaucracy-lite’, where individual managerial
responsibility and a preoccupation with administration remain.
Whether post-bureaucratic network organization and new forms of managerial work will flourish in the future – or, indeed, should do so – are
issues somewhat beyond the scope of this paper.
However, if organizations are regarded, not as
free associations of those striving after some
agreed collective purpose, but as instruments of
management – devices through which an attempt
is made to direct and control the actions of many
in pursuit of very particular and often contended
purposes – these organic forms of organization
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‘Bureaucracy-lite’ and Continuities in Managerial Work
are likely to remain, as they always have been, the
exception. They will be confined either to the
small-scale or expressive fringes of the organizational terrain or to temporary periods of
experimentation by large organizations before
the visible hand of hierarchy retightens its grip.
To return, appropriately, to Weber, bureaucracy,
regardless of its operational inefficiencies, is a
highly effective form of legitimized domination.
Bureaucracy-lite, with its shorter, cleaner lines of
accountability and sharper focus of responsibility
for performance, is likely to be even more so and,
therefore, unlikely to give much prospect to those
concerned to see the development of genuinely
new forms of organization.
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