Bureaucracy
is the plague of the modern organizational world. It breeds inefficiency and
leads to personal and organizational stagnation, but even more disquieting is
its penchant for provoking aggravation, frustration, and gloom in the souls of
nearly all who come in contact with it. Bureaucracy afflicts government
agencies, corporations, and nonprofit institutions alike. The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints is certainly not immune, as revealed in this candid
confession from President Gordon B. Hinckley’s official biography: “As
thrilling as [Church] growth was, he abhorred bureaucracy and at times felt
himself swimming helplessly against a mounting tide.”1
Bureaucracy, it
would seem, is a malady that even prophets have found problematic, if not enigmatic
or even incurable. But this perception is imprecise, for bureaucracy is not an
organizational illness at all; rather, it is a symptom of an underlying
infection. And it is certainly not inevitable. It is a yet another distasteful aspect
of the organizational imperative and its inverted values (see the five
consecutive posts beginning here for a full description).
What Is Bureaucracy?
Bureaucracy is
defined as the division of an organization into specialized departments, which
are structured according to a hierarchy of authority and status, and which are
managed by appointed officials who follow an inflexible routine. This is more
or less the formal dictionary definition, but as former Newsweek editor Jon Mecham reminds us, we do not live in the
dictionary.2 Colloquially, people use the term bureaucracy to describe an institution that is not just structured
and inflexible, but also dysfunctional—irritating, impenetrable, arbitrary,
unreasonable, and oppressive. Toward the end of this post I’ll examine the
relationship between the formal and informal definitions.
German social and
economic theorist Max Weber described how bureaucracies form. In doing so, he identified
three “pure types” of legitimate authority: rational (“resting on a belief in
the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority
under such rules to issue commands”), traditional (“resting on an established
belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those
exercising authority under them”), and charismatic (“resting on devotion to the
exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an individual
person”).3 Interestingly, Weber used Joseph Smith as one example of
charismatic authority: “Another type [of charismatic leader] is represented by
Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, who may have been a very sophisticated
swindler (although this cannot be definitely established).”4
Weber was
particularly interested in what happens “with the death or decline of a
charismatic leader. Charismatic authority is ‘routinized’ in a number of ways
according to Weber: orders are traditionalized, the staff or followers change
into legal or “estate-like” (traditional) staff, or the meaning of charisma
itself may undergo change.”5 Weber would undoubtedly have been
interested in the transition of the LDS Church from a charismatic “new
movement” to a unique combination of traditional legitimacy and legal-rational
bureaucracy. In Weber’s theory, though, bureaucracy was an efficient and ideal
form of organization.
Michel Crozier
re-examined Weber’s concept of bureaucracy and disagreed with it in light of
the way bureaucratic organizations had actually developed. He concluded, among
other findings, that bureaucracies exhibit “the slowness, the ponderousness,
the routine, the complication of procedures, and the maladapted responses of
the bureaucratic organization to the needs which they should satisfy”; that “a
bureaucratic organization is an organization that can not correct its behaviour
by learning from its errors”; and that “the bureaucratic system of organization
is primarily characterized by the existence of a series of relatively stable
vicious circles that stem from centralisation and impersonality.” All this
suggests that bureaucracy, contrary to Weber’s enthusiastic theory, is in
practice a dysfunctional form of organization.6
LDS Bureaucracy
The formal
definition of bureaucracy certainly applies to many organizations, including
the corporate side of the Church, but when most people use the term, they have
the other meaning in mind. This is undoubtedly the way President Hinckley was
using the term, and the way most people who talk about Church bureaucracy use the term, but in certain ways bureaucracy manifests itself quite
differently in the Church than in traditional capitalist corporations or
government institutions. This has something to do with the Church’s dual hybrid
nature—as both ecclesiastical community and corporation and as both theocracy
and democracy. Still, in many ways, the Church is quite typical of your
garden-variety bureaucracy.
Despite sporadic
efforts by the Church hierarchy to reign in the bureaucracy, most efforts to
simplify and curb the organizational Church have been largely unsuccessful, I
believe, because bureaucracy is not just
a complex structural phenomenon; it is a culture, an entrenched and
self-perpetuating system of attitudes and procedures based on a particular set
of organizational values.
Structures and Values
If we look
carefully at the formal definition I gave above, we can see how closely it
aligns with the values of the organizational imperative—and how the basic form of bureaucracy feeds quite
naturally into the informal
bureaucratic culture that most people associate with the word. The formal
definition has three parts:
1. the division
of an organization into specialized departments,
2. which are
structured according to a hierarchy of authority and status, and
3. which are
managed by appointed officials who follow an inflexible routine.
The values of the organizational imperative,
you may recall, are: malleability, obedience, dispensability, specialization,
planning, and paternalism. By definition, then, bureaucracy fits hand-in-glove
with these organizational values. The division into specialized departments facilitates the treating of people as dispensable cogs in a machine; a
hierarchy of authority and status encourages management to treat people as malleable resources, to assume a paternalistic role, and to require
strict obedience to managerial
edicts; and the inflexible routine relies on the predictability of planning. It is not entirely clear which
direction this relationship runs, but it really doesn’t matter. The formal
nature of bureaucracy and this inverted set of organizational values are
mutually reinforcing. The values tend to produce bureaucratic structures, and
bureaucratic structures inevitably perpetuate inhumane values. The result is
always an organization that is dysfunctional—irritating, impenetrable,
arbitrary, unreasonable, and oppressive—an organization with the three basic
features Crozier identified:
1. slowness,
ponderousness, routine, complication of procedures, and maladapted responses;
2. an inability
to correct its own behavior or learn from its errors; and
3. a series of
vicious circles that stem from centralization and impersonality.
The task of
defeating bureaucracy can be approached from either direction—by replacing the
organizational values with a set of more people-friendly values or by making needed
structural changes. Of course, making structural changes without changing the
underlying values is simply an invitation for new bureaucratic structures to
replace the old ones, but it is possible that structural changes can create a
better soil in which to grow humane values.
As Crozier
pointed out, one of the structural tendencies of bureaucracy is centralization.
Centralization is the logical consequence of an organization that values order, or control, above creative freedom and spontaneity. A natural
tension exists between these two ideas, and both are prominent in Mormonism.
God’s house, we read, is a house of order (D&C 132:8), but a central tenet
in Mormon theology is agency, the freedom to choose (2 Ne. 2:27). When order
trumps freedom, however, the result is usually centralization, and heavy-handed
bureaucracy. In the next post, I’ll delve into these ideas.
________________________
1. Sheri L. Dew, Go
Forward with Faith: The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley (Salt Lake City:
Deseret Book, 1996), 408.
2. Jon Mecham, “A Reader’s Guide to the Colbert
Issue,” Newsweek, June 15, 2009, 2.
3. Max Weber, Economy
and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and
Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff and others (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1978), 215.
4. Weber, Economy and Society, 242.
5. Dana Williams, “Max Weber: Traditional,
Legal-Rational, and Charismatic Authority,” http://danawilliams2.tripod.com/authority.html.
6. Michel Crozier, The
Bureaucratic Phenomenon, trans. M. Crozier (London: Tavistock
Publications, 1964), 3, 187, 193.
No comments:
Post a Comment