Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
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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, Nurolain 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
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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.
C. Hales
the organizational terrain and its representation
in organization theory ever since Webers 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 Webers 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 Webers
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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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 Stalkers 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.
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managers 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 OConnell 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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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.
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 1520 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 1012 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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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.
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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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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more bloated versions (bureaucracy-max so to
speak) where rules and hierarchical layers have
proliferated. It is worth recalling from Webers
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 Stalkers 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.
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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 markets
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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