This article was downloaded by: [Fondren Library, Rice University ]On: 13 November 2014, At: 11:56Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Economy and SocietyPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reso20

The institution of bureaucracy:administration, pluralism,democracyJannis KallinikosPublished online: 17 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Jannis Kallinikos (2006) The institution of bureaucracy:administration, pluralism, democracy, Economy and Society, 35:4, 611-627, DOI:10.1080/03085140600960872

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085140600960872

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressedin this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content shouldnot be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Review article by Jannis Kallinikos

The institution ofbureaucracy: administration,pluralism, democracy

Jannis Kallinikos

Text reviewed

Paul du Gay (ed.) (2005), The Values of Bureaucracy, Oxford: Oxford

University Press, ISBN 0-19-927545-9 (alk. paper), ISBN 0-19-927546-7

(pbk.: alk. paper), 345 pages.

Introduction

A central element of the modern institutional landscape as it has certainly

been, bureaucracy came none the less to be historically bound up with a host

of uneasy undertones. An aura of negative predispositions has engulfed

bureaucratic regulation, despite the crucial and inescapable implication of

bureaucracy in modern life and its contribution to the predictable and

accountable ways underlying the operations of political and economic

institutions in modernity. The prevailing negative sentiment bureaucracy

tends to evoke reflects a crooked and, in a sense, fascinating (in terms of the

contradictions it implies) historical trajectory that has been engraved by a

variety of socio-cultural conditions and forces that traverse the entire

ideological and political spectrum of modern society. Over the last century,

left-inspired ideology have virtually joined hands with the ideology of market

liberalism in cultivating (each surely in its own way) a strong disbelief

against bureaucracy. Populist discourses, and a persistent and widespread

artistic detest for whatever bureaucracy may stand for have further

reinforced its image as an institution inimical to freedom, human dignity

and purpose.

Jannis Kallinikos, Department of Management, London School of Economics, Tower 1,

Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE, London, UK. E-mail: J.Kallinikos@lse.ac.uk

Copyright # 2006 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online

DOI: 10.1080/03085140600960872

Economy and Society Volume 35 Number 4 November 2006: 611� 627

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Looked from the present horizon, the predominantly negative connota-

tions accompanying bureaucracy could, perhaps, be traced back to those

predispositions romantic humanism has managed to cultivate vis-a-vis

modern life in general (Sennett 1992; Sassen 2006). In this respect,

bureaucracy has been considered as just an instance of those typically

modern arrangements (e.g. technology, commodification of social relations)

that have partaken in the erosion of the solid bonds of gemeinschaft and the

construction and diffusion of the impersonal geist of modern life. It has also

been seen as a key means to the consolidation of the state and the dangers a

strong central power harbours for civil society and individual liberties. Even

though some of these negative undertones are re-encountered in Weber

(1978) himself (e.g. the iron cage), romantic humanism has managed to

sculpt an image of bureaucracy that has substantially obscured the

fundamental fact that modern life would have been impossible, indeed

unbearable, without the social and organizational order bureaucracy is

associated with and which it helps sustain (see, e.g. Gellner 1983, ch. 3

and 4).

It is not by accident that Weber (1978) in his account of bureaucracy

describes key aspects of the modern social order. The legal-rational

regulative regime of bureaucracy is inescapably tied to the formal character

of modern life and the fundamental fact that the majority of social

encounters in the socially mobile and geographically extended social

aggregates of modernity break out of the intimate and normatively rigid

bounds of gemeinschaft . They thus inevitably involve a variety of transac-

tions with strangers or non-intimates � people outside one’s own limited

circle of friends or relatives. Formality, in this impersonal space, is neither a

vice nor just ceremonial, empty-handedness but civility (Sennett 1992;

Sassen 2006). It springs from the recognition that the more or less transient

transactions that define the fabric of modern life should be conducted

and concluded in as smooth and frictionless a fashion (laid out and

supported by rules, laws and regulations) as possible (Hirschman 1977;

Kallinikos 2004, 2006). In this respect, there have never been Chinese or

Egyptian bureaucracies as it is sometimes claimed, at least not in the sense

Weber intended the term. Ancient or older administrative systems may have

been quite complex and potent administrative machineries, autocratic

hierarchies but not bureaucracies decreed by a legal-rational regime

(Kallinikos 2006).

While riding on the prevailing negative sentiment sculpted by communal

or individualistic romanticism, the relatively recent reformation of the

public sector away from bureaucratic rule also seems to be associated with

long-wave cultural and structural transformations of the modern social

order. A case could perhaps be made for the fact that the relevant

developments reflect what Luhmann (1982) once called the functional

primacy which economic governance has been assuming in the course of

modernity. Such a primacy is centrally implicated in the amplified

612 Economy and Society

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

contradictions between a weakening political power (state) that cannot any

longer be in the steering wheel of society and the growing saturation of the

social fabric by an economic logic that tends to hollow, as it were, pluralism

and ethics from the inside. The functional primacy of economy is

intimately related, I suggest, with the historical (re)emergence of neo-

liberal ideology and the reformation of the state along New Public

Management (NPM) lines. For, both claim, in essence, political regulation

to give way either to a straightforward economic regulation or to contrived

and surrogate versions of it (e.g. quasi markets). Both neoliberalism and

NPM must not be attributed an exogenous status and treated (as it is often

done wittingly or unwittingly) as the transcendental cause of current

political and social changes. Rather, they are better seen as symptomatic, at

least partly, of a changing and fragmented modernity, in which no

institutional domain can any longer find the Archimedean point from

which to lay hold of society in its entirety. The transactional and

inescapably ethical simplifications of economic governance1 find a fertile

soil in the institutional void modernity’s fragmentation produces, a

condition under which the state is no longer, if it ever were, in command

of the complex web of relations and processes underlying contemporary

society. Many of the issues related to bureaucracy and the tensions which

traditional dichotomies such as those of state/market, public/private,

efficiency/pluralism carry are closely associated with these developments

which are ultimately reflecting the deepening functional differentiation of

the current world (Luhmann 1982, 1995, 1998).2 To put it bluntly, neo-

liberalism and to some extent NPM are as much causes as they are effects

of the current late modern condition. Their timing needs itself an

explanation.

Paul du Gay, perhaps more than anyone else, has over the past fifteen

years or so consistently sought to contribute towards developing a theoretical

discourse that does justice to the social and institutional complexity of

bureaucracy and its central implication in modern life. The Values of

Bureaucracy, a collective volume which du Gay has edited, is his most recent

contribution to that project. In addition to his introduction, the volume

contains thirteen chapters organized in four parts. In what follows I have

singled out three major thematic blocks that I think capture an essential part

of the current problematic with which bureaucracy is associated. These are a)

the reappraisal of NPM after three decades of comprehensive state and

municipal administrative reformation, b) the issues associated with the ethical

simplifications of economic governance and c) the prospects facing bureau-

cracy, in the light of the inescapable bureaucratic constitution of corpora-

tions, and the distinctive reengineering such a constitution is currently

subject to within the corporate world and the private sphere. In developing

the corresponding claims I both summarise and show how the various

chapters of The Values of Bureaucracy are distributed over these thematic

blocks. In the final section of the article I bring together the various claims

Jannis Kallinikos: The institution of bureaucracy 613

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

put forth in an effort to critically evaluate the volume and assess its

contribution.

The reappraisal of the New Public Management

Placed against the backdrop of the predominantly negative sentiment

bureaucracy tends to evoke, even its mildest defence may feel as swimming

against the current. And yet, recent developments prompt the reconsideration

of bureaucracy. The reformation of the public sector, consequent upon the

diffusion of NPM and the market idealism on which it ultimately rests, has

been a much more insidious or complex project than its proponents may have

imagined in the first place. In many domains, the privatisation and

disaggregation of public organizations have not been as efficacious as it has

often been claimed. In this process, it has become evident that despite the

rigidities which it may have occasionally engendered, bureaucracy has been a

potent administrative apparatus both in instrumental terms but also in terms

of safeguarding accountability and the pursuit of a variety of values (as

opposed to profit or cost minimization) underlying modern institutional life.

Among the various side effects of the NPM-induced reformation of the

public sector must be registered, as The Values of Bureaucracy depicts in

various chapters, a new and complex regulative regime as public entities have

sought to organize and control their operations in the emerging context of

disaggregation and performance monitoring NMP has implied. To a

significant degree, this has been the outcome of the effort on the part of

public organizations to a) lay down the rules and procedures for articulating

the demands for subcontracted public services in specific and clear ways and b)

develop the mechanisms for monitoring the quality and delivery terms of these

services. An indication of the complexity of this project emerges against the

backdrop of the highly fragmented and institutionally dispersed landscape

privatisation, subcontracting and disaggregation have produced. Overall, the

bureaucratic rigidities, which NPM has set out to combat through adminis-

trative simplification, have often given way to an even more cumbersome

system of rules, procedures and regulations as service specification and

contract developing and monitoring have proved demanding and complex

operations.

Some of these issues are explored in four separate chapters by Paul Hoggett,

Janet Newman, John Clarke and Daniel Miller that critically examine some of

the implications following the NPM-inspired reformation of British state

agencies, local authorities and public organizations. While different in

conceptual orientation and resources, the four chapters are persuasive in

showing how the ‘entrepreneurial and audit culture’ the NPM-inspired

reformation of the public sector inculcates contributes in establishing a

context that in many respects complicates, rather than simplifies, as its

proponents have claimed, the instrumental conditions under which the

614 Economy and Society

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

production and delivery of public services take place. The obsession with

outcome orientation and measurement introduces new operations, segments

old ones and spreads new rules and procedures whose usefulness are not

always straightforward.

At the same time, the entrepreneurial culture on which outcome orientation

and auditing rest has helped erode the ethical foundations and the account-

ability of the bureau. It has also contributed to worsening local adaptation by

drawing local governments away from the variety of problems and issues facing

citizens in the very locales they work and live, as municipal leadership and

administration sought to accommodate the new cumbersome realities of

performance measurement and documentation. As all four authors point out,

in their different ways, the diffusion of audit and measurement have been

instrumental in spreading an abstract and decontextualized model of manage-

ment that in many respects is incompatible with the official rhetoric

legitimating it and the specificity of the issues and problems local governments

seek to address. With the exception perhaps of Newman, whose position

reflects a certain ambivalence with respect to how the superimposition of the

enterprise culture of NPM upon traditional bureaucracies could be inter-

preted, the other three chapters develop some stern criticisms of the ideology

or ‘innocence’ of the pragmatism (what works!) of New Labour, and its

uncritical endorsement of NPM.

Newman is herself critical but her position, at least in this chapter, seems to

me to give that part of the reformation of the public sector with which she

deals with some credit, in the sense of considering it a necessary consequent of

the transformations of the modern social order, elements of which I sought to

describe in the introduction to this article. Rather than dealing with outcome

measurement and performance monitoring, she focuses on the reformation of

the traditional bureau through the infusion of entrepreneurial elements in the

exercise of leadership and policy making. Newman views these reforms as

basically driven by wider socio-cultural shifts that reflect the dispersal of

power, characteristic of the contemporary social landscape, and the breaking of

the instrumental enclosures into which most public agencies have traditionally

been embedded. Public services are currently produced or developed under

conditions of alliance and network building across institutional and organiza-

tional boundaries and the new model of public sector leadership reflects these

realties. In the contexts she has studied, the trade-off between accountability

and leadership discretion has been rather moderate and a new form of

bureaucratic rule has been emerging that, according to Newman, incorporates

elements of a more active model of agency and leadership to the traditional

ethos of the office.

Closely associated with these issues is a chapter by Graeme Salaman that

critically re-examines the development of competency and leadership

programmes within public administration but from a slightly different

perspective. In a characteristically Foucauldian spirit, he depicts the effects

of these programmes and the enterprise discourse on which they lean on in

Jannis Kallinikos: The institution of bureaucracy 615

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

constructing new forms of agency that claim to transform rule-based

bureaucratic passivity into initiative-taking and enterprising modes of acting.

The outcome of the organizational changes of these programmes, he shows, is

a much more elaborate and, in a sense, insidious regime of control. Minute

aspects of organizational life that have traditionally remained outside the

regulative jurisdiction of the office are currently subjected to various kinds of

control by the active complicity of the emerging form of agency epitomized by

the managerial post of the ‘new public manager’.

All five chapters referred to above capture essential elements of the

intricate landscape in which NPM-inspired reformation of the public sector

has taken place. They document with clarity and reference to a variety of

empirical contexts that the entrepreneurial transformation of the bureau and

the diffusion of an audit culture across the board have been quite

ambiguous projects, and their effects in terms of the efficiency they have

sought to promote far from clear. What seems to me not adequately dealt

with is the issue concerning how these reforms should be interpreted and

evaluated in their totality. Do they represent isolated episodes or do they

form part and parcel of wider socio-cultural trends which they seek to

accommodate, albeit in varying forms? Such a question may seem rhetorical

in the first place but addressing it is crucial for obtaining a more adequate

picture of the public sector reformation that has been going on for more

than three decades now. It is also essential for understanding the prospects

facing bureaucracy in the current world. I return to this issue in the final

section of this article.

The ethical landscape of modernity

The strong rhetorical focus on the efficiency of the arrangements by which

welfare and other public services are produced inevitably brings to the fore

the key question concerning the kind of ‘goods’ governments are supposed to

deliver and safeguard. After all, governing is not just an exercise on a

dubious efficiency but a project of considerable complexity involving

considering and balancing a variety of interests and values. Security, equality,

pluralism, democracy, health are examples of major governmental ‘goods’

that all rest on values whose reproduction evades the mono-ethical horizon of

economics. Driven to its extreme, the governance of public entities through

quantitative measures of efficiency tacitly assumes that all values (or goods)

are of the same nature, i.e. part of the same continuous and homogenous

ethical landscape that makes them reducible to a common denominator,

which is cardinal utility. Without such an assumption there is no way of

quantifying the operations of public entities by putting them on a ratio or

cardinal scale (Sen 1987).

Placed in this context, the concern with efficiency and outcome

measurement which dissaggregation and quasi markets have sought to

616 Economy and Society

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

promote emerges as too narrow an objective to reflect more than a limited

portion of the processes of governance. The bureau is a multivalent

institution, integral to developing and implementing social policy in ways

that reflect the variety of (incommensurable) values with which the process

of governing is associated. Coupled with the inability of NPM to prove its

instrumental superiority, the awareness of the multidimensional ethical

landscape into which governance is involved has recently led to the

reconsideration of bureaucracy and its contribution to the modern demo-

cratic and pluralistic society (e.g. Chapman 2000; Courpasson and Reed

2004; du Gay 2000). Rather than being a vice, the neutral, often negatively

viewed, proceduralism of the bureau constitutes an indispensable means to a

re-valued accountability. Key elements of the bureaucratic organization such

as standard operating procedures, formal role systems and centralized

responsibility are part of a much more complicated picture that recounts

the need for accountable but also socially responsive ways by which the

bureau, as an essential part of government, must operate.

While these issues are touched upon nearly every chapter they are more

straightforwardly debated in three separate chapters by Charles Goodsell, Paul

du Gay himself and Thomas Armbruster. All three chapters deal with the

central role the bureau plays in the modern process of governance. Goodsell’s

major point is the rejection of the traditional dichotomy between policy

making and implementation, a dichotomy which tends to relegate bureaucracy

to the obedient executive arm of government. Depicting the complex character

of the process of governance and its dual stakes in both ruling and responding

to the public, he attributes an essential role to the bureau that he views

‘increasingly indispensable as an institutional node of potent, professional and

accountable authority that weaves together the strands of dispersed public

action into coherent policy’ (p. 39). Reviewing relatively recent attempts in US

to reconceptualise governance and public administration in this age of

globalisation, outsourcing and disaggregation, he concludes that no other

institution seems currently able to fulfil the mission of the bureau in a

democratic world.

Du Gay’s and Armbruster’s chapters share a common orientation in

critically re-examining a variety of claims raised against bureaucracy from

quite a broad spectrum of positions in political philosophy, involving among

others libertarianism, communitarianism and neo-liberalism. Du Gay makes a

compelling claim for the significance of bureaucracy as a key mechanism in

providing the neutral proceduralism of the modern state, overcoming

sectarianism and personal biases through ‘the official’s trained indifference

to party or partisan creed’, and embedding the ideals of impartiality, objectivity

and egalitarianism. He rightly criticizes the widespread transcendentalism of

what he refers to as expressivism , according to which individual rights furnish

the means of counterbalancing and ultimately limiting the power of the state.

Rights are not anterior and exterior to modern society but essentially coincide

with the constitution and institutional embeddedness of the modern state. Du

Jannis Kallinikos: The institution of bureaucracy 617

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Gay refers to Holmes’s (1994: 605) suggestive and empirically verifiable phrase

that ‘statelessness means rightlessness’, a claim that emerges all the more

compelling in a complex and differentiated world like ours, in which

community (gemeinshaft ) is not any longer at the centre of social gravity.

It is interesting, in this context, to follow Armbruster’s reconstruction of the

dominant paradigms of political philosophy and his effort to rediscover the

common ground on which the aggressive individualism of standard economic

liberalism reencounters the moralism of communitarianism. He convincingly

shows, by reviewing the original texts of Von Mises, Hayek and Friedman, that

the currently prevailing anti-bureaucratic sentiment cannot exclusively be

attributed to standard liberal non-interventionism haunted, as it were, by

certain ambiguity vis-a-vis bureaucracy. It needs too the moralistic inputs of

communitarianism and civic republicanism, and their insistence on the moral

behaviour of social agents and the civic virtues of civil society. While it is

evident that democratic, pluralistic societies presuppose a citizen capable

of enacting and living up to central democratic values, the emphasis on

individual moral behaviour does carry the heavy influence of romantic

transcendentalism and misconstrues the distinctive character of modernity

as social formation. As du Gay claims in the introduction, the creed on

individual rights, conceived as trans-historical givens, misses the key point that

‘rights and freedoms are an enforced uniformity, rarely guaranteed without the

presence of large, centralized bureaucracies capable of creating and enforcing

them’ (pp. 6� 7).

Some of these issues are cast to new light by Antonino Palumbo and Alan

Scott’s chapter that explores the significance of the commons for modern

society and polity. The chapter entails a shift in perspective that makes it

slightly different (in a positive way) from the rest of the volume. While

affirming the significance and multi-ethical constitution of the commons, the

authors remain sceptical vis-a-vis the disembedded forms of governance which

bureaucratic rule epitomizes. They define the commons as a) a set of

commonly held resources deployed in the service of collective ends, b)

institutional arrangements that foster cooperation and c) managerial practicesthat decree access and use to the common resources. Thus defined, the

commons are set against the unmistakable mono-ethical orientation of the

market (entailing the private appropriation of commons) but equally against

nationalization (resembling sequestration) of the commons by the state and

their management by bureaucratic administration, at a remove from the local

contexts and the lives of people in which the commons are implicated.

Considering the commons as ‘necessary precondition for having a vibrant

sphere and pluralistic civil society’, they set out to develop ‘a non-conventional

defence of bureaucratic actions directed at supporting local commons and a

multi-level system of governance’ (p. 299).

Two other chapters further disclose the complex ethical landscape to which

bureaucratic governance is immersed. Yvonne Due Billing reconsiders the

relationship between bureaucracy and gender equity. Rejecting some wide-

618 Economy and Society

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

spread criticisms portraying bureaucracy as intrinsically gendered, she

reconstructs its multifaceted character claiming that in certain respects the

bureaucratic organization is better geared to promoting gender equity than

its entrepreneurial alternatives. In another chapter, Mike Savage takes

bureaucracy out of the conventional contexts into which it has usually been

considered and explores its significance for voluntary organizations. Presenting

empirical data from Britain, he demonstrates that there has been a shift over

the last three or four decades from working men’s clubs and trade unions to a

new breed of associations populated by the professional and managerial classes,

a development that he sees as signifying a rather worrying decline of voluntary

bureaucracies in vital areas in which they have traditionally assumed a central

place.

All six chapters make valuable contributions in terms of showing the

institutional complexity of the bureau and the ethical multi-dimensionality of

governance. The theoretical claims they develop help, in particular, decon-

struct the accountability/efficiency rhetoric that has legitimated the NPM-

inspired reformation of the public sector and re-establish the lost links between

bureaucracy and polity.

Corporations as bureaucracies

The observations put forth so far associate bureaucracy predominantly and, in

a sense, quite justifiably with government and the public sector in general.

However, the challenges facing bureaucracy cannot adequately be gauged

without consideration of the transformation of a key institution of industrial

capitalism, i.e. the corporation. For, the legal-rational administrative regime

bureaucracy epitomizes has also provided the institutional template for the

organization of the private businesses (Perrow 1986). Two key legal-

institutional arrangements have emerged and became consolidated in the

course of industrial capitalism, i.e. those of property rights and the employ-

ment contract, providing gradually a polyvalent framework of laws, rules and

regulations decreeing the operations of private businesses. The corporation is

thus a variant of the bureaucratic form of organization. Rather than reflecting

solely the functional requirements associated with the efficient production of

goods and services, the structural morphology of corporations (i.e. hierarchy,

role differentiation, standard operating procedures) and the modes by which

businesses in general operate are significantly shaped by the complex

institutional environment in which the making of profit must be pursued

(Fligstein 1990, 2001; Tilly and Tilly 1998).

Little wonder that the dominant institutional framework within which the

corporation and private businesses operate may still be seen as taking part in

favour of the side of property rights. On the other hand, it would be difficult to

deny that over the course of industrial capitalism the institutional entrench-

ment of the employment contract has substantially contributed to embedding

Jannis Kallinikos: The institution of bureaucracy 619

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

labour rights (and other values), reducing the arbitrary exercise of power and

ultimately participating in the democratisation and humanization of the

workplace (Perrow 1986; Tilly and Tilly 1998). It is indeed only in the

democratic societies of the economically developed world that the employment

contract has assumed such an institutional significance. While seldom

straightforwardly recognized, the employment contract has been a key

component of the wider institutional framework of modern polity (Arendt

1958; Beck 1992). To the degree that it got embedded and diffused, it came to

modulate the terms of individual involvement in organizations away from the

inclusive and totalitarian forms of the past.

The wider organizational significance of bureaucracy and, to a certain

degree, the employment contract is explored in one chapter by Paul

Thompson & Mats Alvesson and a second chapter my Mike Reed. Both

chapters revisit and critically evaluate the widespread claims of a post-

bureaucratic stage following the decline of traditional bureaucracies. Thomp-

son and Alvesson systematically review current organizational practices in the

domains of work, employment and decision making/coordination. Their

review suggests a much more complicated picture than the highly stylised and

stereotypical ways by which current developments are portrayed in the post-

bureaucratic discourse. Rejecting the sweeping generalizations of that

discourse, they come to the conclusion that ‘empirical studies of change reveal

relatively modest changes in structural terms and where change has taken place

in some spheres it is in the direction of more rules, hierarchy and

centralization’ (p. 103). The chapter by Reed is similar in orientation but

devotes much more space in re-examining the construct of the network form of

organization and its putative remaking of bureaucracy. Reed eloquently makes

the neo-Weberian case for the centrality and technical superiority of the

bureaucratic form and, then, drawing mainly on Castells reconstructs the

claims according to which networks are assuming a growing significance in

the emerging context of knowledge economy and informational capitalism.

While recognizing the importance of these developments, Reed seeks to

evaluate them by placing their understanding within the wider context of the

historical development of the modern social order, much in a similar spirit as I

have done in the introduction to this text. He concludes that ‘amongst all the

hype about the virtual, post-bureaucratic, or networked organization, there is a

very real need to reassert the fundamental technical, political and ethical

virtues of Weberian-style bureaucratic organization that is in danger of being

washed away in a naıve and disingenuous technological romanticism and

historical determinism’ (p. 136).

The two chapters by Thompson & Alvesson and Reed make important

contributions to the volume as they bring into the picture the consideration of

bureaucracy as an institution that transcends the confines of the public sector.

And yet, placed in the wider context of the significance corporations have had

and are bound to have for the bureaucratic form, the volume has not given due

attention to the pressures for structural accommodation which the transfor-

620 Economy and Society

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

mation of industrial to informational capitalism has exercised upon the

organizational arrangements that prevailed over several decades now. Even

though structural changes may not be, as Thompson & Alvesson point out, in

the direction the advocates of post-bureaucracy claim, the reinscription of the

employment contract within another regime may well signal a major shift in

the terms by which individuals join social systems and organizations.

Combined with corporate restructuring along networking and disaggregating

lines, these developments may well form a cluster of significance shifts in

organizational practices and forms. To the degree that changes of this sort

become consolidated, they provide the organizational templates for the

restructuring of the public sector through processes of coercive, mimetic or

normative isomorphism (Powel and DiMaggio 1991). Let me take up these

matters in the context of the wider evaluation of the contribution of the entire

volume.

The shifting infrastructure of late modernity

The Values of Bureaucracy is a thoughtful and intellectually rich volume, path-

breaking in its effort to disclose the subtleties underlying institutional life,

social policy and polity in contemporary democratic societies. It is also

thematically coherent and even stylistically consistent, despite the inescapable

variety a collective volume like it is bound to exhibit. The volume makes an

important contribution to understanding important practical, political and

philosophical issues that emerge out of the contradiction between the

pluralistic constitution of democratic societies, on the one hand, and their

firm instrumental and ethically narrower orientation towards efficiency and

economic expansion, on the other. But there are still a few key questions whose

detailed consideration seems to me necessary to better describe and appreciate

the challenges facing bureaucracy. I do not mean to imply that this is

necessarily a limitation of the book. As a matter of fact it could well constitute

an indirect contribution, in the sense of having laid bare the ground on which

such questions have emerged with sufficient clarity. The dialectic of knowledge

production is such (and happily so) that the more we know about a subject the

better able are we to clearly articulate what we do not know about it (Luhmann

1995, 1998).

As already indicated, the volume is predominantly oriented towards the

public sector and the state. This is justifiable to the degree that bureaucracy is

centrally implicated in state organization and administration. At the same time,

such an orientation does not give due attention to those long-standing

processes that have progressively resulted in the redefinition of the normative

and structural bases that have underlain the organizational templates of

industrial capitalism and modernity. Much of the pressures currently exercised

upon bureaucracy could perhaps be interpreted by historically associating

them, at least to a certain degree, with the decline of fordism and the

Jannis Kallinikos: The institution of bureaucracy 621

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

reorganization of private businesses along new disaggregated principles (Barry

2001; Castells 2000, 2001). The dialectic of the private/public and how shifts

in the organizational templates, procedures and practices of the corporate

world carry over into the public sector is a highly delicate issue (Fligstein 2001;

Power and DiMaggio 1991) but one that is vital to understanding current

developments across the board. An important manifestation of some of these

trends is provided by emerging work and employment forms (e.g. flexible

employment, work as freelancing) that seek to re-inscribe the employment

contract within a significantly more liberal labour regime. As indicated in the

preceding section, these central themes are underrepresented in the volume,

only Thompson & Alvesson and Reed touch upon them. They ought to have

been given more space, as the developments they are associated with tend to

renegotiate the terms of human involvement in organizations and, in this way,

challenge constitutive characteristics of bureaucracy and the institutional order

of modernity. Let me explain.

Drawing on Gellner (1983, 1996) and Luhmann (1982, 1995) I have

elsewhere claimed that the historical innovations the bureaucratic form has

brought about consist in the non-inclusive involvement of humans in

organizations (Kallinikos 2003, 2004). As distinct from other pre-modern

or contemporary organizational forms (i.e. total organizations, family

businesses), humans join the bureaucratic organization qua roles rather

than qua persons. This apparently innocent and currently taken-for-granted

social innovation have had far reaching institutional implications that emerge

against the background of the new conception of humans with which it is

associated. For the separation of the role from the person conceived as an

existential totality is predicated on a major anthropological breakthrough that

brought about the intrinsically modern understanding of humans as patch-

works of skills and roles (as opposed to unities) that Gellner (1996)

suggestively described as modular (see also Pottage 1998). In making the

role, rather than the person, its key building block, bureaucracy accomplishes

a variety of goals. First, it keeps separate personal preferences from the very

requirements of organizational role enactment and the ethos of the office in

general. Both organizational recruitment and organizational role enactment

are thus given an objective and impartial status that guarantees or is, at least,

aligned with the democratic ideal of equality and the egalitarian ethos of

democracy. Secondly, and contrary to widespread misconceptions, the non-

inclusive principle of the bureaucratic form decouples the reengineering of

organizational roles from the languid and time consuming process of

personal development and reorientation. Organizational changes (and these

are steady and frequent) do not inevitably presuppose personality changes, a

condition that constitutes a fundamental prerequisite to organizational

adaptability and flexibility (Kallinikos 2004). In this respect, and as Weber

(1978) wanted it to be, bureaucracy is the organizational form of modernity

not an aberrant or rigid version of organization as managerialism and market

populism portray it.

622 Economy and Society

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

There are important polity implications ensuing from such an account that I

have already alluded to above. Apart from the key values of objectivity and

impartiality of organizational operations and services, the non-inclusive mode

of human involvement in organizations suggests that the bureaucratic form is

intimately tied to the modern differentiation of life orders. By keeping separate

work and employment from personal, family and civil engagements, the

employment contract has participated in safeguarding modern pluralism, and

the values and preoccupations of different life orders (du Gay 2000; Gellner

1996). Outside the institutional bounds of work, a person’s engagements

(e.g. family, community, civic life) are conducted on other premises that reflect

the differentiation of modern life and the inescapable separation of the major

domains that constitute it (Luhmann 1982, 1995; Walzer 1983). In this respect,

the terms by which individuals have been involved in formal organization have

had a much broader social and institutional significance than what is

commonly recognized. It is far from accidental that the assault on bureaucracy

has been inextricably tied not simply to the broader phenomenon of

deregulation but crucially to the liberalisation of labour law. It is true that

du Gay has repeatedly debated these central issues earlier (e.g. du Gay 2000)

and he mentions them in this volume too.

What I am trying to suggest, however, is that the defining bureaucratic

characteristic of non-inclusive human involvement in organizations is

currently endangered by developments that take place beyond the state

organization. The prospects of bureaucracy are to a considerable degree

renegotiated in the corporate world and its persistent effort to redefine the

terms by which individuals are involved in organizations (Kallinikos 2006).

The diffusion of an overwork culture in which work (at least for a significant

number of people) tends to dominate over and occasionally squeeze out the

values and preoccupations deriving from other life orders is indicative of these

trends (Beck 1992, 2000; Kallinikos 2003; Sennett 2006). In this respect, the

non-inclusive human involvement in organizations, which bureaucracy and the

employment contract epitomize (Jaques 1976), is currently challenged by a

number of developments (Tilly 2001) which I am afraid The Values ofBureaucracy gives only marginal attention. The attempt to infuse the bureau

with an entrepreneurial spirit that questions the fundamental distinction

between the person and the office-role (Newman and Salaman in the volume)

represents another example of the modification of the foundations of the

bureaucratic form that has first and systematically been tried out in the

corporate world. While the redrawing of the boundary between the role of

the person may seem to, and perhaps does, enrich role enactment in a revised

bureaucracy, it also questions a fundamental condition of liberty on the basis of

which work, family, and community have been kept at safe distance from one

another (Gellner 1983, 1996). These developments perhaps reflect wider

cultural shifts (Heller 1999) that could be taken to suggest the transformation

of the bureau to be part and parcel of a much more thorough socio-cultural

change.

Jannis Kallinikos: The institution of bureaucracy 623

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Closely tied to these observations are those developments that I briefly

described in the introduction by referring to Luhmann’s notion of the

functional primacy economic regulation assumes in the deeply differentiated

and fragmented social landscape of modern societies. Are really the issues

raised by the reformation of the state, labour law liberalisation and the

assault to bureaucracy to be understood in terms of ideology alone? Several

contributors to the volume place the understanding of bureaucracy within

the overall shifts that have occurred in industrial capitalism and modernity

over the last fifty years or so. Newman considers what she refers to as the

dispersal of (state) power and the breaking of the institutional and

organizational enclosures of traditional public administration as the wider

context within which the study of state and local government reformation

must be placed. Reed too advances similar arguments that describe shifts in

industrial capitalism and the modern social order, and many other

contributors to the volume refer to globalisation and fragmentation as

essential elements of the wider picture within which the appreciation of

bureaucracy must be situated. My feeling is though that the far-reaching

economic and technological changes that have transformed capitalism and

modernity over the last fifty years or so are not given due attention. I may

demand too much and, in addition, resurrect, through these claims of mine,

the ghost of the Marxist dualism of base and infrastructure. Be that as it

may, I do not think the current shifts in the organizational templates of

industrial capitalism and modes of governance to which they are implicated

can adequately be understood without consideration of the underlying

conditions to which they are associated. And such an understanding seems to

me essential for appreciating the pressures exercised upon the state and the

bureaucratic form. Even though NPM may be in decline, the pressures for

reorganizing the state along lines that challenge the bureaucratic form may

well continue to the degree that they reflect underlying changes in the

structure of late capitalism and modernity.

The infrastructural changes that are implicated in the restructuring of

state power and the reformation of the public sector are clearly manifested in

the spectacular growth of technological information, its expanding instru-

mental involvement and the ensuing institutional implications these devel-

opments have for the lay out and control of economic and political processes

(Castells 2000; Fountain 2001; Sassen 2001). I can do no more than just

hinting at these highly evasive developments here. Even though they may

seem at a remove from the challenges facing public agencies, they are central

for understanding the disaggregation of both the public sector and private

corporations. Most crucially, they provide the conceptual means for

approaching the shifting architectures of control that keep on emerging in

the current late modern landscape of informational capitalism. If these

developments are not acknowledged then ideology (and shifting power

constellations) emerges as the only possible explanation. This seems to me

far from adequate. It is true that disaggregation in the public sector has often

624 Economy and Society

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

been motivated ideologically and often acquired, as many contributors to the

volume rightly demonstrate, artificial forms that are not necessarily

compatible with the infra-structural conditions under which many services

are produced.

And yet, the cumulative effects following the rising instrumental involve-

ment of information have had and will continue to have important

implications. The rendition and reconstitution of many operations and services

at the level of technical representation (i.e. software-based systems and

processes) have contributed to the dissolvability or decomposability of the

context-embedded and en bloc character which these operations and services

have traditionally assumed. In so doing they have substantially raised the

mobility, modularisation and transference of these operations across contexts.

These trends have been further reinforced by the lower communication costs

and the growing interoperability of ICTs and have tended to create a new

nexus of instrumental conditions (i.e. outsourcing, subcontracting, virtualisa-

tion) that have altered the architecture of control in and between organizations.

Even if finance and software services stand as the epitome of these

developments (Sassen 2001), the implications are much broader. Disaggrega-

tion can thus be related to � perhaps it is an instance of � the loosening

interdependence of resources and operations that previously assumed en bloc

forms, as the outcome of the developments which the technological paradigm

of information and communication technologies has brought about over more

than half a century now. The rejection of naıve technological determinism

provides no excuse for avoiding the study of the far reaching implications

which information and communication technologies have in remaking, in a

comprehensive fashion, the conditions under which products and services are

produced and distributed. These infrastructural foundations of the macro-

order seem to me extremely important for understanding key developments in

the contemporary world that are closely associated with the changing

constitution of formal organizations (i.e. bureaucracies) and the shifting role

of the state. Off all the chapters in the volume only Mike Reed and indirectly

Newman, Goodsell and Miller venture into the exploration of some of these

issues (see, e.g. Kallinikos 2006; Sassen 2006). This strikes me as a limitation

that emerges more forcefully against the background of the ongoing

technology-motivated reconstruction of the public services (referred to as

e-government or e-governance) and the different, at least in some respects,

issues which the comprehensive ‘virtualisation’ of the state posits (see, e.g.

Fountain 2001).

A volume cannot of course cover the whole world and it is quite plausible

that the authors consciously made the decision not to include issues of this sort

in The Values of Bureaucracy. Institutional developments like the ones which

the authors focus on are substantially complex and, as already indicated,

relatively independent of wider economic and technological changes and they,

perhaps, deserve to be studied on their own right, without being related or

even attributed to another reality beyond. In view of the objections I have

Jannis Kallinikos: The institution of bureaucracy 625

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

raised above, I feel therefore the need of restating my admiration for the Values

of Bureaucracy and the fact that I found the volume highly interesting and

stimulating in many ways. The issues I have sought to outline above are meant

to provide an intellectual mirror to the contributors of the volume (and the

readers of the journal) by someone with similar research preoccupations yet

slightly different background than most of them. Scholarship only gains by

such intellectual cross-disciplinary confrontation.

Notes

1 As I claim below economic governance is predicated on the assumption that allvalues are instances of utility. For a critical reappraisal of economics see Sen (1987) andGordon (1991).2 This position presents substantial similarities to the one Lyotard (1984) advances inhis La condition postmoderne , despite the fact that he every now and then loves to combatwith Luhmann.

References

Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition ,Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress.Barry, A. (2001) Political Machines:Governing a Technological Society,London: The Athlone Press.Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society, London:Sage.** (2000) The Brave New World ofWork , Cambridge: Polity.Castells, M. (2000) ‘Materials for anExplanatory Theory of Network Society’,British Journal of Sociology 51(1): 5� 24.** (2001) The Internet Galaxy, Oxford:Oxford University Press.Chapman, R. A. (ed.) (2000) Ethics inPublic Service for the New Millennium ,Aldershot: Ashgate.Courpasson, D. and Reed, M. (eds)(2004) Special Issue on Bureaucracy inthe Age of Enterprise, Organization 11(1).Du Gay, P. (2000) In Praise ofBureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics ,London: Sage.Fligstein, N. (1990) The Transformationof Corporate Control , Cambridge, Mass:Harvard University Press.** (2001) The Architecture of Markets ,Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fountain, J. (2001) Building the VirtualState: Information Technology andInstitutional Change , New York:Brookings.Gellner, E. (1983) Nations andNationalism , Oxford: Blackwell.** (1996) Conditions of Liberty: CivilSociety and its Rivals , London: Penguin.Gordon, C. (1991) ‘Introduction’, in G.Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds)The Foucault Effect: Studies inGovernmentality, London: Harvester.Heller, A. (1999) A Theory of Modernity,Oxford: Blackwell.Hirschman, A. O. (1977) The Passionsand the Interests , Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.Holmes, S. (1994) ‘Liberalism for aWorld of Ethnic Passions and DecayingStates’, Social Research 61(3): 599� 610.Jaques, E. (1976) A General Theory ofBureaucracy, London: Heinemann.Kallinikos, J. (2003) ‘Work, HumanAgency and Organizational Forms: AnAnatomy of Fragmentation’, OrganizationStudies 24(4): 595� 618.** (2004) ‘The Social Foundations ofthe Bureaucratic Order’, Organization11(1): 13� 36.

626 Economy and Society

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

** (2006) The Consequences ofInformation: Institutional Implicationsof Technological Change , Cheltenham:Edward Elgar.Luhmann, N. (1982) The Differentiationof Society, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.** (1995) Social Systems , Stanford:Stanford University Press.** (1998) Observations onModernity, Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress.Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The PostmodernCondition , Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press.Perrow, C. (1986) ComplexOrganizations: A Critical Essay, NewYork: Random House.Pottage, A. (1998) ‘Power as an Art ofContingency: Luhmann, Deleuze,Foucault’, Economy and Society 27(1):1� 27.Powel, W. W. and DiMaggio, P. J. (eds)(1991) The New Institutionalism inOrganizational Analysis , Chicago: TheUniversity of Chicago Press.Sassen, S. (2001) The Global City,Princeton: Princeton University Press.** (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights ,Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Sennett, R. (1992) The Fall of PublicMan , London: Norton.** (2001) The Global City, Princeton:Princeton University Press.** (2006a) The Culture of NewCapitalism , New Haven: Yale UniversityPress.** (2006b) Territory, Authority,Rights , Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.Sen, A. (1987) On Ethics and Economics ,Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.Tilly, C. (2001) ‘Welcome to theSeventeenth Century’, in P. J. DiMaggio(ed.) The Twenty-First Century Firm ,Princeton: Princeton University Press,pp. 200� 9.Tilly, C. and Tilly, C. (1998) WorkUnder Capitalism , Oxford: WestviewPress.Walzer, M. (1983) Spheres of Justice: ADefence of Pluralism and Equality, Oxford:Blackwell.Weber, M. (1978) Economy andSociety, vols. 1� 2, G. Roth and C.Wittich (eds), Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Jannis Kallinikos is a Reader in the Department of Management, London

School of Economics and Political Science. His major research interests entail

the study of information and its institutional and organizational repercussions.

Some of these concerns are documented in his recent book The Consequences of

Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change published by

ELGAR in 2006.

Jannis Kallinikos: The institution of bureaucracy 627

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Fond

ren

Lib

rary

, Ric

e U

nive

rsity

] a

t 11:

56 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014