Abstract
Although routinely criticized for its many flaws, bureaucracy, as a form of organizing, remains perceived as being more efficient than any other currently known forms of administration. In fact, efficiency is often considered as the primary purpose of bureaucratic organization. This article examines the current administrative telos of American bureaucracies. It makes the twofold argument that bureaucracy’s dominant purpose, as a form of organizing, changes with time, and given the contingency of the political and historical developments of the past four decades, administrative efficiency can no longer be freely associated with bureaucratic constructs. It is hypothesized that instilling stability, by shielding public servants and their decision-making from environmental volatility and stakeholders’ challenges, much of which are political in character, has become the current dominant telos of American bureaucracies.
Keywords
Students of public administration habitually link bureaucratic form of organizing with efficiency. While often critiqued for its many flaws, bureaucracy continues to be perceived as being more efficient than any other currently known forms of administration. Were one to choose a normative reason for the justification of bureaucracy and its continued survival in a democratic state, it is highly likely that a consensus around administrative efficiency would be reached. Bureaucracy can be and is many things, the least efficient form of organization, however, it is not. In current public administration discourse, bureaucracy and administrative efficiency hang together. Yet, despite the predisposition to regularly link the bureaucratic administrative telos 1 with some form of efficiency, time and again scholarly accounts criticize bureaucracy for its supposed lack of performance. Constantly, yet somehow still unobtrusively, efficiency appears more likely to be a Potemkin 2 village than an unquestioned outcome. This brings us to an intriguing inconsistency—to paraphrase Waldo (1980)—why would an instrument designed to be impersonal, calculating, and efficient be so often perceived as inefficient?
Bureaucracy, as a form of organizing, is undoubtedly driven by a multitude of expectations and serves manifold administrative purposes, with efficiency being one of them. In this article I argue that our extant perspectives on bureaucracy, by casually focusing on efficiency as a stable structure-driven telos, emphasize an incomplete understanding of its nature. While efficiency is certainly one underlying dynamic that explains bureaucracy’s rise as a form of organizing and its staying power, and it rightfully so commonly enters the discussions on bureaucracy, it is not necessarily as dominant in its multi-telos nature as it is repeatedly assumed. By treating bureaucracy primary as a group of mutually interdependent individuals, I argue that given the present-day contextual instability, bureaucratic constructs have evolved to serve as “psychological buffers” and “shields” for their members first, and as efficiency striving mechanisms second.
The hypothesis that is suggested here, most simply put, is that the dominant administrative telos of bureaucracy, as a form of organizing, is not stable and shifts over time. The ability to serve as a psychological buffer for its members is currently perhaps as important, if not more, than efficiency. The latter is not and might have never been 3 the inescapable main reason behind bureaucracy’s continued predominance or the end goal of organizing. Some might even argue that operating “in a strictly rule-governed and impersonal manner . . . is not an instrumental requirement to maximize efficiency of output, but a substantive value embodying ideas about the rule of law and equality of citizenship rights” (Beetham, 1987, p. 36). It is worth noting that it has already been pointed out that one of bureaucracy’s social benefits might be its ability to reduce uncertainty of administration (Gajduschek, 2003). This discussion is different in the sense that it focused at the individual psychological level, and it does not attend to the question of what can bureaucracy do for administration, but rather on what can bureaucracy do for its members. Specifically, the article attends to the following question: Why does a form of organizing, that research regularly shows to be capable of discretion and emotion, so often appears rigid and inefficient?
In this sense, then, this article is partially a polemic. It challenges the prevailing assumption made by the core of public administration literature that of efficiency being a stable bureaucratic administrative telos and the driving force behind its lingering as the governance form of choice. Refocusing our understandings of bureaucracy to its capacity to instill certainty by shielding its members from complex environmental demands, that is acting as a psychological buffer, would encourage more realistic expectations and could perhaps provide a better explanation for the continued survival of this form of organizing in a democratic context. On the whole, this would mean embracing bureaucratic structures as being more protective than domineering. This perspective does not, I submit, provide any remarkable magic of interpretation, but its counterbalancing promise could perhaps be deemed as reasonably notable.
Beyond this introduction, I will construct the argument within three main sections. The first section, using a historical perspective, delineates environmental instability as the overarching force that accompanied the development and the rise of American bureaucracies. Due to the recent realities associated with the devolution of governance, financial constraints and bureaucracy bashing this volatility might have reached a historically unprecedented high. In the second section, I use Weick’s (1969/1979) theory of organizing to build my theoretical argument. Finally, in the third section, I draw conclusions and briefly discuss the implications of alienating efficiency from the unquestioned status of dominant administrative telos.
Before proceeding with the discussion, some considerations regarding the limitations of the scope of this article are in order. Although the article addresses an important question, my ambitions are considerably less than a complete and exacting treatment of all its critical consequences. First, the article does not attend in detail to the implications of the claim that the concept efficiency, as we currently understand it, was foreign to Weber (1978). Second, the discussion is bounded to the context of American public bureaucracies. Finally, this is not a deconstruction of bureaucratic multi-telos in toto, but rather a focus on an overlooked dimension; it merely seeks to expand extant interpretations. Taken together, most of the ideas exposed here surely aren’t previously unheard arguments; in this sense, the article should be accepted as a reexamination with an original twist of an enduring debate.
Contextual and Historical Perspectives
The Bureaucracy-Efficiency Nexus
The majority of the perspectives on bureaucracy, which emphasize efficiency, are direct or related derivatives of the interpretation provided by Weber (1978), 4 who perceived bureaucracy as the most rational organizational form. 5 Bureaucracy, nevertheless, is of interest to Weber mainly to the extent that it enacts the legitimacy of the rationalization of processes within the social contexts (Habermas, 1984; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Satiated by rationality, bureaucracy was expected to be superior to any other form of organization. 6 Weber’s (1978) ideal type is constructed on functional dimensions such as jurisdictional areas, office hierarchy, duties, general rules, specialized tasks, large size, trained career-appointed and paid office holders, office as a vocation, expertise, and written files.
Most of Weber’s (1978) core expectations such as rationality, specialization, neutrality, and hierarchy can also be located, under one form or another, within the principal public administration literature in the works of scholars such as Taylor (1903/1911, 1911), Gulick and Urwick (1937), Urwick (1938), and Fayol (1949). For Weber, rationality in “decision-making and obedience in performance are the pivots on which the entire system operates. In this scheme of things, emotion is regarded merely as hindrance to efficiency, as something to be excluded from the bureaucratic process” (Levinson, 1959, p. 171).Yet, Weber’s ideal construct is rarely upheld in practice, hence, leading some to adopt much less exacting definitions of bureaucracy. For instance, Goodsell (2004, p. 4) defines American bureaucracy simply “as the institutions of public administration in America.”
Regardless of its delineation, however, to suggest anything other than efficiency as the primary administrative telos of bureaucracy and motive of its endurance is trivially short of recklessness. Even Weber (1978) appears
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to attribute the ascendancy of bureaucracy to its mechanical dominance: The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization . . . Today, it is primarily the capitalist market economy which demands that the official business of public administration be discharged precisely, unambiguously, continuously, and with as much speed as possible . . . Once fully established, bureaucracy is among those social structures which are the hardest to destroy. Bureaucracy is the means of transforming social action into rational organized action . . . The ruled, for their part, cannot dispense with or replace the bureaucratic apparatus once it exists, for it rests upon expert training, a functional specialization of work, and an attitude set on habitual virtuosity in the mastery of single yet methodologically integrated functions. (pp. 973-987, original emphasis)
The concept of efficiency, although commonly attributed to Weberian bureaucracy, is never used by Weber (1978) within his discussion of bureaucracy, at least not in the manner that is regularly accredited to him. Weber’s (1978) construal of technical superiority is derived from the idea of rationality and many scholars might have simply interpreted it as efficiency(Leivesley, Carr, & Kouzmin, 1994) . Indeed, it has been argued that “the more precise the definition of efficiency is in social sciences, the less it covers the content of what Max Weber meant by that that term” (Gajduschek, 2003, p. 708). Some have even gone as far as to assert that “efficiency” was foreign to Weber (Albrow, 1970; Gajduschek, 2003). Weber (1978), when discussing bureaucratic efficiency,
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focuses primarily on its technical precision in administration and superiority as domination mechanism:
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Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization—that is, the monocratic variety of bureaucracy—is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. (p. 223, emphasis added)
and The great changes in American metropolitan administrations demanded by reformers have been effected essentially by elected mayors working with an apparatus of officials who were appointed by them. These reforms have thus come about in a “caesarist” fashion. Viewed technically, as an organized form of domination, the efficiency of “caesarism,” . . . rests in general upon the position of the “Caesar” as a free trustee of the masses . . . (p. 961, emphasis added)
Still, even if Weber (1978) might not have intended to associate bureaucracy with efficiency, in its neo-classical economics sense, history and the majority of scholars, for better or worse, have interpreted him as such. Furthermore, we should not fail to appreciate that efficiency is a captivatingly ambiguous concept in its own right.
[E]fficiency is itself a many-layered concept, whose different elements are not necessarily mutually consistent. An organization whose operations are highly routinized may be very cost-efficient, but for that very reason be incapable of responding quickly to some sudden and unexpected change in the environment. (Beetham, 1987, p. 22)
For purposes of this discussion, the understanding of bureaucracy and bureaucratic behavior will not be derived from its definition, but it will be conceptualized primarily through an emphasis on bureaucracy as form of organizing and on the environment in which it evolved. The discussion now turns to delineating the contextual instability surrounding the evolution of American bureaucracy.
The Condition of the Context
Environmental instability and task complexity as seen through historical evolution
“The history of American national bureaucracy, if not untold, certainly is unsung” (Nelson, 1982, p. 747). For the most part, scholars cavalierly assume that bureaucracies in the United States have always stayed faithful to a Weberian nature. In fact, the concept itself did not receive serious academic considerations until the New Deal. American bureaucracy, however, has a rather long intriguing and turbulent history. There is much to be learned from history, and although it might not provide all the answers, it can delineate the nodes when our understandings took an unrepresentative turn.
The current nature of American bureaucracy can be considered as a by-product of several historical shifts, with the bulk of the systematic ones taking place before the 1930s (Crenson, 1975; Skowronek, 1982). To truly understand the character of American bureaucracy, one would have to start with the First Continental Congress in 1775, when its bases were laid. According to Goodsell (2004), unlike Europe, American bureaucracies evolved not from the king’s household . . . but from the practical need of the people’s representatives . . . Administrative bodies were needed to carry out these purposes. They too were created not by divine authority, but simply because of the need of the people to care for themselves as collective communities. (p. 7)
In its early stages of existence, the United States underwent rapid transformations from a rural society with consistent values to an urban and industrial one that garnered in many parts opposing values. The complexity of the emerging American society made the development of rational administrative organizations unavoidable (Fried, 1967).
The social transformations as a result of the industrial revolution and the density of the administrative demands of the Civil War further rationalized the need for hierarchical and precise forms of administration. Gajduschek (2003) asserts that the explosive development at the turn of past century and mass production in industrial and administrative spheres made the capacity of bureaucracies to instill certainty to be erroneously equated with efficiency. 10 In an environment governed by uncertainty, increasing certainty becomes synonymous with efficiency, as decreased instability meant lower costs. Therefore, it wasn’t necessarily efficiency that drove the establishment of bureaucracy, but perhaps the need for rationalization and stability.
Dissimilar from the European context, in the United States democratic political institutions were established before administrative ones—that is, democracy before bureaucracy (Nelson, 1982). As such, public administration and public servants had to struggle for their identities and for legitimacy within a discourse context that was negatively predisposed from origin. In a sense, scrapping for acceptance could be deemed as inherent to American public service. The volatility and instability that came with the perceived lack of legitimacy became an integral part of the milieu within which American bureaucracies shaped the meanings behind their operations. The shaky legitimacy footing allowed for politics to invade and become a conventional element of the American bureaucratic nature. “The development of political skills was part of the process by which executive agencies adapted to their environment in order to survive in the egalitarian democratic society in which they found themselves” (Rourke, 1976, p. 73).
The Progressive movement brought about an increased awareness of bureaucratic forms but also their association with efficiency and neutrality (Fry & Raadschelders, 2008). The movement sought betterments in governance through means of decreased corruption and more effective spending. The period from the “Great Depression” to the “Great Society,” with the II World War and fervent economic development of the 1950s in-between, represented the heyday of American bureaucracies. But even during these times, due to its nature, American bureaucracy was cautiously thought of “as necessary to higher ends” (Goodsell, 2004, p. 8). The governance failures, the political scandals, 11 the economic shocks of the 1970s, as well as the rise of convincing challenges (see Friedman & Schwartz, 1963/1971) to Keynesian economics (see Keynes, 1936/2009), however, soon spelled the end of several decades of somewhat unquestioned need for bureaucracy.
The 1980s were characterized by reforms that targeted bureaucracies under the ideological umbrella of “government is the problem” (Cooper, 2009).
The war on bureaucracy was largely responsible for electing the . . . two American presidents after Richard M. Nixon discovered the mother lode of public antipathy toward Bill Bureaucrat in 1968. Vietnam and Watergate only side-tracked the issue temporarily. (Chandler, 1984, p. 197)
Along similar lines, the 1990s witnessed New Public Management driven legislative efforts to reinvent government. These initiatives were in large part inspired by work such as those of Gore (1993) and Osborne and Gaebler’s (1992), which reintroduced the neo-classical economic logic within the normative redesign of bureaucracy through the idea of entrepreneurship. This time around, although government was still the problem, bureaucrats gained a more human face by being “good people trapped in bad systems” (Gore, 1993, p. 2). With the exception of e-government, the first decade of the 21st century has yet to motivate any large scale efforts to transform bureaucracy, which have been so familiar to the previous three decades. Yet, it is quite possible that in the long run, history will judge e-government as nothing more than a fresh attempt to rationalize administration and minimize bureaucratic discretion (see Roman, 2013; Roman & Miller, 2013).
Finally, at present, bureaucracies, in their attempt to fulfill the pragmatic needs of governance, face an unprecedented degree of complexity. The devolved (Kettl, 2002, 2005) and contractual (Cooper, 2003) nature of budgetary constrained public administration have shifted the locus of policy control from bureaucracies toward non-governmental organizations and private third parties.
Whatever its other implications, the volatility that has been so common in the recent history of American policymaking both reflects and contributes to a diminishing role for career civil servants in the policy process . . . The working habits of bureaucratic organizations are better adapted to handling the continuing and inescapable tasks of government than they are to implementing the “brave new worlds” in both foreign and domestic policy that liberal and conservative activists have been zealously trying to fashion in recent American politics. (Rourke, 1991, p. 124)
Bureaucracies are currently experiencing historical lows in terms of trust and their ability to monitor policy implementation, but are still expected to maintain high levels responsibility (Sachs, 2011). When the shadow governance 12 fails, it is still public bureaucracies that get blamed, with little concern for their actual involvement. Moreover, the financial realities have agencies interlocked in constant budgetary battles and justifications. Taken together, the devolution of governance has led to increased levels of environmental instability; from budgetary allocations to court challenges by interest groups, bureaucracies are constantly bombarded with conflicting demands and unrealistic expectations.
Bureaucracy bashing
In an ironic way, bureaucratic hatred is ingrained in the American national fabric (Goodsell, 2004; Sachs, 2011).
The country was conceived as much in anger as in liberty, with much of the anger directed at perceived abuses by the British administration . . . Thus, though the sole task of the provisional government established by the First Continental Congress in 1775 was an executive one . . . it was made purely legislative in structure. (Nelson, 1982, p. 750)
Bureaucracy is simply “something we all love to hate. It presents simultaneously the contradictory images of bundling inefficiency and threatening power” (Beetham, 1987, p. 1). While historically the aversion for bureaucracy has fluctuated, today bureaucracy bashing is awfully close to becoming a social and political obsession. Scores of scholars find it much more substantial to criticize bureaucratic constructs in terms of their performance than justify their existence. There is a persistent search for improved and more democratic forms of governance.
The dominant stream of disapproval draws primarily upon neo-classical economics theory and on the presumed superiority of market mechanisms. Scholars typically assert that due to the fact that bureaucrats are driven by self-interest and given the lack of competitive forces, public bureaucracies will underperform compared to the private sector (Buchanan & Tullock, 1962; Downs, 1957, 1967; Drucker, 1969; Hayek, 1960/2011; Niskanen, 1971/2007 13 ; Tullock, 1987). A second more recent, post-modern inspired stream asserts that bureaucratic forms, within their dehumanizing nature, are simply not able to cope with the complexity of the demands imposed on current governance (Hummel, 1994). Along similar lines, feminist perspectives hold that bureaucracies are inherently patriarchal and gendered masculine—hence, hierarchical and discriminatory (Ferguson, 1984; Kanter, 1993; Mackinnon, 1989; Stivers, 2002). As a consequence, many textbooks make it a habit to delineate bureaucracies in normatively negative terms (Cigler & Neiswender, 1991).
[W]e Americans are taught throughout our lives, from hearth and home on through school and career, that our government is a sea of waste, a swamp of incompetence, a mountain of unchecked power, an endless plain of mediocrity. Our media and politicians tell us that public bureaucracy is bloated in size, inefficient compared to business, a stifling place to work, indifferent to ordinary citizens, the problem rather than the solution. Bureaucrats—with the word uttered in contempt—are alleged in all quarters to be lazy, incompetent, devious, and even dangerous . . . They are continuously monitored and investigated by auditors, judges, budget examiners, performance evaluators, legislative committees, public watchdog groups, clientele associations, citizen bodies, and media organizations eager for a good scandal. (Goodsell, 2004, p. 3)
Notwithstanding the implications of bureaucracy bashing on trust in government, 14 on promoting individualism and on the broader quality of governance, what is of import here is that these anti-bureaucratic narratives have relentlessly made the environment in which bureaucracies operate contested and politically volatile. American bureaucracy has become the scapegoat of choice for most governmental failures, real or perceived. Typically the only time bureaucrats are “needed” or even somewhat admired is during non-political crises (e.g., Oklahoma City bombing, hurricane Katrina, September 11th attacks). But even then, if more goes wrong than goes right, administrative structures are mercilessly questioned for faults that might have not even been of their own making (Derthick, 2007). Thus, paradoxically, the few times that bureaucracies are not challenged and enjoy less politically charged environments happen during crises. Essentially one dominant vector of instability is merely replaced by another.
There are few important dynamics that have developed due to bureaucracy bashing that should be addressed here. First, public employees are habitually ridiculed and criticized both outside and within government. Such continuous attacks on bureaucracy have curtailed the development of or have driven out some of the most talented individuals in government (Voinovich, 2000). The latter would make bureaucracies less resilient on professional grounds. In addition, bureaucrats are no longer perceived as the sole experts on policy matters.
The proliferation of expertise on subjects that bureaucrats may once have monopolized is thus a fact of life for every agency today . . . the private sector now abounds with think tanks, consulting firms, and watchdog groups that are widely regarded as more reliable source of information and advice than the government itself. The specialized knowledge that Max Weber once saw as the comparative advantage that bureaucrats would always enjoy in debates on national policy is now much more widely distributed through American society. (Rourke, 1991, p. 120)
Second, bureaucratic incompetency and underperformance are often exaggerated (Holzer & Callahan, 1998). It is commonly disregarded that it has yet to be empirically proven that public bureaucracies are indeed less effective than the private sector. 15 On the contrary, public bureaucracies often perform and motivate similar levels of satisfaction to those of private companies (Goodsell, 2004). On the whole, such overstatements, however, make for a highly volatile environment and cater to the unrealistic expectations. Third, the vilification of bureaucracy through popular narratives, political discourse, and reform efforts have legitimated avenues for its challenges. The contesters of administrative decisions are often conferred the moral high grounds, regardless of whether they have a valid concern or not. Not only has it become easier to challenge bureaucracies, but such actions are repeatedly applauded as normatively desirable.
Politicians and citizens generate expectations; yet, bureaucracies are the ones entrusted with the pragmatic task of fulfilling them. Even in the case of seemingly unsolvable social issues such as poverty, anticipations are rarely realistic. According to Weber (1978), bureaucracies are constructed to solve problems and in this vein, goals are set and work is organized. “And this is not the least of the reasons for the bureaucratic proliferation in the rapidly changing environment of twentieth-century American politics” (Rourke, 1991, p. 126). Once issues become more politicized and difficult to define, however, they also become more difficult to deal with. With conflicting signals from the environment, the gap between expectations and capacity grows, consequently leading to a diminished ability of bureaucracy to operate effectively. Rourke (1991) argued that Policy volatility is a world that bureaucrats never made, and it is one in which their influence has steadily diminished. The bureaucrats’ forte has always been the gradual alteration of existing policy to cope with emerging demands or sudden disturbances in their agencies’ environments. They cope with change by adhering to routines that are carefully scripted to deal with similar situations encountered in the past. These routines are often poorly suited to a political culture in which the present radically and frequently departs from the past. (p. 112, emphasis added)
What becomes readily apparent, then, is that since the industrial revolution, change and environmental insecurity have been the only certain characteristics surrounding bureaucracies. It could be argued that either as a condition of the time or as result of the efforts to establish political control, bureaucracies have always been at the center of contextual instabilities. An intricate link between the nature of American bureaucracies, the instability of their environments, and its historical developments can indeed be conceptualized.
Theoretical Perspective
Open Systems Theory
Von Bertalanffy’s (1950, 1968) open system theory suggests that a system constantly interacts with its environment. Applied to organizations, this perspective posits that all organizational dimensions are interrelated and interdependent, which means that shifts along any one aspect will echo throughout the system. The environment is believed to have permeating effects on the organization’s structures and behaviors. The associations, nonetheless, are by no means linear. Given the dialectical 16 relationship between organizations and their environments, organizations adapt and attempt to converge toward a state of dynamic equilibrium (Kast & Rosenzweig, 1972; Scott & Davis, 2006).
Weick’s (1969/1979) theory of organizing represents an application of open system theory to the realm of information processing by organizations. For Weick (1969/1979), the idea of organization might be a myth and the only thing that matters is organizing. By focusing on process rather than structure, Weick (1969/1979) argued that managing large flows of information is one of the greatest challenges facing organizations. The constantly evolving dynamics behind the information exchanges within the organization, specifically at the individual level, lie at the heart of theory of organizing. Most importantly however, according to Weick (1995, 1969/1979), one of the fundamental purposes of organizations, which is “enacted” through individual action, is to reduce uncertainty through management of information flows. The purpose of organizing, then, is to make information less ambiguous through coordinated individual actions. Rules and procedures are the ones that give a sense of rigidity and stability to organizing forms, which otherwise are somewhat loose. As a result, repetitive and contingent behaviors will develop among actors. Behavior, nonetheless, is seen more as an outcome of the context than of personal traits or assumed role. In reality, then, people in organizations are only loosely connected and have ample room for discretion.
The theory of organizing applies concepts of social cultural evolution (evolutionary theory) to social behavior (West & Turner, 2007). Within the context of environmental shifts, individuals or groups will embrace certain behavior which appears fit for the condition. Once a certain interpretation is adapted, it becomes an integral part of the nature of organizing, until a later date when it might be substituted by a different environmental read. Organizing is cyclical as retained interpretations dictate to what dimension of the environment to respond, how to respond, and how to understand the newly created associations. Shared goals are more likely to be interpretations of the past than the glue of the present. Of key importance is that the organizing evolution will not necessarily lead to improved organizations, at least not in the normative sense of better-quality public administration.
According to the theory of organizing, one of the primary shared goals among individuals is to develop and maintain structures that assure certain satisfactions. In most cases, the theory would predict and support ambivalence, disorder, and diversity as the better strategies for organizational survival. Yet, if a given structure is commonly under siege from the environment and it is portrayed and expected to behave in a certain way, it would adapt those specific interpretations. Collective and continuous actions within the group and in the context of its environments will enforce and strengthen an extant behavioral expectation. In regard to individuals working in the public sector, then, if they are constantly under environmental attacks and if using rules as a buffer does provide the better chances for certainty and survival, I argue that public servants will use bureaucratic constructs to isolate from a volatile environment. Presently, a public servant, I argue, is a “bureaucrat” most often for “protection” purposes.
I would be remiss if I would assert that suggesting that bureaucracy tends to isolate itself from its environment or that it strives to limit uncertainty is by any means a novel concept. It is widely accepted that institutionally managed and controlled environments, by means of legitimized rules, shield organizations from volatility (Emery & Trist, 1965; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Terreberry, 1968). While driven by different ideological beliefs and depicted and various normative connotations, bureaucratic isolationist capacity and tendency has been noted as early as its administrative efficiency. Marx (1843/1970) argued that bureaucracy has to become a “closed corporation” in order for the capitalist class to maintain its domination. Unlike Marx (1967), who saw bureaucracy as a short-term essential evil with long-term benefits, Weber (1978) was suspicious about the potential power and tendency of bureaucracy to insulate itself from outside influences, and perceived it as a long-term evil with no apparent solution (Brown, 1978). Weber (1978) suggested, a view that found resonance in the principal-agent/bureaucratic control literature (see Buchanan & Tullock, 1962; Downs, 1957, 1967; Lowi, 1979; Niskanen, 1971/2007; Tullock, 1987), that elected officials can become dilettantes in their relationships with powerful bureaucratic structures.
This superiority of the professional insider every bureaucracy seeks further to increase through the means of keeping secret its knowledge and intentions. Bureaucratic administration always tends to exclude the public, to hide its knowledge and action from criticism as well as it can. (p. 992, emphasis added)
Merton (1940) used the adjacent notions of “trained incapacity” (Veblen), “occupational psychosis” (Dewey), and “professional deformation” (Warnotte) to argue that public servants fall victims to the bureaucratic structures and become displaced from reality and fully infatuated with red tape.
Functionaries have the sense of common destiny . . . the esprit de corps and informal social organization which typically develops in such situations often leads the personnel to defend their entrenched interests rather than to assist their clientele and elected higher officials. (Merton, 1940, p. 564)
Downs’ (1967) “law of increasing conservatism” posits that bureaucrats will clinch on to rules to minimize risk and punishment for errors. 17 McCurdy (1991) examined Downs’ (1967) model and indeed concluded that bureaucracy (in his case NASA) “aged” and became more rigid as result of increased political scrutiny from Congress and the White House. Benveniste (1983) suggested that bureaucrats are facing increasingly volatile organizational environments, which motivates an omnipresent tension; as a consequence, they commonly engage in defensive tactics using rules as isolation mechanisms. Gajduschek (2003, p. 714) deemed bureaucracy’s capacity for “uncertainty reduction as a missing part of bureaucratic rationality.” Finally, LaPiere (1965) argued that those who prefer employment in bureaucracies are security minded, and shy from innovation and prefer isolation from external forces. Along similar lines, Caiden (1991), Osborne and Gaebler (1992), and Osborne and Plastrik (1997) believed that isolation and resistance to change are inherent attributes of bureaucratic culture. Yet, few of these authors dedicated meaningful levels of attention, which is argued here should be done, to the possibility that public servants might appeal to the rigidity of rules to make sense of competing demands and to guard against a fairly unfriendly environment.
If the latter is indeed the case, there would be at least two major streams of literature that would raise significant opposition to the idea that bureaucratic natures are called into play for purposes of psychological protection. On the one hand, sociology literature identifies bureaucracy as dysfunctional, driven by internal contradictions (Crozier, 1964/2010; Etzioni, 1964; Merton, 1940, 1968; Simon, 1946) or by elite considerations (Benveniste, 1983; Chackerian & Abcarian, 1983). This literature will probably claim that isolationist tendencies are pathological rather than rational expressions of a structure that is under constant pressure. On the other hand, the organizational domination and oppression literature holds that organizations demand individuals to give up their identities to become meaningless cogs in the administrative machine (Ewing, 1977; Ferguson, 1984; Hummel, 1994; Thayer, 1981; Whyte, 1956/2002). This stream would presumably support the idea that it is not the environment but the bureaucracy that public servants need protection from.
Bureaucratic Environmental Sensitivity
Despite the legion of theoretical accounts that depict bureaucracies as closed, rigid, and controlling systems, there is more than sufficient empirical support for the idea that bureaucracies are quite responsive to their environments and public servants engage in higher levels of administrative discretion than it is commonly depicted. Bragaw (1980) found that the U.S. Coast Guard has responded to threats to its existence by adapting and becoming innovative. Lipsky (1980), Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003), and O’Leary (2006) provided vivid descriptions of the limits of the assumed rigidity of administrative behavior. Public servants often make detailed appeals to rules only when they are dealing with a difficult task or they find themselves under scrutiny. Otherwise, professional and social expectations shape administrators’ behaviors as much as bureaucratic structures 18 (Brehm & Gates, 1997; Hooten, 1992).
It has also been asserted that public servants tend to have on average more liberal views than regular citizens (Garand, Parkhurst, & Jourdan, 1991); when empirically examined appear to behave “non-bureaucratically” (Kohn, 1971); while their ranks are fairly representative of public values (Houston, 2000; Rainey & Bozeman, 2000) and of the broader national demographics (Goodsell, 2004). Here, of particular interest is Beetham’s (1987) idea that the antidemocratic nature of bureaucracies is triggered not by its administrative structure, but rather by the type of tasks that bureaucracies are typically expected to perform. This could provide a rival explanation to the ability of bureaucracies to engage in administrative evil, as delineated by Adams and Balfour (1998/2004). Obviously, the undertaking does not justify the administrative evil, but it does suggest that either to protect from the task or from a scrutinizing environment, bureaucrats might tend to shell themselves psychologically by appealing to the assumed rationality of the bureaucratic process. Selden, Brewer, and Brudney (1999, p. 193), for instance, find that to perform their jobs “many administrators seek isolation from the political process.”
Furthermore, bureaucracies are probably more susceptible and responsive to political authority than is led to believe (Golden, 2000; Rubin, 1985; Wood & Waterman, 1994). Wood and Waterman (1994) suggested that both Congress and the President are able to command chief levels of influence over administrative agencies. Aberbach and Rockman (2000) argued that bureaucrats often reflect the political preferences of appointed officials. Within the same vein, Watson (1997) provided a credible challenge to the idea that bureaucrats resent political control. Furthermore, non-governmental organizations, private sector parties, and even ordinary citizens now have the ability to exert process debilitating pressures on administrative processes such as rulemaking (see Kerwin & Furlong, 2011). A similar condition can be noted in terms of legitimacy, with many public agencies now having to compete with non-governmental organizations (Koppell, 2010).
Finally, contrary to popular belief and rhetoric, American bureaucracies are most often small and certainly not “the same” in terms of their behaviors (Goodsell, 2004). This might have been true for the American bureaucracies even at the time of Weber’s writing. Not all bureaucracies are made equally “bureaucratic,” some are more bureaucratic than others. “Form follows function in bureaucracy; agencies designed to prevent internal fraud look and act differently from those designed to promote efficiency, coordination, responsiveness, or some other value” (Nelson, 1982, p. 762). Very few bureaucratic structures, if any, ever take on genuine Weberian shape or are deterministically oppressive (Organ & Greene, 1981; Thomas & Johnson, 1991). In fact, scholars have long suggested that stand-alone bureaucratic organizational structures are at best weakly deterministic in terms of demanding similar behavior on the part of its members (Bonjean & Grimes, 1970; Thompson, 1956). Contrary to Merton’s (1940) expectation, then, participation in bureaucracy does not appear to be associated with neither ascendancy, submission, nor rule rigidity (Foster, 1990).
Thus, it could be argued that American bureaucracies are quite sensitive to social and political pressures. “Bureaucratic” behavior is not necessarily an outcome of bureaucratic membership. Public servants behave like bureaucrats, neutral and enforcing red tape, partly by choice, not the least being because this is how they make sense of convoluted and contradictory demands. Selden et al. (1999, p. 172) asserted that “even if neutrality is possible, the public administrator’s choice to remain neutral is itself a fundamental exercise of bureaucratic discretion.” Settings aside the normative debate that such condition normally triggers, it is worth noting here that the social environment pressures public servants just as much as organizational forces. Quintessentially, bureaucracies do possess the capability to be personal, uncalculating, and effective in delivering sympathy and compassion. 19 More often than not, nonetheless, such sensitivity is rather dangerous, hence avoided, as it can easily provide the basis for an external attack.
Discussion
Holistically, the argument, that might at first appear convoluted, is relatively modest in its extent and easy to trace; yet, despite its apparent unpretentiousness, it could perhaps make a meaningful contribution to public administration theory and practice. First, it has been argued that the bulk of our current understandings of bureaucracies are derived from a definition that envisioned an ideal type and was coined under the auspices of negative normative connotations. Also, the typical association between bureaucracy and efficiency might be a by-product of biased translation, erroneous correlations, and lax scholarly interpretations of Weberian rationality. Second, there is sufficient empirical evidence to suggest that bureaucracies are sensitive to external influences, and contrary to anecdotal and caricature portrayals, most bureaucracies are small and only weakly deterministic by form. Third, the rise and establishment of bureaucracy coincided with dramatic shifts in governance, especially in terms of uncertainty, ambiguity, and above all environmental instability. Approximately four decades ago, the complexity of the task might have surpassed the capacity of bureaucracies to effectively solve many of the posed social problems. Currently, agencies are typically faced with competing and inconsistent demands which they are expected to fulfill, notwithstanding the fact that it is widely accepted that most demands are mutually exclusive or at least hard to reconcile. Fourth, much of the prestige and power that American public bureaucracies might have enjoyed until 1960s is now in the past. Rourke (1991) suggested that a divided government, transformation in agencies constituency (political volatility), and policy volatility have diminished the power of bureaucracies and increased their environmental instability. Fifth, American bureaucracy has been the target for continuous attacks from outside and inside government by means of public discourse and reform initiatives. Public service is no longer competitive in terms of attracting talent and is vulnerable to contestations on professional grounds. As a result of the governance shifts and efforts by Congress of the past six decades, it has now become easier, found appropriate and legitimate to challenge bureaucracies (Cooper, 2009; Rourke, 1991). “The deference to administrative expertise that judges had been practicing since the latter days of the New Deal is now, so to speak, history” (Rourke, 1991, p. 117). Transparency demands and technological capacities have also increased the levels of scrutiny that bureaucracies find themselves under.
Finally, scholarly accounts have noted that when dealing with difficult cases (Chambliss, 1996; Kelly, 1994; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003; Lipsky, 1980) or environmental volatility (Rourke, 1991), public servants will appeal to rules and regulations to cope with the ambiguity and make sense of their environments. Such behavior, on the other hand, is not necessarily present when public servants are sufficiently comfortable to use their discretion (Diggs & Roman, 2012; Roman, 2014). In sum, bureaucratic behavior is not deterministically dependent on form of organizational arrangement, but might be triggered by efforts to make sense of the environment. The more volatile an administrator’s or an agency’s environment becomes, as it is the case for American bureaucracy for the last four decades, the higher the probability that a rule-driven rigidity will encompass the core of the administrative process.
On the whole, then, I argue that the construal of bureaucracy’s telos and nature in general cannot be generated outside of its immediate context. Environmental insatiability, in larger part due to continuous efforts to control and reshape bureaucracy, has motivated isolationist dynamics and paradoxically has led to less responsive bureaucracy.
If there is a pertinent lesson to be learned from the ironic history that has helped to shape the current period, it might be one that justifies despair: a lesson in the pitfall of political reform. Time and time again, major efforts to make administration more responsive to political control have had the opposite effect. (Nelson, 1982, pp. 776-777)
Unlike Nelson (1982), I, however, find that the apparent decrease in responsiveness is due more to the increase in ambiguity and confusion regarding goals than the actual nature of bureaucracy. I argue, that under current conditions, public servants embrace rules and bureaucratic behavior to protect themselves and to make sense of the vague and contradictory signals received from their environments.
To an extent, suggesting the bureaucrats isolate themselves for purposes of protection is in many unimportant ways similar to suggesting that they are guided by self-interest. The few differences that exist are, nonetheless, critical. First, accepting the psychological buffer hypothesis would imply that the isolationist dynamic is conditioned by the environment and does not initiate with the public servant as a deterministic behavior from operating within bureaucracies. Second, if left to their own devices, public servants might not necessarily act bureaucratically 20 (Brehm & Gates, 1997). Third, indirectly this would support the idea that bureaucratic administrative telos is diachronically dependent. Finally, ironically this would imply that in today’s devolved governance, bureaucratic responsiveness can be achieved by relaxation of political controls.
Conclusion
There are many who criticize bureaucratic inefficiency, regardless of whether it is assumed or real. The criticisms come right, left, and center. The voices haves changed; yet the message remains agonizingly familiar. Drucker (1969, p. 3) once argued, in what might sound more like November slogan than a careful observation, that “government is sick—and just at the time when we need a strong, healthy, and vigorous government.” The message is resilient and consistently resurfaces under one form or another in the game of politics. Drucker (1969) continued by stating that I do not know whether Americans are particularly inept at public administration—though they are hardly particularly gifted for it. Perhaps, we are only more sensitive than other people to incompetence and arrogance of bureaucracy because we have had, until recently, comparatively so much less of it than other people . . . results . . . are singularly unimpressive. What is impressive is the administrative incompetence. (pp. 7-9)
Along similar lines, more recently, Behn (2001) asserted that governmental and bureaucratic performance is dangerously close to being an oxymoron. For Olsen (2007, p. 137), bureaucracies as “developed in a legalistic and authoritarian society” are “now inevitably withering away because it is incompatible with complex, individualistic and dynamic societies.”
As always, there is an element of truth to such hyperbolic criticism, but then again, the hyperbole does dampen the message. The common denominator for recent negative accounts of bureaucracies is the supposed pathological inefficiency of bureaucracy. Transformational efforts from New Public Management, Reinventing Government to E-government have all targeted the apparent wastefulness of bureaucratic structures. Yet, numerous accounts attempted but failed to explain why bureaucracy, despite being constructed as a mechanism that would generate efficiency, is often severely inefficient. My answer is quite simple—perhaps it is no longer (or has never been) intended to serve that purpose. While during its rise, efficiency, under one form or another, might have had a monopoly over the multi-telos administrative character of bureaucracy, this has long stopped from being the case. Understandings constructed solely on efficiency are but a shadow of the complex nature of bureaucracy. Current American bureaucracies are often creating their hierarchical structures for purposes of sense making and protection from contextual instability. The rule-driven and highly rigid form of organizing is often employed by public servants to buffer from external uncertainty, ambiguousness, and pressures, which most of the time assume political shades.
In discussions such as this one, it is critical that the argument is found stimulating and sufficiently powerful to motivate a reevaluation and a counterbalancing of axiomatic beliefs about the efficiency-bureaucracy nexus. There are sufficient theoretical inadequacies and vulnerabilities in leaving the concept of bureaucracy wedded to the idea of efficiency to warrant serious re-evaluations. Clarifying whether Weber (1978) meant by efficiency what is habitually attributed to his writings is beyond the scope of this article and was already discussed in detail in other instances. 21 I find that efficiency, as defined by neo-classical economics, has certainly played a role in the development of bureaucracies. Yet, under the current form of governance, efficiency should be perceived as a mere incidental by-product, a “side-effect” so to speak, than as an unquestioned administrative telos of this specific form of organizing. Although the focus on efficiency captures a part of the nature of American bureaucracy, there is also much that it misses. Efficiency is neither a necessary nor a guaranteed outcome of bureaucratic form. In the spirit of provoking discussion, I suggest that the administrative telos of bureaucracy is in large part very much of its time and should not be assumed as being immune to transformations in governance. I differ from Gajduschek (2003) in that I believe bureaucracy reduces uncertainty not only for the sake of its environment but also for the psychological harmony of its members or to cope with a convoluted task.
One should also note that while the discussion here was restrained to the domain of government, it could be extended just as easily to bureaucracies in profit-seeking organizations. The latter are not in the slightest immune to environmental instability; they are perhaps even more susceptible. Bozeman and Rainey (1998) have suggested that contrary to common expectations, private sector managers are more likely to prefer a greater number of rules than their public counterparts. Moreover, as a public administration scholar, I have my trained biases that in spite of my earnest efforts might still seep through my choice of words and literature selection. All of us to some extent have control, even if limited, over our ideas, but we rarely control the assumptions within the literature we use to support them. Although one could trace normative connotations to the discussion, this surely isn’t the primary intent of the manuscript. The article was, in reality, motivated by what might appear at first glance an innocuous observation from personal research—that public servants appeal to rules (their bureaucratic nature as it were) when such behavior is deemed convenient. While power and self-interest are unmistaken makers of convenience, I here assert that making sense of and psychological coping with their environment or the task at hand are just as plausible. The motives of self-interest and protection are, of course, not entirely separate from any given perspective. However, the differentiation, if theoretically embraced, would add in many ways to our understanding of the motivation behind bureaucracy’s habitual failures to meet expectations. Above all, such an interpretation will not portray public servants as pathological miscreants, while still allowing room for power and self-interest to enter the equation. It is my belief that today’s American public servants, highly bashed and stripped of their once high statuses, are by and large bureaucratic, in the stereotypical sense, not necessarily by their nature, but because they succumb under the pressures of their tasks and the politicsness 22 of their environments.
Footnotes
Editor’s Note
This DSF contribution by Alexandru Roman generates a lively debate about (of all things!) bureaucracy and its dominant purpose. A response comes from Jos Raadschelders that offers some historical perspective on the changing telos of bureaucracy. Readers who would like to join the fray should jump in.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.