Abstract
Max Weber and Franz Kafka are seminal writers on bureaucracy and administration. While Weber suggests the technical superiority of a bureaucratic “iron cage,” Kafka speaks from within that cage, seeing its repressive rationality as being confounded by recalcitrant citizens searching for freedom. However, if individuals are embedded in a bureaucracy that limits the parameters of actions from which they can choose, how could they ever defy structural control? Articulating the conditions for human liberty, this article uses critical realism to reveal the potential emancipatory nature of bureaucracy as a way out of Kafka’s powerlessness and Weber’s iron cage via citizen engagement.
Max Weber (1864–1920) and Franz Kakfa (1883–1924) as contemporaries are among the most important writers who have inspired countless amount of research on bureaucracy and administration. Organizations governed under Weber’s hierarchical model of administration have been identified by scholars as demanding calculability, predictability, competency, and impersonality for effectiveness and efficiency (Centeno et al., 2016; Engster, 2001; Evans & Rauch, 1999).
In contrast, via novels like The Castle, Kafka is known for reading through Weberian formal-rational spectacles, by identifying how people experience such labyrinthine, nightmarish, and even inscrutable work settings. For instance, by linking Weber to workforce conformity with hierarchy, distinct jurisdictions and exhaustive written rules, Hodson et al. (2012, p. 269) present human disconformity with Weberian top-down forces as a key feature of Kafka’s vision of bureaucracy——such Kafkaesque elements often include alienation, deceit, patrimonialism, chaos, uncertainty, and rule breakings, all of which are individual responses to the exercise of domination by structural forces in the Weberian bureaucratic “iron cage” (Jennings et al., 2005; Jørgensen, 2012; Warner, 2007).
Is the bureaucratic world more Weberian or Kafkaesque like? This article argues that both views are typical of our work lives as their portraits of bureaucracy examine the same phenomena from different positions——Weber works from a top-down perspective with an overview of this repressive authority, whereas Kafka supplies us with a lived experience from the bottom-up, just as they share a similarity that suggests individuals cannot alter this mammoth iron cage no matter what happens inside.
For example, by simultaneously portraying workforce conformity (e.g., how managers discipline themselves according to hierarchical expectations) and nonconformity with structural forces (e.g., how subordinates discipline their bosses), McCabe (2014, p. 257) suggests that for Kafka, both conformity and nonconformity constitute the dark side of bureaucratic organizing, whereby we all are victims to work regimes that we “have not created, and may disagree with, but required to enforce.”
Yet refusing to be pessimistic, McCabe (2014, p. 260) adds that for Kafka, “there is always the potential for finding space through which to escape or evade control,” seeing human free will as “light” in such darkness, and believing that through “education, political will and struggle,” people could resist Weberian formal-rational control (McCabe, 2015, p. 75).
Is it really possible? Scholars studying Weber and Kafka should wonder whether individuals are embedded in bureaucracy and subject to its regulative, normative, and cognitive processes that trim their cognitions, define their interests, and produce their identities (Holm, 1995), and how are they able to defy such structural forces? In other words, if structures set a limit to the parameters of actions from which the agent can choose, we will find it difficult to understand how individuals might defy or change such dominating bureaucratic reality even if they ever wanted to (Clemens & Cook, 1999).
To answer how it is possible by articulating the conditions for human liberty out of Weber’s iron cage, this article contributes to public administration studies by fitting Weberian and Kafkaesque understandings of the bureaucratic forms into an emancipatory critical realist model of bureaucracy. Here, as Gorski (2013, p. 662) argues, critical realism (CR) sees human beings as capable of resisting “the most ruthless efforts to control behavior” as a result of the nondeterministic relationship between the administration and the citizen in diverse ontological realms, thereby echoing Kafka’s call for human emancipation——nondeterministic in the sense that CR shuns the flat ontology of Weberian and Kafkaesque portraits of bureaucracy, which confuses our knowledge of what exists (epistemology) with that which exists (ontology), by reducing the whole of social reality to mere human experience and imagination.
Rather, CR sees the bureaucratic reality as stratified rather than flat: What exists contains more than that which we observe——bureaucracy consists of potentialities (potentials) and actualities (happenings) that reside in three related yet independent ontological domains——the Real, the Actual, and the Empirical (Bhaskar, 1989): Weberian structures (e.g., the formal-rational citizen–administration relationship) are located in the Real and their activations give rise to varied events (e.g., observed and unobserved bureaucratic phenomena) in the Actual, which, only when observed and experienced, become Kafkaesque individual practices in the Empirical domain.
What does this ontology mean for our better analysis of bureaucracy? As Porpora (2015) points out, we may eschew philosophical labels but not philosophical commitments when doing research, so “we should make sure that the positions to which we are philosophically committed are those that are most defensible” (p. 188). Thus, as with all philosophical approaches, the strength of a CR approach depends on whether this is a well thought through and coherent perspective on the world. This article suggests it is.
And critical realists further emphasize philosophizing with practical points. Intuitively, CR’s ontology means that Weberian structures (formal-rational expectation of citizen–administration relationship) in the Real may not be realized in the Empirical by Kafkaesque individual experience that only exists in practice as manifested by specific actions at specific times. This is because Weberian structures are not the only force in society as other interacting structures like the market, family, and religions also prescribe and proscribe the behaviors of social actors. Together, they influence what individuals choose to do in a bureaucracy. This suggests that Weberian structures are tendencies or potentialities in the Real that may not be realized while Kafkaesque lived experience are actualities in the Empirical so that they can only influence but cannot determine each other when they reside in different reality domains.
Procedure-wise, the following sections will first review the existing literature on Weberian and Kafkaesque visions of bureaucracy before suggesting how they could both fit into a critical realist ontology in which Weberian structures existing in the Real cannot dominate the knowledge and actions of individual-level Kafkaesque experience in the Empirical——unless we specify such ontological conditions for individual resistance and liberty in bureaucracy, we fall into the traps of structural determinism, soft and hard, as of the existing literature: Despite avoiding “hard” determinism in which the agent appears as passively reacting to Weberian “cages in the sense that people are trapped in them, their basic humanity denied” (Ritzer, 2008, p. 27), Kafka’s vision of bureaucracy is a form of “soft” structural determinism in the sense that Kafka still tends to emphasize how bureaucratic processes are shaped by Weberian forces that reinforce conformity while allowing nonconformity as long as it does not overthrow the iron cage.
Weber, Kafka, and Structural Determinism
Weber formulated his model of rational–legal bureaucracy based on the administrative systems developed under French, English, and Prussian absolutism (Thompson, 2005). The purpose of these systems was not to support responsive governance but instead to extend the absolute sovereign’s powers to all corners of the kingdom and bring all subjects under the monarch’s detailed regulation (Engster, 2001, chap. 4) so that lower-level bureaucrats continued to be conceived as functionaries whose main role was to apply the laws and policies handed down from above to individuals in predictable, impersonal, and neutral ways with universal criteria (Matheson, 2007).
But how? The bureaucrat as a human being can be reckless, subjective, emotional, and irrational just as this relationship between the governed and public authorities does not develop spontaneously. Consequently, Weber (Gerth & Mills, 1948, p. 214) argues that the exercise of power must be regulated by the bureaucratic forms of organization: The decisive reason for the advantage of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any form of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction, and of material and personal costs—these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration, and especially in its monocratic form. As compared with the collegiate, honorific, and avocation forms of administration, trained bureaucracy is superior on all these points.
As Parsons (1951) sees it, for Weber, bureaucracy as a dehumanized system represents an ideal type of exercise of power between citizens and administrative authorities involving the principles of action orientation, objectivity, neutrality, and universality—Jørgensen (2012, pp. 195–196) then specifies such features: In a bureaucratic organization, bureaucrats should have professional/academic trainings, and the authorization to make decisions is established in rules so objectivity (e.g., case decisions must be made on objective criteria), neutrality (e.g., the authorities cannot treat bureaucrats emotionally), and universalism (e.g., everybody receives the same treatment following universal criteria) are promoted; bureaucrats are also placed in a hierarchical system with a high degree of specialization while their work should be based on documents to ensure action orientation (e.g., a bureaucrat’s properties such as his or her race or weight should not matter as what counts for job evaluation is performance).
In a way, Weber works with a top-down perspective and his ideal type is a theoretical construct to which reality can be compared (see Fry & Raadschelders, 2014, p. 61). No wonder subsequent scholars build on his model of bureaucracy to examine the relationships between the bureaucracy and its citizens. For instance, Gouldner (1954) usefully contrasts three patterns of administration to differentiate representative bureaucracy in which rules serve the interests of all employees, from punishment-centered bureaucracy in which rules serve as a means of legitimating one party’s right to sanction the others, and mock-bureaucracy in which rules are ignored by all parties. Other scholars further suggest that the bureaucratic forms (as formalization by the extent of written rules, procedures, and instructions) can be of two distinct orientations to their employees: one as constraining, to coerce effort and compliance from them, and the other as enabling them to perform their tasks better (e.g., Adler & Borys, 1996).
Of course, Weber was no naive admirer of the bureaucratic form of organization as he was concerned about the bureaucratization of societal life through formalization, standardization, and dehumanization (Jørgensen, 2012, p. 206), but his model of bureaucracy tells us little about the concrete relation between the bureaucracy and the citizen from the citizen’s perspective, which is well enlightened by Kafka who tends to depict how a Weberian bureaucracy as an artificial ideal state works in real life.
Kafka, Literature, and Bureaucracy
As someone living in the shadow of the Austrian Hungarian Dual Monarchy, Kafka might have had more experience than Weber with bureaucratic administration just as his literature has spawned diverse interpretations by organization scholars on the nature of bureaucratic organizing, with an alternative understanding of the Weberian model that is put in time and space.
And the relationship between literature and bureaucratic analysis has been well examined. For example, Land and Sliwa (2009) argue that it is precisely the “unreality” of literature that gives novels their value as spaces for experimentation and learning within organizational settings. While Tummers and Karsten (2012) specifically vouch for the use of literature in public administration research as they find such use has become frequent in top field journals. Common to these scholars is an appreciation that literary fiction can reveal important truths about bureaucratic life, as narrative approaches can be “complementing, illustrating and scrutinizing logico-scientific forms of reporting” (Czarniawska, 1999, p. 23). Here, De Cock and Land (2005) have summarized three broad ways in which literature has been appropriated within social science analysis: (a) the use of literary theory to provide new insights to management analysis; (b) the use of literary genres to provide alternative modes for the presentation of research findings; and (c) the use of literary fiction itself as a tool for illustrating management ideas. The stories of Kafka, featured in The Trial and The Castle, are very relevant for this last type of research, given that few authors of fiction have had such a profound impact on our everyday understanding of bureaucracy——surely, for scholars of public administration, Kafka stands out among novelists of the 20th century because he deals with issues that lie at the heart of the study of the bureaucratic form: rationality, power, resistance, escape, domination, and sensemaking (Parker, 2005, p. 160).
In Kafka’s novels, as Munro and Huber (2012, p. 526) argue, “the labyrinthine buildings and sets of rules, the animal-becomings, and the everyday misunderstandings between the various characters . . . which while being generally complementary to Weber’s theory of bureaucracy, bear their own distinctive characteristics”: As in confronting legal (The Trial) and government (The Castle) bureaucratic organizations, character K. unfalteringly proceeds with the expectation that these organizations will behave in a way that is consistent with an orderly, predictable, and rational system of regulations mediated through a rigid organization of offices. He is seduced by the rational promise of bureaucracy. But as Clegg et al. (2016, 158) note, K.’s experience is far from what he expects, as “it is fueled by contradiction, irony, despair and futility.” Or as G. Smith (2008, p. 8) puts it, for Kafka, the ideal type of bureaucracy exists as a false promise, a delusion of reason and certainty, “a symbol of K.’s doomed search for order.”
In other words, this Weberian hyper-hierarchical world, despite being able to regulate the subjective and interest-driven people, is marked by a number of cracks: For instance, K. finds personal connections, advantageous opportunities, and convenient occasions in the bureaucracy that grant one access to formally unjustified privileges, contradicting Weberian ideals of neutrality and universality with strict rule-followings; K. also encounters procedural errors, if not chaos, related to the distribution of case documents, which should be the lifeblood of a Weberian bureaucratic organization; accordingly, K. finds it hard to understand the Castle’s authorities that are filled with ambiguity and inscrutability——even K.’s very appointment to the surveyor position is dubious from the beginning because K. claims to be called for by the Castle. But where is the letter that calls him to the Castle? K. refers to assistants that shall follow the next morning with instruments on what K. needs to survey but they never arrive. They probably never existed—K. has to guess how to navigate the myth of the bureaucratic Castle that is subject to conjecture and sensemaking interpretations.
No wonder Kafka’s literature precedes contemporary criticism of bureaucratic organizing from management thinkers, who can be divided into two camps of structural determinism, hard or soft, meaning that they either see Kafka’s narratives as about individuals’ futile or active defense against a repressive bureaucratic superiority.
On the hard side, scholars like Huber and Munro (2014, p. 262) argue that Kafka’s tales provide accounts of “the dehumanizing effects of the bureaucratic apparatus on the very individuals who are supposed to be their beneficiaries,” or depict “the ambivalent character of the social institutions that ostensibly exist to help us” when they emphasize the proliferation of misunderstandings during human interactions with the bureaucratic order (Munro & Huber, 2012, p. 523). In this vein, Kafka portrays the workplace as an arena for the interplay of “uncontrollability, unpredictability and helplessness” (Kets de Vries, 1995, p. 55), showing how bureaucracies, filled by repression, contradiction, and irony, come to dominate us, as citizens feel trapped and even despaired in a vicious circle created by bureaucratic rules, norms, and expectations that they cannot even run away from, let alone change or overturn (Warner, 2007). In other words, if we borrow Hirschman’s (1970) concepts, in a Weberian bureaucracy, voice or revolt by citizens and bureaucrats seldom occurs as nobody leaves it. Most of them react with loyalty.
On a softer determinism side, as Deleuze and Guattari (1986) argue, although Kafka’s work does not herald individual salvation, his view on human voluntary actions is pessimistic but not passive as he still believes in flight and escape but not in total human liberty when facing bureaucratic controls and constraints.
Hodson et al. (2012) further argue that such individual disconformity with top-down forces is a defining feature of Kafka’s vision of bureaucracy when they suggest that existing accounts underplay the structural opportunities for resistance as scholars have long found deceit, informal agreements, personal power, and widespread rule breakings inside the bureaucratic machine to evade dominating institutional repression. Likewise, DeHart-Davis (2009) identifies “unbureaucratic” Kafkaesque nonconforming behaviors and dispositions in Weberian bureaucracy, including rule-bending and risk propensity through a study of the employees of four cities in a Midwestern U.S. state.
Extending this line, McCabe (2015) argues that Kafka attends to such nonconformity “precisely” to encourage us to imagine liberating alternatives to the dire consequences of conformity for bureaucratic citizens, revealing what can happen when the Weberian “formal-rational model is taken to its extreme——when humans become so distanced from each other that they regard each other as mere cogs in the machine” (p. 63). But a Weberian bureaucracy is a “contradictory work regime” that also enables managers to be disciplined by their subordinates (McCabe, 2014, p. 274). Thus, for Kafka, workforce conformity and nonconformity with structural forces suggest that Weberian structural power is a contested affair for free will as “there is always the potential for finding space through which to escape or evade control” or even resist domination.
However, disappointedly for McCabe, in Kafka’s stories, agents rarely have true freedom, with no real power to contest bureaucratic formal-rational structural processes. Although we see occasional nonconformity in Kafka’s novels that enlightens us about the human potential to escape or even fight bureaucratic control, it is problematic to equate Kafka with human liberty because as Munro and Huber (2012) note, though “every attempt at escape only leads to further entanglement within the bureaucracy. Behind every office lies another office. Escape is found only in extremis” (p. 540).
Surely, escape against hard structural forces can be fine but what overwhelms structural determinism, soft and hard, lies in the human capacity to challenge and alter top-down control. But how? We lack adequate theories to answer a puzzle on how individual will and endeavor could resist or change bureaucratic structural forces without disembedding from such powerful contextual constraints (i.e., avoiding individual voluntarism that inflates a human’s role and power to do whatever he or she wants to shape and engineer bureaucratic authority) as Weberian bureaucracies could accordingly evolve to further contain and accommodate reflexive human actions.
In sum, the most important differences between Weber and Kafka are that they view the same dehumanizing nature of bureaucracy from different positions. Weber sees this repressive bureaucratic authority from a top-down perspective while Kafka provides us with a lived experience from a bottom-up lens, looking at the bureaucratic phenomenon through persons who are often marginalized. Are the observations of one more correct that the other? The question is meaningless. Their understandings are complementary and enrich each other just as they share a fatal similarity that suggests individuals cannot escape, let alone overthrow, the iron cage no matter what happens inside.
Thus, to move beyond Weber and Kafka and their structural determinism, this article instead sees the potential emancipatory nature of bureaucracy as a way out of Kafka’s powerlessness and Weber’s iron cage via citizen engagement, in a critical realist model of bureaucracy, which is ontologically sandwiched between a view that the bureaucratic world works like a Weberian machine, and a view that the world is more Kafkaesque with both conformity and nonconformity present in a stratified bureaucratic reality.
CR and Stratified Reality Domains
CR is a broad movement that began in British philosophy following the founding work of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer, and others. Since the 1970s, it has become a major strand of social scientific paradigms rivaling empiricism, poststructuralism, constructivism, and interpretivism, by arguing for the necessity of ontology for research, that is, the study of being, existence, or more simply the study of the way the world is.
Here, CR helps us avoid falling into the oscillation trap between moments of structural determinism that loses the actor (actions) in structures as Weberian and Kafkaesque theorizations often do, or moments of voluntarism that inflates the actor’s role to contest and change bureaucratic authority, as some Kafkaesque scholars like McCabe wishes when they analyze bureaucratic functioning with a flat ontology.
In fact, CR, like the flat ontology that is the basis of Weberian and Kafkaesque bureaucracy analysis, is a worldview, and an emancipatory ontology to explain the processes of structural change: The flat ontology of the existing literature suggests that it is what is observable that defines the nature of, and limit to, our knowledge of bureaucracies. But in this conception of the world lacking underlying tendencies, what is absent from the face of the world is simply impossible. For instance, social relations as an empirically unobserved but true reality are independent of human interpretations. Thus, even Karl Popper, a foe of metaphysics, came to appreciate near the end of his life that his preoccupations with a flat world existence had blinded him to the reality of potentialities (Runde, 1996). He acknowledges that potentialities are realities and “not mere possibilities. They are as real as forces” (Popper, 1990, p. 9).
Instead, CR argues against the flat ontology that refers to the reduction of reality to mere human experience. For CR, social reality is characterized by stratified entities and processes in three domains: A distinction is made between the “Empirical” domain (including observed human practices and experiences), the “Actual” domain (including events out of a social relationship that can happen but may not be realized into the Empirical domain until human agency transforms them into experience), and the “Real” domain (including mechanisms/structures as social relations that distribute resources and potentials to people within social settings, which enable or constrain their actions to generate events in the Actual domain, which only when observed and experienced, become featured in the Empirical domain). This ontology, as shown by Figure 1, tells us that reality is more complex than may be apparent in “raw” human observations.
The three domains of the Real.
To philosophize with a practical point, let us imagine a social scenario. In a factory, we may empirically observe a team of operatives follows testing schedules and standard operating procedures within a Code of Practice. We may also observe that they do this independent of supervision. For CR, to explain such (observed) dutiful following of the rules in the Empirical domain, we need to look beyond the events observed.
At a “deeper” level, or the Actual domain, the causes of the empirical regularity may be accessed beyond the immediate context of the observed events. For instance, the unobserved events of engineers in self-preserving the Code of Conduct, implicit requirements for pre-entry professional training, and random yet possible surveillance from supervisors in this factory may all play a role in affecting the observations made.
Then, the Real domain contains structures and mechanisms. Here, social structures as social relationships exist to enable or constrain people’s actions. We can imagine that it is the capitalist relationship between the employer and the employed that affects the observed and unobserved events and regularities in the factory.
Although the word structure gives the impression of something physical, like the structure of a house, social structures are social relations: As Cohen (2000, p. 36) points out, seeing structure as relations is consistent with our common sense, just as the structure of a bridge is about the relations between its constituent girders, spans, and so on.
C. Smith (2011, p. 138) then adds that scholars often have difficulty believing in the reality of social relations (or structures) independent of human interpretations because such relations are empirically unobserved. For instance, a Weberian social relation can be exploitative between the governors and the governed without that being realized by the parties to the relation or even without the actors’ having any concept of exploitation. Or as Porpora (2015, p. 103) puts it, “it is of course true that for a relation to be exploitative, the parties to the relation must be doing something they understand, engaging in some behavior that is concept-dependent. But it need not be the relation in question, in this case exploitation, which their behavior generates. The relation in such cases is an unintended and perhaps even unperceived consequence of what else the actors are doing”—social relations as structures are thus not concept or behavior-dependent but are the often-unobserved relational conditions underlying behaviors.
This means that structures are ontologically existent in the Real domain whether or not actors notice them in the Empirical domain. And there are many structures, for instance, capitalist exploitation between producers and workers, or bureaucratic power between supervisors and subordinates. These structures may contradict each other just as structures influencing professional conduct in a bureaucracy often moderate structures of racism——there are mechanisms that exist in the Real domain but are not activated, or are activated but counteracted by other mechanisms, and thus do not produce events in the Actual domain. Overall, this complex web of the Real domain enables and constrains individual actions and events performed in the Actual domain, including those generated by social relations that are only observable in the Empirical domain, for example, our everyday experiences, such as a good day at work or a frustrating meeting with our bosses. We seldom look beneath these observed experiences to test what drives them. This suggests that structures only give rise to actions, manifest not in the form of deterministic human outcomes but rather as tendencies or potentialities, which are never stable or fully predictable (Zucker, 1988).
For public administration in particular, CR therefore provides a nudge to go beyond such empirically identified events—critical realists are unified by an overall ambition of wanting to explain and also change the world. In operationalizing this ambition lies a need for knowing what complex bureaucratic phenomena are comprised of, how they can be studied, and the ontological premises for doing so.
In sum, CR’s ontology holds that events in the Actual and structures behind them in the Real are ontologically independent of our experiences in the Empirical—as the next section shows, Weberian structures between authorities and bureaucrats are priors (or independent relational conditions in the Real) that give rise to Kafkaesque behaviors in the Empirical. As structures and practices exist in different reality domains, they can only affect but cannot dictate each other—we hereby theorize an emancipatory bureaucracy beyond Weber’s iron cage and Kafka’s powerless individuals.
Putting Weber and Kafka in a Critical Realist World
Does ontology affect our research? Critical realists believe that it does (e.g., Gorski, 2013), just as all research presupposes meta-theoretical commitments to questions regarding the nature of our world, the possibility and methods of knowing (Lawson, 1997). And what this article does is to apply ontology of the abstract to particular bureaucratic entities, thereby theorizing the emancipatory conditions for individual resistance that may well change Weberian structural forces—for CR, the study of bureaucracy cannot be reduced to the analysis of observed human experiences. It is necessary to examine deeper social structures that are enduring but are not reducible to the human activities that they facilitate or subvert. Let us start from the Real domain.
The Real
What are the main features of this citizen-administrative social relation or structure in the Real domain that shape a bureaucracy? Weber has identified for us some which introduced this article—they include social expectations, vocabularies, and visions for bureaucratic administration with emphasis on power and authority, specialization and hierarchy, neutrality and universality, rationality and rationalization, superordination, and subordination (Clegg, 2005; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011).
These expectations and visions in a social relationship are potentialities that may not be realized because a Weberian structure does not exist alone in our contemporary society as it can be counteracted by other structures that may be conflicting as well as complementary to this Weberian relation-set. This should mean that a relationship between a supervisor and a subordinate in a state administration is only one of the many social relationships that pervades their social world. For instance, Thornton et al. (2012) draw our attention to the many societal structures that prescribe and proscribe the cognitions and behaviors of actors in a modern society—the market, state, family, religions, professions, and community (for a review on how multiple structures shape our society, see Greenwood et al., 2011)—tensions between these various structures are ubiquitous so that multiple social identities and vocabularies are available to our bureaucrats in state administration (e.g., Meyer et al., 2014), when we have plenty of research showing how these actors rarely listen to only one structure to carry out their actions in the Empirical domain (e.g., McPherson & Sauder, 2013)—a bureaucrat can be a father, a Buddhist, a PhD in statistics, and a part-time stock broker at the same time such that his understanding of what to do when his supervisor assigns him a project can be quite varied and what goes on as events in the Actual domain out of this supervisor–subordinate relationship may not always be easily observable to both parties.
The Actual
Structures will unfold in the Actual domain as events in specific organizational settings such as in a public organization, whether our social actors or bureaucrats are aware of them or not. Such events can be forms of specific patterns that are reproduced through relatively self-activating processes and they “gradually acquire the moral and ontological status of taken-for-granted facts which, in turn, shape future interactions and negotiations” (Barley & Tolbert, 1997, p. 94). Eventually, actors often adhere to those “taken-for-granted” scripts, without questioning their efficiency or legitimacy. Such specific scripts give stability and meaning to their social life.
What are such specific events under Weberian bureaucratic formal-rational structures? Scholars suggest they can range from (a) stable and exhaustive written rules, (b) specialized departments and fixed jurisdictional areas, (c) an ordered hierarchy with clear lines of subordination and supervision, to (d) formal training for employees to acquire specialized expertise (e.g., Gajduschek, 2003). Such events may not be readily observable to our bureaucrats. For instance, we see bureaucratic rules written down in an organizational manual but we do not literally observe them with our senses, just as these rules often reproduce themselves by establishing behavioral routines, disciplining deviance, and constructing agents’ identities and interests (Phillips et al., 2004).
Or as Clegg et al. (2016) add, unobserved bureaucratic events may also include (e) constructed meaninglessness, (f) managed inaction, and (g) taught helplessness. Constructed meaninglessness involves intense individual attempts at understanding apparently meaningless actions and pointless rules in a struggle to produce meaning for their own actions; managed inaction in a bureaucracy then “restricts individual behavioral options by socializing clients in their respective lack of agency, subjecting them to reminders of their impotence, inviting them to give up any attempts to persuade the organization to be responsive to what they want and need” (p. 166), whereas taught helplessness involves intense emotional reactions as people “have learned to believe that any effort will be insufficient and that an attempt to solve a problem will possibly aggravate it” (p. 168) as they have learnt to feel powerless and trapped.
Overall, the Actual includes events happening independent of the perception that actors may have of them (although actors may not fully see such events, they do exist).
The Empirical
Indeed, some events exist in the Actual but are often overlooked by actors in bureaucracy. But fortunately, Kafka has helped us identify some that have been translated into the Empirical domain by our human actors. Such observed events are actualities of how individuals experience and act in the Weberian bureaucracy, just as Warner (2007) argues that Kafka depicts the reality of bureaucratic organizing rather than simply produces a surreal commentary in which people are simply stunned by Weberian rituals, routines, and rules. So as Clegg et al. (2016) well put it, we should study Kafka’s portrait of bureaucracy “as a practice rather than a metaphor that informs studies about the perceptions of microprocesses that create obstacles for change” (p. 161).
Aside from the usual Weberian obedient bureaucrats practicing objectivity, neutrality, and universality during their work in a hierarchical system with high specialization, actualities of how Weberian structures (as potentialities) get practiced by actors in the Empirical can also include (a) chaos, when different actors within and outside an organization contradict each other with divergent goals (Edwards & Wajcman, 2005); (b) negotiated order that is between workers and managers when the formal rules in organizations are often very different from the way things actually get done in organizations (Selznick, 1996); (c) abuse and patrimonialism that elites subject their subordinates to (Dobbin, 2009); and (d) fear under the rule by fiat (Pelzer, 2002).
Emancipatory Bureaucracy Set in Three Reality Domains
In contrast to Weber’s formal-rational ideals of what a bureaucracy looks alike, Kafka provides us with a sense of irony for lived experiences in a bureaucracy. To see bureaucracy’s emancipatory potential due to the nondeterministic nature between structure and agency, CR then urges us to move beyond Kafka’s observations to acknowledge an ontologically independent reality of three domains that cannot be collapsed into each other.
However, a reviewer of this article suggests that compared with CR, Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory is more capable of producing enlightenment and emancipation (structuration can raise individuals’ consciousness to enable humans to destroy the mental “iron cage” that they build for themselves). This suggestion is insightful yet problematic as Giddens’s conflation of agency and system denies the political difficulties humans face when they try to resist and change structural forces.
For Giddens, the social system or society is reproduced or changed by individual action that is always patterned by “structure,” a virtual order of rules/differences. Thus, structuration referred to the active process by which individuals, informed by social structure, acted in the world to reproduce or change the social system which confronted them. Archer’s (1982) seminal British Journal of Sociology article was one of the first critiques of Giddens’s theoretical project. It remains one of the most insightful critiques. Archer was, like many critics, rightly skeptical about the status and function of this virtual structure that causes troubling theoretical implications—through the concept of structure, Giddens “conflates” the human agent with the system.
In other words, through structure, individual agency was constituted by the system because they have thoroughly interiorized their social conditions. This conflation fails to live up to the proclaimed purpose of setting humans free because if structures (or rules and resources as defined by Giddens) exist only in individual instantiation, then we see a collapsing black hole, when system, structure, and agency all become one.
If agency and structure become two sides of a same coin, it is analytically impossible to study their interactions, cementing the false promise of voluntarism that suggests individuals can simply do what they want, which is not true. For Archer (1982, p. 464), the implication of this voluntarism is objectionable: “the systematic underplaying of constraints artificially inflates the degrees of freedom for action”—by failing to maintain a distinction between the individual and social reality, Giddens denies the existence of social conditions that transcends the individual or releases the individual from structural constraints. And as social conditions are no more than internalized rules, an individual is free at any point to follow the rules differently or act otherwise.
Instead, CR stands as an intervention into the debate because it tells us the distinctive properties of social structure and human agency are distinctive for a purpose, thereby facilitating our understanding that structure and agency exist in different domains.
Ontological Freedom Versus Political Freedom
On a deeper level, Giddens’s position is in fact more about striving for ontological freedom rather than political freedom that our article is concerned with: CR, unlike structuration, does not agree with the statement that human beings build their own bureaucratic cages so if they stop perceiving themselves as being caged, they can set themselves free.
In a way, structuration and its voluntarist view on human emancipation are in line with Sartre’s early views that freedom is synonymous with human consciousness (humans are conscious and therefore free): No human being can fail to be free because that even if you are in chains, and incapacitated practically, you still retain free will over what choices you have (Cox, 2008, pp. 41–42). This notion of ontological freedom has often been rejected because it implies that humans can be free when they raise their consciousness. In his early work, Sartre embraced this implication unflinchingly when he claimed the French public was as free as ever during the Nazi occupation.
For this article, emancipation means something political as fighting bureaucratic determinism not only relates to ontological freedom but also to the practical scopes of choices and barriers. While Sartre never renounced the ontological view of freedom, in later works he became critical of what he then called the “Cartesian” view that freedom consists in the ability to change one’s attitude no matter what the situation. In this vein, he emphasized the “situation” (i.e., structural influences) in explaining individual choice and psychology, by conceding that a change of attitude is insufficient for real freedom.
This suggests that emancipation in a critical realist model not only depends on how human beings buried in bureaucracy can come to see themselves as something other than prisoners in a cage, but also on how they understand, resist, and change structures.
Practical Step 1 to resist structures
As O’Mahoney and Vincent (2014) suggest, CR believes in the possibility to improve the human condition by exploring social structures more adequately. Here, structures or mechanisms are neither necessarily observable nor unobservable but are more like potentialities that may or may not be realized or observed until measures are utilized for discovery——the emancipation of human rights relies on our self-awareness and further investigation of structural bondages and the relations of entities and powers, which may not be empirically manifest but still knowable with our efforts. As such, CR provides a way for researchers to critique the existence and value of these social structures, for example, by explicating how the human condition is adversely affected by Weberian structural forces.
Step 2
The awareness of diverse structural forces then affords the potential to inform corrective actions based on the knowledge of the causal mechanisms involved with an emancipatory focus—CR’s explanatory clarity of distinguishing between real, actual, and empirical levels of reality, or between possessed, exercised, or observed powers offers us a critical approach to think about why certain of our decisions lead to certain outcomes. If we knew that, we might be able improve on existing decision-making if we understood the mechanisms in play.
And even if we simply try to become more inquisitive about the structural situations we face, there could be practical benefits to be gained because, as suggested earlier, Weberian structures do not constitute a coherent whole. Other structures in society also help define a cognitive world in which actors may find ample ideas to justify new bureaucratic forms or challenge existing ones, using these diverse structures as underlying principles for their actions. For instance, bureaucrats are fearful for their careers about violating the organizational rules but Weberian bureaucracies are not the only force in society as structures such as the market economy also influence what individuals can choose to do so that a bureaucrat may push for more market incentives such as flexible pays and work at home during lockdowns with his or her allies in the workplace, reshaping citizen–administration relationship in a Weberian bureaucracy.
In short, Weberian structures do not provide “ready-made” solutions. In numerous studies, organizational actors have been found to have successfully resisted (e.g., Townley, 1997), hybridized (e.g., Thornton & Ocasio, 1999), or fundamentally changed the bureaucratic forms in diverse settings (e.g., Yang & Liu, 2019)—in this vein, CR successfully conceptualizes a bureaucracy with emancipatory potentials for these actors.
Conclusion
How can individuals embedded in bureaucracies contest the structural forces to which they are subject? CR comes up with a way of seeing bureaucracies as having the potential to free their inhabitants from the false notion that they are helpless in the face of the cage-like qualities of the bureaucratic forms because structures can only influence but cannot determine what human beings do. They are not prisoners in a cage.
Thus, our critical realist model of bureaucracy helps scholars identify and revise the weaknesses in both Weberian and Kafkaesque organizational theorizing, which we label as structural determinism (hard and soft) because none of the paradigms gives true power to organizational actors (despite claiming and hoping to do so) or theorizes the emancipatory conditions that allow these actors to resist or change structural forces.
Instead, against painting the bureaucratic world as either Weberian or Kafkaesque like, this article has well fit Weberian and Kafkaesque understandings of bureaucracy into an emancipatory CR framework, which suggests that public administration is a contingent product of nondeterministic interactions between structural forces in the Real and varied individual experience in the Empirical, giving rise to resilience, adaptability, and possible transformation of existing bureaucratic forms by social actors.
For future research directions, scholars could build on our threads to investigate how unintentional, rather than intentional, Kafkaesque actions may test Weberian structural constraints and may “accidentally” kick start institutional changes addressing unexpected individual actions seen as localized irregularities and contingencies. In fact, Archer (1995) has long pushed us to incorporate the time-sequential potentialities of less purposeful actions that also challenge Weberian structural boundaries, emphasizing bureaucratic changes that emerge despite, rather than because of, intentional action.
Finally, we would also reiterate that CR, as an ongoing project, offers opportunities for researchers to critique and amend the vocabularies and concepts which the original theorists developed. For readers new to CR, the term used here may seem unfamiliar, especially for those more used to positivist or constructionist approaches. However, the key point is that CR enables a more sophisticated representation of the natural and social worlds than those offered by other positions. For this reason alone, the journey into CR is one that will enrich all researchers, even if they end up disagreeing with the ontology, they will be more able to justify their own beliefs and practices. For critical realists, the commitment of CR to a progressive social science means that inquiry and debate are fundamental to the survival of not only CR, but credible social science.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor Douglas Porpora, the journal editors as well as the anonymous reviewers for their very insights that have significantly improved this paper during rounds of revisions. The critical realism community of scholars and their thoughtful work shaped the original idea.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This writing project is supported by the Social Science Fund of Beijing Municipality with grant number 18ZGC012.
