Abstract
Organizations can spend a great deal of time, effort, and funds bringing new employees onboard. Organizational socialization, or onboarding, is how an organizational newcomer becomes a full-fledged organizational member. It is the process through which organizations train new employees and inculcate the organizational culture. Having conducted a study of a state agency that went to considerable lengths shaping new employees into productive organizational members, one of my first thoughts as I neared the end of Zachary Oberfield’s book Becoming Bureaucrats: Socialization at the Front Lines of Government Service was “does this all mean that an organization’s formal efforts to shape newcomers are for naught?”
Through his case studies of the bureaucratic socialization of new police officers and welfare caseworkers, Oberfield finds that “becoming an insider might be more aptly described as a subtle shift than a radical reconstruction” (p. 174). He considers both institutional and dispositional factors during the socialization process. The premise underlying the institutional factors is that new employees are malleable and formal organizational interventions such as training can influence new employees’ adoption of new views and ways of being. From the dispositional factor perspective, most of employees’ formation actually occurs prior to bureaucratic socialization and their views remain relatively stable—that is, employees will maintain the perspectives with which they entered the organization or occupation. Oberfield offers evidence indicating that although both have some influence, there is far less of a shift than expected between entry and several years in.
Another worthy finding in Becoming Bureaucrats is the importance of informal organizational influences such as interactions with peers and supervisors. Scholars in the organizations and management literature have noted that the relationship between newcomers and experienced organizational members can play a key role in new employees’ socialization and offer access to resources that may not be available through formal socialization efforts (e.g., Morrison, 1993, 2002; Ostroff & Kozlowski, 1992). Oberfield goes so far as to say that these informal efforts may actually be the root of the modest changes seen in his study (p. 173). In part, the power of this finding lies in the longitudinal nature of this study. Oberfield is able to see that effects of formal training may be more prominent early on, while the influence of informal interactions with peers and then supervisors is more consistent throughout the study period.
Few studies in organizational socialization go to the extent that Oberfield does to offer us a deep, rich account of the underlying mechanisms of onboarding and the potential influence of prior factors. As such, Becoming Bureaucrats offers an important contribution to the organizational socialization literature generally. Scholars in that realm have called for more studies that focus on the antecedents of socialization, that collect longitudinal qualitative and quantitative data, and that follow newcomers for longer than 6 months or a year. Oberfield deftly responds to each of these calls with a robust research design that collects quantitative and qualitative data through ethnography, interviews, and surveys over a 2-year time period.
Thus one of the main strengths of Becoming Bureaucrats is the research design and data. Oberfield offers a deep, rich view of the socialization of welfare caseworkers and police officers through data from surveys over five time periods and interviews at three points in time over a 2-year period. He also collects ethnographic data by becoming a welfare casework trainee and employee for 1 year. Of note is that an ethnographic approach is unique within the organizational socialization literature generally, and also is not one often used within public administration research. It offers that relatively rare first-person inside view of and data about what is actually going on within a public sector organization.
The chapters on the study findings offer a comprehensive view of changes over time after first grounding us in the perspectives of newcomers and veterans. To help the reader navigate the extensive findings, Oberfield offers several summaries at the end of major sections and/or chapters. Doing so goes a long way toward helping the reader make sense of the extensive findings he presents. He begins by discussing views of veterans and newcomers in Chapters 3 and 4. Then in Chapters 5 to 7, findings for each dimension of bureaucratic personality—identity, motivation, and attitudes—from his conceptual framework are organized into their own chapters. Each of these chapters contains a section for each occupation, police officers and welfare caseworkers, and then within each occupation the qualitative and quantitative findings are presented. His analysis is carefully explained in detail, and he weaves in both the qualitative data and analysis and quantitative data findings.
Oberfield extensively explains his research design, methods, and the research context. I found this to be one of most complete discussions of design and methods I have read in a book based on empirical research. One minor comment is that I wish the interview guides had been included in an appendix. Survey questions are included, making the omission of the interview guides all the more apparent. Because the nature of the interviews was semi-structured, I recognize that more questions were asked than were in the guides and that it is not practical to include all questions asked. But the guides would indicate the basic premise and intent of the starting set of questions. They could also be a good resource for others interested in doing similar research but in different contexts.
One area that I wish Oberfield had addressed more extensively is the possibility of gender (or gendered) differences in socialization, particularly across these two occupations. Although gender was not a focus of his study, it is hard for the reader to ignore the disparity in the number of men and women across the samples of police officers and welfare caseworkers or not to wonder whether gendered occupational cultures may have mattered. It leads one to question what, if any, difference “difference” makes in terms of gender, especially since he does discuss race and racial identity to some extent. He makes the point that minorities may have been motivated by desires to protect people and treat them fairly (p. 171), but such motives can also be gender stereotyped as feminine. It is possible that although Oberfield notes that the only demographic characteristic that showed any predictive power was race, an analysis of the qualitative data through the lens of gender identity and gendered occupations (Ely & Padavic, 2007) might reveal additional nuances in the process and outcomes. Such a focus would be worthy of future research.
An important contribution of Oberfield’s work is that it highlights the salience of both identity and organizational socialization in the public sector literature. Although both of these areas have received considerable attention in the organizations and management literature, they have received some, but not much, attention in studies of public sector organizations and employees. In the interests of full disclosure, both are also a focus of my own interest and research. But with that bias aside, research in these areas can offer insight into the dynamics of public sector organizations insofar as revealing more about what influences employee behavior. In turn, increased understanding of what influences behavior lends insight into key concerns of public sector scholars and practitioners, such as employee satisfaction, turnover, organizational fit, and performance.
Is the ultimate message of Becoming Bureaucrats that selection and recruitment process and informal interactions among employees trump formal socialization tactics? Oberfield’s findings suggest that this might be the case and indeed he presents these ideas as implications not just for newcomer socialization but also for organizational change and continuity. Although it is unlikely that organizations will cease to fund and offer formal socialization tactics such as classroom training, mentoring, on-the-job training, communities of practice, buddy systems, and so on, they may do well to focus more attention on informal interactions that occur in the workplace in addition to their recruitment and selection processes. Instructors teaching public management and organizational behavior and theory courses would find Oberfield’s text a worthy addition to their course reading list. I highly recommend reading Becoming Bureaucrats not just to learn more about the bureaucratic socialization of police officers and welfare caseworkers but also to keep the research and conversation about socialization going within the public sector literature.