Major Themes in Industrialised Societies: Organisations I

 

- Max Weber and Ralph Fevre

We shall examine the Weberian approach to modern organisations, and explore some of the moral aspects of organisations

 

Weber’s view on organisations

a) Ideal form of modern bureaucracy

Weber constructs ideal types of organisations, in particular the rational-legal form of bureaucracy. Bureaucracies in modern industrial society are steadily moving towards this ‘pure’ type. This ideal type contains the following characteristics:

i) Each administrative official has a clearly defined area of responsibility. Complex tasks are broken down into manageable parts, with each official specialising in a particular area. For example, state administration is divided into various departments such as education and health. Within each department every official has a clearly defined sphere of competence and responsibility.

ii) A chain of command and responsibility is established whereby officials are accountable to their immediate superior both for the conduct of their own official duties and those of everybody below them.

iii) The operations of the bureaucracy are governed by ‘a consistent system of abstract rules’, and application of these rules to particular cases. These rules clearly define the limits of the authority held by various officials in the hierarchy. Obedience to superiors stems from a belief in the correctness of the rules. They impose strict discipline and control, leaving little room for personal initiative or discretion.

iv) The ideal official performs her duties in a spirit of formalistic impersonality without hatred or passion. The activities of bureaucrats are governed by the rules, not by personal considerations, such as feelings towards colleagues or clients. Business is conducted according to calculable rules and ‘without regard for persons’.

v) Officials are appointed on the basis of technical knowledge and expertise. Officials are selected in terms of the contribution their particular knowledge and skills can make to the realisation of organisational goals. Promotion is based on seniority or achievement, or a combination of both.

vi) Bureaucratic administration involves a strict separation of private and official income. Officials do not own any part of the organisation for which they work, nor can they use their position for private gain. ‘Bureaucracy segregates official activity as something distinct from the sphere of private life.’

 

b) Effectiveness of modern bureaucracy

Weber argues that modern bureaucracy is highly effective mode of organising large number of people.

i) Bureaucratic procedures might in some ways limit initiatives, but they also ensure that decisions are taken according to general criteria rather than individual whim or caprice.

ii) Although training official to be experts in the area to which their duties apply cuts out the ‘talented amateur’, but ensures a general level of overall competence.

iii) Making official positions salaried and full-time reduces, although it does not eliminate, possibilities of corruption. Traditional system of authority allowed officials to adopt ad hoc decisions for personal gains.

iv) The fact that performance is judged by examinations or other public means reduces – although it does not eliminate – the obtaining of positions through personal favour or kinship connections.

 

c) Informal relations embedded in modern bureaucracies

i) Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy gives primacy to formal relations within organisations. The more bureaucratised an organisation is, the more tasks are fixed and detailed. But in bureaucracies, informal ways of doing things are often the chief means by which a measure of flexibility is achieved.

ii) Informal networks tend to develop at all levels of organisations. Personal ties and connections may be more important in the real structure of power than formal relations. For example, business leaders and managers may consult one another in informal way, and belong to the same clubs. Colleagues may consult among themselves on how to undertake their work rather discuss this with their immediate supervisor. Colleagues consult each other to obtain concrete advice for creative ideas, innovations and reforms (i.e., learning organisations), and reduce the anxieties involved in working alone. This also enhances better working environment, motivation and productivity gains.

Recruitment may involve recommendation from trusted and close friends and relatives rather than formal education qualifications. To achieve loyalty and cohesion at work, organisations may employ workers know o each other ‘outsiders’ (e.g., minority ethnic workers).

iii) Often this situation can be characterised as social embedding of organisations. This social embedding serves to promote the power and interests of particular groups, but also to achieve flexibility in an otherwise inflexible ex-ante mode of coordinating economic practices. Flexibility is vital for the success of an organisation to ensure effective response to changing social, economic and political conditions in the economy.

 

A moral critique of modern bureaucracy

a) The system of rational, specialised and expert examinations is increasingly indispensable for a modern bureaucracy. The valuation of technical expertise is radically different from the ideal of the ‘cultivated man’, who gave himself to work to enhance the public good. Modernity turns the world over to specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart. Office holding is a ‘vocation’ (rather than a ‘calling’), and the nature of the official’s work is one of duty.

b) The ethical character of an organisation presupposes a ‘sense of duty’ and ‘conscientiousness’, which contrasts sharply with the morality of ‘honour’. The bureaucracy is strangely ‘amoral machine’, which rests on officials renouncing and giving up their individual responsibility and being subservient to the organisation; e.g., the Nuremberg trials. The honour of the official is vested in her ability to execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities exactly as if the order agreed with her own conviction. This holds even if the order appears wrong to her. Without this moral discipline and self-denial, the whole bureaucratic apparatus would fall into pieces.

c) Weber regards the technical rationality of organisation as the most efficient technical means of achieving particular ends. Organisations are formally rational in that they allow individuals and society to have the knowledge and means to strive for particular ends. But organisations cannot provide or evaluate the ends themselves – they lack substantive rationality. Organisations have nothing to say on questions of value, and are silent on exactly that which gives all human life and action their meaning. They give no answer to our question, ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ The Nazi holocaust machine was effective in running the trains to Auschwitz and Treblinka without assessing the end purpose of the task. In this way, officials who served organisations chose to live by an ‘ethic of responsibility’ rather than an ‘absolute ethic’ of ultimate ends.

d) Worse still, organisations can undermine exactly those values which we cherish and have reason to value, as reason, logic and calculation dominate moral sentiments, passions and sympathy. The rational disenchantment of technical organisations destroys the possibility of a moral soul and ethical framework as well as failing to provide an adequate substitute for morality. This is an irretrievable loss.

e) What organisations leave us with is the unprecedented loneliness of the single individual, for whom humane values and direct and personal human relations are in retreat in the face of the logic of calculation and reason. In effect, humanity and humaneness are everywhere in retreat before the impersonal deities of modernity such as bureaucracies and science.