BUREAUCRACY: AN IDEA WHOSE

TIME HAS COME (AGAIN)?

Haldor Byrkjeflot and Paul du Gay

ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we focus on the stabilizing functions of public bureaux andexamine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make themless hierarchical and more ‘flexible’. In so doing, we seek to evidence theways in which what are represented as anachronistic practices in themachinery of government may actually provide political life with particularrequired ‘constituting’ qualities. While such practices have been negativelycoded by reformers as ‘conservative’, we hope to show that their veryconservatism may serve positive political purposes, not the least of which isin the constitution of what we call ‘responsible’ (as opposed to simply‘responsive’) government. Through a critical interrogation of certain keytropes of contemporary programmes of modernization and reform, weindicate how these programmes are blind to the critical role of bureaucracyin setting the standards that enable governmental institutions to act in aflexible and responsible way.

Keywords: Bureaucracy; flexibility; hierarchy; Weber; anachonism

Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations

Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 85–109

Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035006

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INTRODUCTION

‘What is new in the modern world is not acceptance of diversity in styles of life. It is

hostility to hierarchies’

John Gray The Two Faces of Liberalism

It is not currently easy to make a case for the importance of hierarchy,whether one wishes to do so in the world of formal politics or in the world offormal organization. Wherever one looks, hierarchy is routinely representedas antithetical to the realization of any number of cherished values – pluralism,freedom, equality, enterprise, creativity and innovation, for instance – the listis long asmany of the basic premises informing its compilation aremisguided.For the last three decades that form of hierarchical organization which we callbureaucracy has been the subject of constant political and managerialcriticism.While such criticism has not been levelled exclusively at public sectororganizations, it is the latter that have been most frequently associated withthe dysfunctions of bureaucracy, seen as the epitome of hierarchicalorganization, and thus towhom the imperatives for reformandmodernisationhave been most vociferously addressed. There is still much debate aboutwhether rhetorical injunctions to de-bureaucratize have been matched bypractical achievements. Both modernisers and defenders of bureaucracy alikemay have been hostage to exaggerating claims about the end of the bureau(Thompson & Alvesson, 2005). What is less in doubt, however, is the size andnear constancy of public sector organizational reform across many countriesover the last few decades, and, at its centre, a desire to banish, breakthrough orotherwise transcend, bureaucracy. Under the auspices of modernisation andde-bureaucratization, the working methods and conditions of manythousands of public sector workers have been altered.

However, despite the claims of politicians, management consultants andsocial theorists, for example, that the end of the bureau is (and, indeed,should be) nigh, there remain a number of reasons to be cautious. In theaftermath of the corporate scandals at Enron, Worldcom et al., even thefulsomely anti-bureaucratic The Economist (2003) noted that organizationallife was bearing witness to a ‘partial return to values we thought were goneforever’ (2002, p. 118). In particular, it was noted that the cult of ‘thecharismatic leader’ was ‘being cast aside’, and in its place was espied anincreased value being placed on dull but (once again) worthy managementskills of ‘attention to detail’ and attention to formal procedures. Linked tothis, a renewed concern with hierarchical forms of management was noted.This, it was argued, followed from recognition of the personnel problems

Bureaucracy: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)? 87

deriving from a lack of clear guidelines. ‘People’, they suggested, ‘like toknow to whom they are reporting. This will start to be built into companystructures. Gently, the middle manager will stage something of a comeback’(2002, p. 118). Taken together, these developments pointed to a return ofthat which dared not utter its name: ‘Bureaucracy, after many years ofdecline, will be on the rise again’ (2002, p. 118). The Economist baulked at itsown conclusions, however, stating that this (re)discovery of bureaucracyhad ‘nothing at all to commend it’, despite the logic of its own analysispointing in the opposite direction: that bureaucracy was a tool to solve aproblem – one relating to the disasters that deliberate attempts to transcendbureaucracy had brought into being.

Even now, during a remarkable economic and regime crisis (Crouch,2008; Valukas, 2010), whose anti-bureaucratic roots are not too difficult todiscern or trace, bureaucracy is still a word that appears to be unnameableto positive political coding (Olsen, 2008). It is represented as so thoroughly‘out of time’ that to invoke its name is to be labelled at best nostalgic, and atworse, irrelevant. As Peters (2003) has indicated, contemporary publicadministrators find it increasingly difficult to give voice to the values ofWeberian public bureaucracy without appearing to be anachronistic. Andyet, the values of bureaucracy – hierarchical integrity or integrality, dueprocess, thoroughness – are continually attested to, if nearly always (withcertain honourable exceptions) indirectly or otherwise elliptically.

In this chapter, we focus on public bureaux, instituted to pursuedistinctive purposes on behalf of the state, and examine some of theconsequences attendant upon attempts to make them less hierarchical andmore flexible in the name of various epochal imperatives of ‘change’ or‘modernization’. In so doing, we seek to evidence the ways in which what arerepresented as anachronistic practices in government – the hierarchicalstructuring of offices, from which governance is conducted, for example –may actually provide political life with particular required ‘constituting’qualities. While such practices have been negatively coded by reformers as‘conservative’, we hope to show that their very conservatism may servepositive political purposes, not the least of which is in the constitution ofwhat we call ‘responsible’ (as opposed to simply ‘responsive’) government.In this respect, we argue that bureaucratic practices are permanent featuresof government which help constitute the political landscape; they can be‘gotten around’ in one or another, but only at some considerable cost.

Finally, through a critical interrogation of certain key tropes ofcontemporary programmes of modernization, specifically that of ‘flexibility’,

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we hope to indicate how bureaucratic practices in governmental administra-tion can be seen to provide some useful illustrations of the ‘conservationstandards’ appropriate to the political management of the state, including themanagement of ‘change’ within the state. We suggest that there is not only asuppleness and integrity to the practices of hierarchical bureaucracy, but alsothat bureaucracy itself in producing predictability in a state’s decisions,actually enhances, indeed, even constitutes, the freedom and flexibility ofthose operating within the state’s field of vision (Larmore, 1987, pp. 40–42;Law, 2001). As Larmore (1987, p. 41) has argued in relation to the latter point,‘to the extent that a state’s decisions are less predictable, institutions in therest of society are less able to plan their own activities. Thus, to a greaterpredictability in government corresponds a greater freedom of the otherspheres of social life’. More generally, this focus on ‘conservation standards’,we suggest, offers a useful corrective to the widespread, and frequentlyde-contextualized representation of ‘change’ as progressive, and ‘constraint’or ‘limit’ as reactionary.

The chapter is organized as follows. We begin by exploring the ways inwhich and the tropes through which bureaucracy as an institution ofgovernment is represented as anachronistic within contemporary discoursesand programmes of public sector modernization. We note, in particular, themetaphysical and theological aura permeating modernizing discourses, andsuggest that it is the latter, rather than the bureaucratic practices theycriticise, which might be more plausibly accused of anachronism. There is noattempt in modernising tracts to describe bureaucratic practices in their ownterms, for to do so would require modernisers to be open themselves to thepossibility that such practices might actually serve positive politicalpurposes rather than simply being ‘outdated’ and ‘broken’. In the secondsection, we seek to make explicit some of the positive political purposesthat hierarchical bureaucratic organization in government performs. Here,we show how bureaucratic practices are not waste products that can beremoved or transcended without cost, but rather permanent features whichconstitute the political landscape, and whose dissolution or disappearancecan come at a very high price. In the third section, we seek to articulate someof these costs through an examination of the practical application ofone of the key norms of contemporary modernising discourse: ‘flexibility’.We argue that current attempts to make bureaucracies more flexible canundermine their political efficacy and effectiveness. We conclude with someobservations on the importance of bureaucratic practices to the functioningof states and representative democratic government as well as to effectiveand accountable management in private sector organizations.

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THE CRITICISM AGAINST BUREAUCRACY FOR

BEING ANACHRONISTIC

In recent and ongoing discussions of public sector reform, accusations ofanachronism proliferate. Such accusations are most readily identified withclaims about the need for reform in the first place. Thus, for example, wefind the opening pages of Osborne and Gaebler’s (1992) classic modernizingtract Re-Inventing Government replete with images of an outdated and thus‘broken’ bureaucratic public administration, no longer able to fulfil itsinstituted purposes, because it is fundamentally out of step, temporally, withthe environment in which it now has to operate. In this reading, bureaucracyis positioned akin to what Ulrich Beck (2005) terms ‘a zombie category’:something still living but effectively dead. This bureaucratic anachronism iscontrasted with the practices of ‘entrepreneurial governance’, whosemodernity is not in doubt, and which is deemed to offer the public sectorthe possibility of salvation, and hence a viable future. As has been arguedelsewhere (du Gay, 2003), modernizing tomes such as Osborne andGaebler’s operate with an ‘epochalist’ frame, deploying a periodisingschema in which a logic of dichotomisation is established, in advance, eitherfor or against. Thus, in such a schema, ‘bureaucratic public administration’is associated only with a failed past, whereas ‘today’s environment demandsinstitutions that are extremely flexible and adaptable’ and ‘that areresponsive to their customersy that lead by persuasion and incentivesrather than command; that give their employees a sense of meaning andcontrol, ownership even’ (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992, p. 15).

‘Entrepreneurial governance’ is represented as in tune with needs ofhistory, while the past is simply represented as unworthy of seriousconsideration, so bound up is it with what has failed and what cannotpossibly be sustained in the future. Perhaps one of the most dramatic andexplicit examples of such future-oriented thinking can be found in theopening pages of Hammer and Champy’s (1995) Re-Engineering TheCorporation

Re-engineering is about beginning with a clean sheet of paper. It is about rejecting the

conventional wisdom and received assumptions of the pastyHow people and

companies did things yesterday doesn’t matter to the business re-engineer. (1995, p. 2)

Here, the past is nothing more than a conservative constraint on futureaction, and in an era of unrelenting change, something to be dispensed withat all costs. Historical memory, indeed, history, itself, is an anachronism.

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Such epochalist discourses establish a periodising logic – between modernand post-modern, for instance – which is also a dichotomization betweenparticular styles of public management – bureaucratic and entrepreneurial,for example. Because the co-ordinates are set up so far in advance, thereappears no escape for the frame of reference, and thus from the conclusionsreached. In this sense, as Ronald Moe (1994, p. 113) has argued, epochalistforms of argumentation are often quite metaphysical, possessing what hedescribes as a ‘theological aura’. This ‘theological aura’ makes themprecisely anachronistic because they operate outside of historical time. Theirconception of history is, so to speak, normative in the sense of holdingcontexts (in this case ‘public administration’) accountable for the degree towhich they are able historically to realize certain idealities. Commentingspecifically on the National Performance Review in the United States, Moeargues that the latter was never framed in terms of a set of propositionssubject to empirical or temporal proof or disproof, but rather registered as agroup of statements exhorting acceptance and action. The ‘bureaucraticparadigm’ was the cause of the government being broken in the eyes of theentrepreneurial management promoters. It had not proven flexible enoughto permit change to occur at the speed considered necessary in the newinformation-driven, globalized world. The report argued, deterministically,that the entrepreneurial management paradigm must prevail and the alter-native was increasingly dysfunctional government. Those who questionedthis paradigm were fundamentally out of step with the demands of thepresent and future (Moe, 1994, pp. 113–14).

In indicating the ‘theological’ and ‘metaphysical’ aura permeating suchepochalist schemas, Moe makes an important point: that epochalists, whileostensibly depending on historical explanation to construct their period-isations, are actually anachronistic, precisely because they seem to thinkthey know what is needed in advance. According to modernizers, theentrepreneurial management paradigm will succeed; there is no room forhistorical contingency here, only destiny and, hence, teleology. As March(1995), for example, has argued, such a future orientation with no regard forthe contingencies of the past may lead to the establishment of organizationsthat become victims of ‘rigidities of imagination’.

Similarly, this anachronism also pervades the manner in which epochalanalyses seek to describe that which they also wish to refute. Thus, we findthat the ‘bureaucratic paradigm’ is effectively re-described in terms set for itby entrepreneurial principles and norms. No attempt is made to offer ‘grey,meticulous or patiently documentary’ (Foucault, 1986) descriptions of anyactually existing bureaucracies or bureaucratic practices. Rather, a whole

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host of different practices and purposes are reduced to one overarchingdesignation, ‘bureaucracy’, whose historical ‘failure’ and supersession isrepresented as largely due to its inability to operate according to the normsand principles advocated by modernizers. Perhaps it is only by deprivingbureaucratic practices of their own raison d’etre, and assessing themsimply in terms of a cluster of alternative assumptions and norms, that theycan then be represented as anachronistic. What if bureaucratic practices donot and were not designed to give voice to entrepreneurial principles, andoperate according to their own distinctive ethics that entrepreneurialprinciples and norms simply cannot recognize in the terms they set out ‘inadvance’? Who or what would then be best considered anachronistic?

As Conal Condren (2006) has argued, ‘It is little better than giving up ifwe admit the anachronisms involved in some of our descriptive vocabulary,and then still proceed as if they did not matter.’ If we rely simply on con-temporary norms and principles of public management to frame the terms inwhich we are to understand the past, we may gradually cease to knowwhat so-called ‘old public management’ was, and instead, simply trade onstereotypes about it, ad infinitum.

Post-Bureaucracy and Memory Loss

While the epochalism of contemporary public management discourse hasbeen subject to considerable critical commentary (Clarke & Newman, 1997;du Gay, 2000, 2004; Moe, 1994), this has been supplemented more recentlyby a renewed interest in time and timing in public management (Pierson,2004; Pollitt, 2008, 2009). A key feature of this analysis is a focus on theissue of organizational memory and forgetting. According to Pollitt (2009),for instance, one of the consequences of the practical implementation of thenorms and techniques of conduct advocated by modernizers has been asignificant shift in the capacity of organizations to learn from or evenremember their own pasts. In particular, he draws attention to the ways inwhich the devices and practices of ‘post-bureaucratic’ organizing – whetherassociated with New Public Management or Public Service Networks – canlead to ‘the deterioration of organizational memories, so that policymakersand managers quickly lose track of relevant experience from even the recentpast’ (Pollitt, 2008). He points, inter alia, to team-working, to contractingout and to the decline of long-term careers and the growth of temporaryand short-term contract working, as well as to a doctrinal bias in favour ofparticular norms of flexibility, enterprise and innovation, to show how these

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involve a number of radical departures from bureaucratic norms andtechniques of conduct, with some serious consequences for the organizationofmemory for the provision of responsible, efficient and effective governance.The serial restructurings associated with modernizing efforts, he indicates,chip away at the knowledge and skills associated with established practicesof organizational memory (archiving, record-keeping, filing etc.) and alsoleads to the loss of experienced staff who knew how tomaintain such practicesin the service of public administration as a distinctive art of government.In this sense, the loss of organizational memory may not only entailthe diminution of the conservation standards associated with bureau-cratic administration, but those associated with representative democraticgovernment too.

After all, as we will discuss at greater length in the third section, practicessuch as minute-taking are banal but crucial devices in the establishment oforganizational memory, key elements in the practice of bureaucratic formsof governmental administration and, as a number of commentators haveindicated, equally important to the securing of political accountability inrepresentative democracies (Olsen, 2006, 2008). For without a clear andagreed record of a decision made, there is no way of holding the decisionmakers to account (Hennessy, 2004; Wilson, 2004). Similarly, if the civilservice were to fulfil its constitutional role as instituted counsel to govern-ment, for instance by indicating how contemporary policy proposals relateto past policy failures or successes, it is not clear how it can do so if recordkeeping and archiving is not viewed as a valuable form of activity in contrastto a focus on delivery, for example (Quinlan, 2004).

An increased reliance on a network mode of governance, as Pollitt (2008)suggests, may also undermine organizational memory, since such networksdo not necessarily rely on a central (or any) unit for storing and distributingknowledge relating to past activities and events (such as rules, records orfiles). As he argues, it is not just whether information is stored or not thatmatters, but also to what extent there are practices of rememberinginstituted within organizations. The past must be continuously articulated,checked and be reflected upon in order to become memory. Without such aninstitutionalized practice, also called bureaucracy, ‘we will have no warningsabout potential dangersy and no opportunity to gain a richer awareness ofthe repertoire of possible remedies’ (Misztal, 2003, p. 14).

Here Pollitt’s arguments, as well as those presented by the recent BetterGovernment Initiative in the United Kingdom (2010), intersect with a longerhistory of work within organization studies, where various organizationaldevices or instruments – formal rules, for example – have long been seen to

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provide codes of meaning that facilitate interpretation of an ambiguouspast. As the work of JamesMarch has clearly indicated, for instance, one mayspeak of internalized organizational rules as lessons which are encodedby actors drawing inferences from their experiences (March, Schultz, &Zhou, 2000).

Rules, procedures, technologies, beliefs, and cultures are conserved through systems of

socialization and control. They are retrieved through mechanisms of attention within a

memory structure. Such organizational instruments not only record history but shape its

future path, and the details of that path depend significantly on the processes by which

the memory is maintained and consulted. (Levitt & March, 1988, p. 326)

As arguments such as these suggest, contemporary discourses of publicsector modernization, and the devices they deploy to give practicaleffect to their dreams and schemes, both express and create an enmity orcontempt for the past which can have a serious impact upon the ability oforganizations to establish and maintain practices of remembering.After all, the ways in which humans and organizations give meaning toexperience, including the capacities to learn from experience, are intimatelyrelated to the devices or techniques of ‘meaning production’. The latter –grids of visualization, vocabularies, norms and systems of judgment –produce experience, and are not simply produced by experience. Changingthe vocabularies by which people understand the activities they areengaged in changes the identity of those activities; altering the devices andpractices of meaning production changes the ways in which past actionsand present and future conducts are held to relate one to another. AsPollitt’s (2008) work suggests, in their headlong rush to the future,organizationally impatient enthusiasts for public sector modernizationhave reduced both the potential and actual influence of organizationalmemories. They have done so both through the norms they advocate for a‘re-invented’ public sector, and crucially through the devices they instituteas means of reforming what they view as the ‘anachronistic’ practices ofbureaucratic forms of public administration. However, as we have sug-gested, and as Pollitt’s arguments imply, it is perhaps modernising reformswhich are really anachronistic, rather than those practices they seek to‘modernise’.

Having briefly indicated some of the ways in which bureaucratic tech-niques and devices serve important ‘conservation’ functions in government,not least through their provision of ‘institutional memory’, we proceed nowto widen our argument and by indicating how and why the bureau performsa central and multifaceted role in democratic governance more widely,

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functioning in effect as the ‘key unit’ of governance (Goodsell, 2005). In sodoing, we seek to show how bureaucratic practices are not waste productsthat can be removed or transcended without cost, but rather permanentfeatures which constitute the political landscape, and whose dissolution ordisappearance can come at a high political and governmental price.

BUREAUCRACY AS HIERARCHY, RULES AND

EXPERTISE

As we suggested earlier, bureaucracy has been represented as ananachronism not least because the values it embodies and expresses –hierarchy, authority, formality, impersonalism – are seen as fundamentallyout of kilter with the demands of the present and future – which it is arguedare to be better managed through the promotion of alternative set ofcriteria, such as informality, flexibility and personal empowerment. In thefollowing, we want to make an argument as to why bureaucratic principlesof organizing may still provide important underpinnings for the moderndemocratic order.

In doing this, we follow a line of reasoning recently presented by Olsen(2008) who argues that the idea of bureaucracy, both as outlined by MaxWeber and in the way it has been institutionalized in democratic states,combines three principles of governance: hierarchy, rules and expertise.Since governments and parliaments have legislative supremacy andauthority, there has to be a hierarchical system in place – a bureaucracy –in order to ensure that the will of parliament is implemented and officers ofstate and government are held accountable for their decisions and actions.Democratic–bureaucratic authority is embedded in constitutions and has tobe rule-bound, not least because it regulates the relationships betweencitizens and representatives, as well between politicians and administrators,law and administration and within the bureaucracy itself. Furthermore,bureaucracy is expert authority since civil servants are selected on the basisof their professional, impartial and non-partisan knowledge. It follows fromthis that bureaucracy is not just an instrument, but also an institution ‘witha raison d’etre of its own’, the bureaucracy is ‘a changing mix of fairlyenduring and legitimate organizational forms’ that has developed differentlyin different states and political contexts (Olsen, 2008).

Recently, there has been a call for a return to bureaucracy, both as aresponse to some of the accountability problems associated with thefragmenting forces of NPM, as well as the crises and scandals, such as those

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associated with the ongoing credit crisis, which have also triggered demandsfor legal rules and an ethos of responsibility. The World Bank, amongothers, has given increased attention to the relationship between goodgovernment, economic development, reduced corruption and poverty. Also,market reforms in the former communist countries have had consequencesthat in turn have led to calls for the establishment of well-functioningbureaucratic governance. Many of these countries jumped straight intoadopting market principles and management systems without previouslyestablishing a solid basis for democratic development – ‘pre-eminently abureaucratic administration with autonomy from the political and economicspheres’ (Raandma-Liiv, 2009). A similar argument was made long ago byCarl Friedrich (1950, p. 57), no friend of Weberian bureaucracy, whowarned that easy sloganeering about the need to de-bureaucratize in thename of liberty and democracy evidenced a rather simplistic understandingof both bureaucracy and democracy. As he observed: ‘A realistic study ofgovernment has to start with an understanding of bureaucracyybecauseno government can function without it.’

Similarly, as Holmes and Sunstein (1999, p. 14) point out, thesebureaucratic practices may be the ‘costs’ that society has to bear in orderto enjoy the liberties it values so highly. Not least because those rights andliberties are the product of ‘vigorous state action’ (1999, p. 14). As Holmes(1994, p. 605) has argued, ‘statelessness means rightlessness. Statelesspeople, in practice have no rights’: inhabitants of weak or poor states tendto have few or laxly enforced rights. Without centralized and bureaucraticstate capacities, there is no possibility of forging ‘a single and impartial legalsystem – the rule of law – on the population of a large nation. Without awell organized political and legal system, exclusive loyalties and passions’are difficult to control. Seen in this light, the unresponsiveness andimpersonality of bureaucratic conduct against which critics of the bureaurail becomes instead ‘a condition of freedom’ (Larmore, 1987, p. 42).

The bureau is integral to the whole process of governance, it is aninstrument not just for rule but also for response, which implies that theinfluence of the bureau may be bottom-up via citizens and expertise aswell as top-down via elections and associated institutions for rule andhierarchy that provide informed direction and confer practical meaningon policy (Goodsell, 2005). In order to serve these functions the bureau-cracy must have certain autonomy from outside interests and frompolitics. Some of the preconditions for such an autonomous position ofthe bureaucracy were outlined by Max Weber particularly in his politicalwritings.

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Weber’s view of bureaucracy has often been misinterpreted and translatedinto the so-called Weberian ideal type, putting emphasis on the machine-likeand one-dimensional character of the bureaucratic model. By criticising thisidea, and following Olsen’s emphasis on the institutional and compositeaspects of bureaucracy, we build upon the work of Weberian scholars, suchas Hennis (1988, 2000) and Goldman (1988, 1992), who approach Weber asa historical anthropologist of Lebensfuhrung, making it clear that his workon bureaucracy is neither unequivocally celebratory nor overtly critical.Indeed, it is apparent that Weber was not mainly interested in offering aformal organizational theory of ‘bureaucracy’ at all (Byrkjeflot, 2000;Shenhav, 2003), but was rather, as Hennis (1988, 2000) observes, was mainlyinterested in specifying the ethical – cultural attributes of bureaucraticconduct, most particularly as these relate to politics. When approachingWeber’s work in this way, it appears that we may begin to see bureaucracyas furnishing political life with some important constituting qualities, in themanner testified by Olsen, Friedrich, Holmes and Goodsell.

In particular, Weber (1978, p. 983 ff) stresses the ways in which the ethosof bureaucratic office-holding constitutes an important political resourcebecause it serves to divorce the administration of public life from privatemoral absolutisms. Indeed, without the ‘art of separation’ (Walzer, 1984)that the state bureau effected and continues to effect, many of thequalitative features of government that are regularly taken for granted – forinstance, formal equality, reliability and procedural fairness in the treatmentof cases – would not exist.

As Weber makes clear, the crucial point of honour for bureaucrats is notto allow extra official commitments to determine the manner in which theyperform the duties associated with their office. ‘On the contrary’, thebureaucrat ‘takes pride in preserving his impartiality, overcoming his owninclinations and opinions, so as to execute in a conscientious and meaning-ful way what is required of him by the general definition of his duties or bysome particular instruction, even – and particularly – when they do notcoincide with his own political views’ (Weber, 1994a, p. 160). ‘The officialhas to sacrifice his own convictions to his duty of obedience’ (1994a, p. 204).This does not mean that officials only do the boring, routine work of publicor state administration. Independent decision-making and imaginativeorganizational capabilities are usually also demanded of the bureaucrat, andvery often expected even in large matters (Weber, 1994a, p. 160). This wasnot only the case for public bureaucrats, Weber argued, since many ofthe same principles would be used in private organizations. It is thus amistake, as has been frequently made in organization theory, to draw

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a sharp distinction between the mechanistic form of organizing allegedlyassociated with bureaucracy and the organic form associated with otherkinds of organizing, lately associated with the distinction between bureau-cracy and post-bureaucracy. As Styhre (2007, p. 12) has argued, ‘Bureau-cracies are by no means mechanical systems, but rather organismsstructured in accordance with some mechanical principles, yet capable ofresponding to and dealing with external changes.’

The key to understanding the ethos of bureaucratic office, Weber argued,resides in ‘the kind of responsibility’ associated with it, which he refers to asthe ‘ethos of office’ (1994b, p. 330) which means that the civil servants ‘senseof duty stands above his personal preference’. Without this ‘supremelyethical discipline and self-denial’, Weber (1994b, p. 331) continued, thewhole apparatus of the state would disintegrate, and thus all the politicalbenefits deriving from it would too. Also, as he made clear on a number ofoccasions, the ‘formalism’ of bureaucratic conduct – its instituted blindnessto inherited differences of standing and prestige – produces the verysubstantive effects – democracy and equality, for example – that the criticsof his own time, and indeed, ours, claimed bureaucratic conduct woulddestroy (Weber, 1978, 1994b). This idea that the ‘formal’ rationality ofbureaucratic conduct itself gives rise to substantive ethical goals and effectsand is rooted in its own Lebensordnung or ethical life-order, that of thebureau, has been largely ignored by critics keen to ‘rehumanize’ official lifethrough ‘post-bureaucratic’ means. In this way, as Holmes and Sunstein(1999) have indicated, they have been able to avoid asking some importantquestions, concerning the political and governmental costs of attempts topractically achieve or ‘deliver’ the dreams and schemes they advocate.

As John Rohr (1998) has persistently inquired: why do reformers neverseem to consider the constitutional and political impacts of theirorganizational reforms? After all, government has its own specific regimevalues, and failing to consider these when seeking wholesale changes in thebureaucratic apparatuses of state seems to pose a ‘forest and trees’ questionof the first order. In the following section, we explore some of the politicaland governmental consequences of attempts to reform state bureaucraciesto make them accord with particular principles at the heart of con-temporary modernization discourse. The principle focus is contemporarynorms of ‘flexibility’. As we hope to show, there are reasons to be scepticalabout the usefulness of making institutions of state accord with theseprinciples, when seen from the standpoint of their contributions to thesecuring of responsible and predictable, and not merely ‘responsive’government.

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THE DEMAND FOR FLEXIBILITY: SOME PROBLEMS

As we indicated in the introduction, a certain assumption has come to framediscussions of organizational change in recent times, one which stresses theoverriding importance of the qualities of flexibility and adaptability toorganizational survival. Consequently, anything that reduces flexibility canbe construed as a threat to survival. Constraints on change are, by thisaccount, antithetical to flexibility, and thus are to be avoided, or whereevidenced, to be done away with. This assumption has become something ofa truism in discussions of organizational change in a variety of differentorganizational domains, and can be registered as frequently in debatesabout programmes of public administrative reform as it can in those focusedon the appropriate conduct of commercial enterprises. However, as HerbertKaufman (2007, p. xi) points out, such a truism is also something of asimplification. As he puts it, ‘For one thing, organizational flexibility is notunequivocally beneficial; it, too, entails risks to survival. For another,survival means the maintenance of many established behavioural andstructural patterns; organized entities are essentially lasting patterns of thesekinds. If many prevailing patterns in a given organization are disrupted, theorganization loses its form and character, its identity, its very existence as anongoing entity.’ In so doing, the purposes it has been instituted to pursue arealso placed under erasure.

We have focused on organizations instituted to pursue distinctive publicpurposes, on behalf of the state, and will now further examine some of theconsequences attendant upon attempts to make them more ‘flexible’ and‘adaptable’ in the name of various overriding imperatives of ‘change’ or‘modernization’. In particular, in the following section, we will discuss someproblems associated with the development of what was termed an informal‘sofa-style’ of government in the United Kingdom as revealed in testimony totwo committees of inquiry focusing in their rather different ways on theprocess that led to the decision to go to war with Iraq; we will also focus onarguments deployed by critics of bureaucracy in relation to the presumed needto relax financial control in government in order to achieve more flexibility.

Informalism and Flexibility: The UK Government’s Decision toGo to War with Iraq

In the light of continued disquiet concerning the justifications provided bythe British government in support of its decision to go to war with Iraq in

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2003, and in particular, its use of materials provided by the intelligenceservices, a committee of inquiry was set up in February 2004 to explore theintelligence that underpinned the government’s decision-making in thisregard. The Committee, chaired by Lord Butler of Brockwell, a former headof the British Civil Service, like the related inquiry into the death of thegovernment weapon’s expert, Dr. David Kelly, conducted by Lord Hutton,yielded an exceptionally detailed picture of how the centre of the Labourgovernment had been operating. A good deal of this, for all the criesand whispers of media commentators, came as little surprise, and was notconsidered particularly troubling to those who’d had some practicalfamiliarity with what we might term ‘the fog of government’. However, therewere, as Sir Michael Quinlan (2004, p. 125) has pointed out, ‘significantexceptions to that relaxed recognition’.

The Butler Committee Report, Review of Intelligence on Weapons of MassDestruction, voiced a number of serious critical comments upon how therelationship had come to function between the secret intelligence servicesand a small number of important policy-oriented persons in and around thePrime Minister’s Office in No. 10 Downing Street. Similarly, and, perhaps,more importantly, for our purposes, the report ended with what was, ineffect, a scathing denunciation of the way in which the then prime ministerhad organized and conducted certain elements of the leadership of thegovernment, including the collective cabinet dimension of that leadership.These two elements highlighted in the Butler report – the relationshipbetween the intelligence arm of government and its political leadership, andthe more general conduct of the machinery of political administration by thegovernment – revealed a tendency, also present in testimonies and in therecent report from the Better Government Initiative (2010), for traditionalpractices of governmental administration – practices we wish to locatewithin a broader notion of ‘bureaucratic rationality’ – to be superseded ortranscended by a more informal, flexible, style of conduct. As the Butlerreport indicated, this informal, flexible ‘sofa-style’ enabled significantdecisions to be made by small groups of governmental actors – ministers,special advisers and some officials (frequently imagined as an undiffer-entiated central executive resource) in un-minuted meetings. Embeddedsafeguards in the constitution, such as collective cabinet responsibility,proper audit trails and minuted meetings, and respect for the relativeindependence, impartiality and expertise of official advice had been set asideor seriously degraded.

These practices, we argue, characterised, as they are by a markedimpatience with due process, rest upon an assumption that traditional

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patterns of governmental administration are anachronistic and unsuited tothe demands of contemporary social, political and economic existence.However, as we also hope to show, attempts to bypass or otherwise transcendthem in pursuit of a more flexible, swift and ‘results’ oriented style ofmanagement – in pursuance of what Jane Caplan (1988) in another contextcalled the fantasy of ‘government without administration’ – risk underminingthe very conditions for governmental stabilization and reproduction, in termsof policy-making procedures and institutional effectiveness. In this way, the‘conservation standards’ appropriate to the political administration of thestate are jeopardised.

One of the most commented uponmoments in the Hutton inquiry occurredwhen in giving evidence, Jonathan Powell, the then prime minister’s ‘Chief ofStaff’, disclosed that of an average 17 meetings a day held in Downing Street,only three were minuted (Hutton Inquiry Transcripts for 18 August 2003).For Wilson (2004, pp. 85–86), such an approach was potentially quitedangerous. For while ‘formal meetings and minute-taking, for instance, mayseem ‘bureaucratic’’ and not ‘modern’ technologies, they played a crucialpractical role in ensuring good government and provided a necessaryunderpinning for the realization of constitutionally sanctioned accountabilityrequirements – of ministerial responsibility to Parliament, for example – byensuring that a proper record of governmental decision-making existed andthat agreed actions were clearly delineated. In other words, good minutesmake sure that everyone knows what had been decided. As Wilson (2004,p. 85) continued, ‘the official machine responds well to a decision which isproperly recordedy I believe that there is a connection between properprocesses and good government’.

Quinlan (2004, p. 127) has similarly argued that the Blairite belief thatexisting governmental administration was anachronistic appeared to restupon an insufficient understanding:

that existing patterns of government had not been developed without practical

reasonyWhere, as in Britain, there is no written constitution and governmental

practice rests largely upon convention, rather than entrenched rule or statute, changes

may be more easily made than in a more formalized setting, but that does not render

thorough, timelyy evaluation any less importanty

Aswe have seen, theButler committee’s characterisation of theBlair style ofgovernmental decision-making as ‘sofa government’, where small groups ofministers and their advisers made momentous decisions frequently withoutthe benefit of minute-takers, was both constitutionally and administrativelydisabling. It nonetheless sits well with the demands for amore flexible, ‘can do’

Bureaucracy: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)? 101

approach to public administration that also characterised previous Con-servative regimes. The niceties of consultation, discussion, recording – allelements of the traditional, much derided, bureaucratic style of publicadministration – are, in this view, inhibiting to the ‘efficient’ dispatch of affairs(O’Toole, 2006, p. 200). For instance, the more informal and personalizedways of conducting official business established by Blair and his coterie hadserious repercussions, for the possibility of the Cabinet exercising theconstitutionally important role of ‘collective responsibility’ on what Butlerdescribed as the ‘vital matter of war and peace’.

Linked to this informality and flexibility of approach was the govern-ment’s obsession with ‘delivery’. The New Labour administrations of Blairand Brown were infused with a strong impulse to achieve practical results.This salutary concern, though, has continually been contrasted with thepractices of traditional bureaucratic administration, which are representedas inherently antithetical to the securing of ‘delivery’. However, this focuson delivery can quite easily:

slide into a sense that outcome is the only true reality and that process is flummery. But

the two are not antithetical, still less inimical to one another. Process is care and

thoroughness, it is consultation, involvementy legitimacy and acceptance; it is also

record, auditability, and clear accountability. It is often, accordingly a significant

component of outcome itself; and the more awkward and demanding the issue –

especially amid the gravity of peace and war – the more it may come to matter. (Quinlan,

2004, p. 128)

As we have suggested, the idea that public administration as an institutionof government must be flexible is one of the most characteristic and at thesame time disabling aspect of ‘epochal’ attitudes to public management.Here, as we have seen, traditional bureaucratic forms of public adminis-tration are represented as out step with the demands of the present andfuture, and their continued presence within the machinery of government isregarded as testimony to the rigidity and inefficiency of that machinery andits need for its complete overhaul.

It is not necessary to make a fetish of role-demarcation in government, toknow that different actors in the governmental machine have differentpurposes, related to their ‘official’ position and ‘core tasks’, and a somewhatcontrasting set of ethics framing their conduct, and for very sound practicalreasons. As Weber (1994a, pp. 177–178) argued long ago, for instance, giventhe very different requirements of the respective ‘offices’ occupied bythe professional politician and the public bureaucrat, ‘it would be quiteastonishing if abilities which are inwardly so disparate’ were to coincidewithin the same persona. Ignoring ‘office’-based professional boundaries, in

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the name of enhancing flexibility, though, carries with it a temptation – orperhaps may be a reflection of a lack of consistent and dependable system.That was certainly the impression left by the Hutton and Butler inquiries. AsQuinlan (2004, pp. 127–28) puts it, the government appeared to exhibit:

Little interest in or tolerance for distinctions of function and responsibility between

different categories of actors within the government machiney there was a sense of all

participants – ministers, civil servants, special policy advisers, public relations handlers –

being treatedaspart of anundifferentiated resource for the support of the central executive.

For modernizers, such sentiments cut no ice. They appear, rather, as littlemore than expressions of an obstructive old fogeyism that they see as thehallmark of the worst aspects of the forces of conservatism within the publicservice.Modernizers have sought to reduce public bureaucracies to somethingakin to a ‘delivery mechanism’, framed by a ‘just do it’ mentality, and torepresent impartial state service as a dangerous fiction. In so doing, theyappear to have little appreciation of the positive and enduring reasons for notencouraging toomuch flexibility in arrangements in the public administrationas an institution of government, nor those for sustaining the UK’s 150-year-old tradition of unified, permanent, politically neutral crown service.

Public service neutrality, or party political impartiality, means not beingcommitted, by convictions guiding one’s official actions, to the creed andplatform of a current political party, while being able, without crisis ofconscience, to further the policies of any current party (Parker, 1993,p. 138). Civil servants are therefore likely to greet the enthusiasms andpanaceas of all political parties with caution. That is an important part oftheir job – one assigned to them by the constitution – and in fulfilling thatrole they can be seen as servants of the state. This is the kernel of the case forkeeping the public service open to all those with the requisite talent andfor keeping the appointments and promotions of the main body of itsmembership independent of party control. This does not preclude ministersfrom having political aides, but it may have costs in the form of a lesserenthusiastic and committed official embrace of party programmes of socialchange than party enthusiasts might wish. While it is easy to see how such acritical role can be viewed by politicians as a licence to obstruct, it was, untilcomparatively recently, generally considered to be indispensable to theachievement of ‘responsible’ as opposed to merely ‘responsive’ governmentbecause it was seen to balance and complement political will, making it moreeffective in the longer run.

There are, in fact, any numbers of areas in which attempts to removewhat are seen as anachronistic bureaucratic constraints have been pursued

Bureaucracy: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)? 103

in the name of a liberating flexibility, or a flexibility that will liberate.Executive freedom to act, for instance, has come to be seen as the product ofan absence rather than the presence of bureaucratic mechanisms andconstraints. Tom Peters’ rallying cry ‘I beg each and everyone one of you todevelop a passionate and public hatred of bureaucracy’ was just one of themore infamous of the calls to managers to smash the stultifying chains ofbureaucratic rules and procedures in the name of organizational andpersonal liberation. The ethos that allowed and encouraged the pursuit ofprivate policies by stealth, or the bypassing of bureaucratic process, inEnron and Worldcom, on the one hand, and Lehmann Brothers and HBOS,on the other, can be traced to the logics of liberation articulated sopassionately by Peters and his ilk without too much difficulty. Perhaps it istime, once again, to return to some of the less-dramatic classics of themanagement genre, for a more nuanced understanding of the positivities ofbureaucracy (du Gay & Vikkelsø, forthcoming). In his elegant, but nowlargely forgotten text, Explorations in Management, the businessman andorganizational analyst Wilfred Brown (1960) argued that bureaucratic rulesand procedures should be seen as mechanisms through which managerialfreedom to act was constituted, rather than the means by which suchfreedom was undermined or eliminated. In this sense, the so-called rigiditiesof bureaucracy should not be regarded as ‘the other’ of flexibility – itsdiametric opposite – but rather as an organizational means through which acertain flexibility of outcome is arrived at. By assuming that bureaucracy is awaste product that inhibits or undermines freedoms and flexibilities, we failto see that bureaucracy is a mediator which constitutes those flexibilities incertain forms and creates the spaces within which freedom can be exercised(Feldman & Pentland, 2003) – Not natural freedom, of the sort espousedand advocated by managerialist metaphysicians such as Tom Peters, butartificial freedom, the only sort that can be formally organized intoexistence, and, according to Hobbes (1991), the only one worth having (seealso, Latour, 2007). As Kohn (1971, p. 473) has argued, the power of non-bureaucratic organizations over their employees is more complete; ‘thealternative to bureaucracy’s circumscribed authority is likely to be, not lessauthority, but personal, potentially arbitrary authority’.

CONCLUSION

Clearly political circumstances change, and so should the machinery ofgovernment. After all, too narrow a focus on the inviolability of a set of

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pre-existing commitments can be just as problematic, politically, adminis-tratively and organizationally, as too passionate a fixation on the imper-atives of change and modernization. Institutions must be allowed to adaptfrom their original purposes if the circumstances in which they operate havechanged. However, the point we wish to underscore here is that the modernstate and hence a functioning modern society depends on hierarchicalbureaucracy, and thus upon a non-partisan public administration for itsown functioning and reproduction.

There is, in effect a battle ongoing here, and not simply in regards to the‘proper’ organization and conduct of public management, for it appliesequally to debates about private sector management too. The hierarchicalkind of organization named bureaucracy, Jaques (1990, pp. 2–3) argued,had come to persist because it is ‘the only form of organization thatcan enable a company to employ large numbers of people and yet preserve anunambiguous accountability for the work they do’. (1990, pp. 2–3). Thesepoints were reiterated in his commentary on the scandals besetting Enron andArthur Andersen, pointing to a direct relationship between anti-bureaucraticmanagement thinking and the proliferation of ‘weak or non-articulatedaccountabilities’, a lack of formal authority and the presence of compensationsystems that ‘alienate people and require selfish and even corrupt behaviours’(Jaques, 2003, p. 136). As we indicated earlier, similar points have been madein relationship to the recent financial crisis (Valukas, 2010).

Contemporary anti-bureaucratic thought has much in common with itshistorical predecessors, though its own imperviousness to historical con-textualization ensures that it cannot register this, and thus acknowledge someof the problems that have, historically, beset attempts to de-bureaucratizethe state or, indeed, formal organizations in the private sector too. Advocatesof radical reform are, as we have suggested, anachronistic in this regard. Thearguments deployed against hierarchical organization are emotionallyattractive at some gut level, particularly in contexts where personal autonomyis considered a prime ethical value. And yet, as we have suggested thereare good reasons to ignore the siren calls of those advocating the dissolutionof hierarchical bureaucracy in the name of autonomy, equality, economy andliberty, for example. Such calls demand that society liberates itself from thevery laws, institutions and practices that have made it possible in the firstplace. Without a hierarchical ordering of offices in a bureaucracy, the statewould not exist; without centralised bureaucratic state capacities, there wouldbe no practically realisable legal or organized political system, and thus noenforceable rights, for example,

Bureaucracy: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)? 105

In stating these and related arguments in defence of hierarchicalbureaucracy we do not claim originality-there is a growing chorus of voicesmaking similar cases concerning the importance of hierarchical bureaucracyto responsible administration in government and in business, or stressing therelationship between the ethos of bureaucratic office and the securing ofrepresentative democracy (Goodsell, 2004, 2005; Olsen, 2006; Peters, 2003;Suleiman, 2003). Our specific focus on anachronism in public managementis, however, an attempt to mount another line of attack on the assumptionsunderpinning contemporary anti-bureaucratic thought. As we have argued,the epochalist and future-oriented nature of much contemporary anti-bureaucratic thought raises a number of important issues concerningorganizational memory and forgetting. One of the central functions of thepublic administration as an institution is to provide government with expertadvice. This cannot be done in a proper way without a system of archivesand files and routines for checking and making use of them. As notedby Karl Deutsch (1966, p. 206) some time ago, memory is essentialfor ‘‘any extended functioning of autonomy’’ and thus for the role ofbureaucracy as an autonomous agent in government, where its role is one of‘‘feeding back of data from some form of memory, and thus from thepast, into the making of present decisions’’. A public administration that isdenied this possibility – because it is fragmented or decentralised, or its corefunctions have been outsourced or distributed across networks or partner-ships- is not fulfilling its politico-administrative role – acting as ‘‘thenerves of government’’, its ‘institutional memory’, or as the ‘‘constitutionalballast’. Remembering and checking how things have been done before,and what the effects of previous reforms and policy initiatives were,ought to be one of the central functions of public administration as aninstitution of government, yet it is precisely this that the practical imple-mentation of modernising norms and techniques of conduct organizes out ofexistence.

We have thus suggested that the time is ripe for a return to many of thepractices of hierarchical bureaucracy, but have so far concluded that such areturn is not likely given the current preoccupation with anti-bureaucraticreforms. However, it is possible and necessary to put hierarchical bureau-cracy back in time, which means defending some of the central practices ofbureaucratic administration against the claims of anachronism. Not least, aswe have argued, because bureaucratic practices provide many of the‘conservation standards’ appropriate to the political management of thestate, including the management of ‘change ‘within the state.

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More generally, our focus on organizational ‘‘remembering’’ and ‘‘forget-ting’’, offers a useful corrective to the widespread, and frequently de-contextualized representation of ‘change’ as progressive, and ‘constraint’ or‘limit’, as reactionary. A future orientation with no regard for the contin-gencies of the past,may lead to the establishment of organizations that becomeinflexible. In order to achieve the right sort of flexibility, especially ingovernment, it may be necessary, we suggest, to maintain a bureaucratic formof public administration that is able to make qualified interpretations ofcurrent laws, principles and rules, andwhichmaintains respect for democraticand professional values. Making a talisman of one kind of flexibility, thewrong sort, in fact, can be very problematic for the securing of publicpurposes, as illustrated byWedel’s (2004, 2009) studies of ‘‘flex’’ organizationsin Eastern Europe, and elite circles in US foreign policy-making, and Moe’s(2001) studies of Quasi Government in the United States.

All forms of government have costs. If we are lucky we can choose whatproblems to have but not whether we have problems or not. The problemswe have with maintaining the ideals and institutions connected withWeberian bureaucracy are potentially less serious, we suggest, than thoseassociated with the alternatives posited by the reform movements associatedwith New Public Management and ‘‘self-governed networks’’.

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