Weber’s Bureaucracy: Rationalization, Morality, and the Aston Studies
Representational modernism consisted of sketching a singular set of empirical tendencies imagined to be irresistible and inevitable. These were the famous ‘rationalization’ of the world, the success of which would be attributed to bureaucracy as the primary mechanism of its achievement.
Its outcome was to be our imprisonment in the house of bondage – the iron cage of bureaucracy.
From Weber’s modernist vision of the world, it is, in many respects, a bleak and pessimistic vision, leavened only by the irony and intelligence of its progenitor and the undoubtedly ambivalent moral quality of his thought.
He interpreted pre-modernity in German terms as referring to a weak and divided set of states rather than a strong nation-state.
For some, bureaucracy has frequently been seen as a good thing, as something desirable. In the various editions of his Complex Organizations, Charles Perrow has contributed most to advance the idea of bureaucracy as a moral project. Organizational rationality, expressed in terms of the principles of bureaucracy, is in this work taken as a guarantee against discrimination premised on particularistic aspects of identity, such as ethnicity, gender, age, religion, and sexuality. The morality of bureaucracy lies in its implicit promise to treat each person only according to their status as an organizational member, irrespective of any other aspects of their identity. In a fully functioning bureaucracy, conceived in terms of this moral project, no other attribute of identity should have salient status unless it is formally represented as such in the constitutive documents and policies of the bureaucracy.
For Weber, bureaucracy was regarded as ‘necessary’, ‘unavoidable’, ‘unstoppable’, ‘inescapable’, ‘universal’, and simply ‘unbreakable’ (Weber 1920: 3f, 203ff; 1958: 318ff). It is these adjectives which serve to display Weber’s ‘cultural pessimism’, in the simply irresistible but utterly unattractive face of the ‘fate of our times’.
In Weber’s work, it is the theme of rationalization which threads these disparate experiences into a number of interlocking, contingent processes whose outcome is modernity as we have defined it: the capacity to respond to changing environments and to manage the complexity that this entails.
Bureaucracy, for Weber, was a mode of organization.
He contrasted three ‘ideal types’ of authority which were based upon: the ruler’s charisma; the rule of tradition; and the rule of rational, legal precepts.
The Aston Studies
The fifteen possible dimensions of organization structure located in Weber’s variables were not all explored in the empirical study. Preliminary research by the Aston team suggested that organization structure was likely to be built out of just five of the dimensions: specialization, standardization, formalization, centralization, and configuration.
- Specialization: the degree of division into specialized roles.
- Standardization: the degree of standard rules and procedures.
- Formalization: the degree of written instructions and procedures.
- Centralization: the degree of decision-making authority at the top.
- Configuration: long versus short chains of command.
These dimensions were as follows.
- Structuring of activities: specialization, standardization, and formalization are all highly related. The larger the organization, defined in terms of the number of employees who were contracted to it in a stable employment relation, the more specialist, standardized, and formalized it would be.
- Concentration of authority: centralization is negatively related to specialization. This relationship is summarized by a single structural dimension called ‘concentration of authority’, a measure which increases as the dependency of an organization upon other organizations increases.
- Line control of workflow: this was a factor which comprised the percentage of superordinates and the degree of formalization and standardization of procedures concerning personnel decisions. Organizations with less routinized technologies tended to have a higher line control of the workflow.
The Aston studies found that size was the major determinant of these central features of organizational structure.
The conclusions of Woodward regarding the increasing levels of formalization, standardization, differentiation, centralization, and concentration of authority identified by the Aston researchers, whenever organizational structures were classified according to the type of technologies employed:
- Unit or small batch production: organizations produce only small batches of items.
- Mass and large batch production, where there is a continuous and standardized process: example of the automotive industry.
- Process production, where there is a long and continuous production line, in which the same procedures are used repeatedly: petrochemical industry and oil refineries.
The increase in technical complexity and structural changes in organizations:
- The increase in technological complexity tends to promote standardization.
- In process production, the high number of specialists tends to be incorporated into the hierarchical line, and the high standardization of work tends to form a more flexible structure.
- Mass production bureaucracy operates with the lowest levels of qualification, highest levels of standardization, and the highest degrees of formalization and stratification.
Conclusion:
- Firstly, the closer we get to the technical core, the more decisive the impact of technology becomes. Secondly, the smaller the organization, the more it will be influenced by the technology it uses.