Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy : From the Bureau to Network Organizations 9781780527833, 9781780527826

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REINVENTING HIERARCHY AND BUREAUCRACY – FROM THE BUREAU TO NETWORK ORGANIZATIONS

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury Recent Volumes: Volume 15:

Deviance in and of Organizations

Volume 16:

Networks in and around Organizations

Volume 17:

Organizational Politics

Volume 18:

Social Capital of Organizations

Volume 19:

Social Structure and Organizations Revisited

Volume 20:

The Governance of Relations in Markets and Organizations

Volume 21:

Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative

Volume 22:

Legitimacy Processes in Organizations

Volume 23:

Transformation in Cultural Industries

Volume 24:

Professional Service Firms

Volume 25:

The Sociology of Entrepreneurship

Volume 26:

Studying Difference between Organizations: Comparative Approaches to Organizational Research

Volume 27:

Institutions and Ideology

Volume 28:

Stanford’s Organization Theory Renaissance, 1970-2000

Volume 29:

Technology and Organization: Essays in Honour of Joan Woodward

Volume 30A:

Markets on Trial: The Economic Sociology of the US Financial Crisis: Part A

Volume 30B:

Markets on Trial: The Economic Sociology of the US Financial Crisis: Part B

Volume 31:

Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution

Volume 32:

Philosophy and Organization Theory

Volume 33:

Communities and Organizations

Volume 34:

Rethinking Power in Organizations, Institutions, and Markets

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS VOLUME 35

REINVENTING HIERARCHY AND BUREAUCRACY – FROM THE BUREAU TO NETWORK ORGANIZATIONS EDITED BY

THOMAS DIEFENBACH College of International Management, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), Japan

RUNE TODNEM BY Staffordshire University Business School, Staffordshire University, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2012 Copyright r 2012 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78052-782-6 ISSN: 0733-558X (Series)

CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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ADVISORY BOARD

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ABOUT THE EDITORS

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BUREAUCRACY AND HIERARCHY – WHAT ELSE!? Thomas Diefenbach and Rune Todnem By

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SECTION I: FUNDAMENTALS AND HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS OF BUREAUCRACY ‘LITTLE COGS’: BUREAUCRACY AND THE CAREER IN BRITISH BANKING, C. 1900–1950 Alan McKinlay

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THE END OF BUREAUCRACY? Stewart R. Clegg

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BUREAUCRACY: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME (AGAIN)? Haldor Byrkjeflot and Paul du Gay

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SECTION II: ORGANISATIONAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HIERARCHY UNDERSTANDING HIERARCHY IN CONTEMPORARY WORK Susanne E. Lundholm, Jens Rennstam and Mats Alvesson

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CONTENTS

THE CULTURAL FANTASY OF HIERARCHY: SOVEREIGNTY AND THE DESIRE FOR SPIRITUAL PURITY Carl Rhodes and Peter Bloom

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CROSSING OF BOUNDARIES – SUBORDINATES’ CHALLENGES TO ORGANISATIONAL HIERARCHY Thomas Diefenbach and John A. A. Sillince

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SECTION III: ALTERNATIVE VIEWS ON, AND ALTERNATIVES TO HIERARCHY THE BIRTH OF BIOCRACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS AT WORK Peter Fleming

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SUPER FLAT: HIERARCHY, CULTURE AND DIMENSIONS OF ORGANIZING Martin Parker

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Mats Alvesson

Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Peter Bloom

School of Business and Economics, Swansea University, Swansea, UK

Rune Todnem By

Staffordshire University Business School, Staffordshire University, Staffordshire, UK

Haldor Byrkjeflot

Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Stewart R. Clegg

Centre for Management and Organisation Studies, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Thomas Diefenbach

College of International Management, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), Beppu, Japan

Peter Fleming

School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK

Paul du Gay

Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej, Frederiksberg, Denmark

Susanne E. Lundholm

Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Alan McKinlay

School of Management, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK vii

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Martin Parker

Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK

Jens Rennstam

Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Carl Rhodes

School of Business and Economics, Swansea University, Swansea, UK

John A. A. Sillince

Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University, Newcastle-uponTyne, UK

ADVISORY BOARD SERIES EDITOR Michael Lounsbury University of Alberta School of Business and National Institute for Nanotechnology, Edmonton, AB, Canada

ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS Howard E. Aldrich University of North Carolina, USA

Paul M. Hirsch Northwestern University, USA

Stephen R. Barley Stanford University, USA

Renate Meyer Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria

Nicole Biggart University of California at Davis, USA

Mark Mizruchi University of Michigan, USA

Elisabeth S. Clemens University of Chicago, USA

Walter W. Powell Stanford University, USA

Barbara Czarniawska Go¨teborg University, Sweden

Hayagreeva Rao Stanford University, USA

Gerald F. Davis University of Michigan, USA

Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson Uppsala University, Sweden

Marie-Laure Djelic ESSEC Business School, France

W. Richard Scott Stanford University, USA

Frank R. Dobbin Harvard University, USA

Robin Stryker University of Minnesota, USA

Royston Greenwood University of Alberta, Canada

Haridimos Tsoukas ALBA, Greece

Mauro Guillen The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Richard Whitley University of Manchester, UK ix

ABOUT THE EDITORS Thomas Diefenbach is associate professor of business ethics at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), Beppu, Japan. In his research, Thomas investigates primarily the problematic existence and relationships of individuals within all types of organisations, different forms of organisations and the fundamental principles of past, present and future organisations and societies. Thomas is particularly interested in identifying and investigating non-hierarchical structures and processes as well as alternative forms of management, organisations and societies. In his latest monograph Management and the Dominance of Managers (2009) he developed a comprehensive and multi-dimensional model for critically investigating managers’ power, interests and ideology within an organisational context. In another monograph on Hierarchy – The Eternal Beast (2012, forthcoming) he tries to develop a ‘General Theory of the Persistence of Hierarchical Social Order’. Rune Todnem By is academic group leader (organisational behaviour, leadership and change) at Staffordshire University Business School, UK, and editor-in-chief of Routledge’s Journal of Change Management (JCM).

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BUREAUCRACY AND HIERARCHY – WHAT ELSE!? Thomas Diefenbach and Rune Todnem By ABSTRACT Hierarchy and bureaucracy have been more or less welcomed companions of human civilisation from the very beginning. In almost every culture and epoch, ruling elites and followers, superiors and subordinates can be identified. Hierarchy and bureaucracy are quite flexible, adaptable and they are fairly persistent – but why could, or even should we see this as a problem? This introduction will first provide a brief history of no change, followed by the second section where the advantages and disadvantages and the contested terrain of hierarchy are elaborated in some length. The discussion focuses on three areas: the functional, social and ethical qualities of hierarchy. In the final section, the chapters of this volume will be briefly introduced. The chapters are grouped into three sections: (I) Fundamentals and historical accounts of bureaucracy, (II) Organisational, cultural and socio-psychological aspects of hierarchy and (III) Alternative views on, and alternatives to hierarchy. Keywords: hierarchy; bureaucracy; history of mankind

Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 1–27 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035003

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INTRODUCTION There are two strong principles which have had an enormous impact on shaping the design of organisations as well as the reasoning about organisations: the idea of a vertical organisation of tasks (hierarchy) and the idea of rule-bound execution of tasks (bureaucracy). Together with a few other principles, they constitute the classical, orthodox organisation. According to contemporary rhetoric, most hierarchy and bureaucracy are regarded as ‘evil’ and, thus, fought with an arsenal of (change) management concepts – usually with more than questionable outcomes. But, as we all know, hierarchy and bureaucracy are still around in hybrid and post-modern organisations, perhaps more informal than formal, more ‘velvet glove’ than ‘iron cage’ – or simply as ‘soft’ on top of all their traditionally ‘hard’ design. If this was the end of the story, this special volume would not have been necessary. However, with the articles included, we attempt to provide a much more differentiated picture than the usual ‘bureaucracy means redtape’ and ‘hierarchy means top-down order and control’ rationales. Thanks to the contributors, the articles offer a kaleidoscope of remarkable and thought-provoking perspectives on bureaucracy and hierarchy. Beside all their diversity, the articles, if we understood them correctly, share two very fundamental assumptions: 1. Hierarchy and bureaucracy do not only establish functional but also establish social relationships, i.e. they put people into certain relations to each other. 2. They are fairly persistent, i.e. hierarchy and bureaucracy exist throughout time and space, and within almost any cultural context. Why could, or even should we see this as a problem? Hierarchies definitely have got their advantages. It is claimed that hierarchy represents (one of) the best and most efficient solutions for the functional requirements of social systems such as groups, organisations and even whole societies as well as their management (e.g. Jaques, 1990). And it is not only structures and processes which are in an efficient and stable equilibrium (Gouldner, 1960) but also the social relationships within the hierarchical system. It provides and guarantees a certain kind of order, stability, protection and conservation (Prentice, 1961/2005; Zaleznik, 1989). There is a balance of power, reciprocity, common and mutual interests between superiors and subordinates, leaders and followers (Mast, Hall, & Schmid, 2010, p. 461; Van Vugt, 2006); leaders provide the guidance their followers require and followers execute what their leaders want to see

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realised. Moreover, hierarchy offers opportunities for career and personal development as well as monetary and non-monetary advantages, privileges and prerogatives. Even for people lower down the pecking order, it at least provides orientation, some kind of security and purpose as well as hope of personal advancement. Conversely, hierarchy has got disadvantages. Hierarchy does not only simply mean different functions within society, official structures of an organisation or the formal, task-oriented relationship between superiors and subordinates. It is primarily meant as the creation of unequal social relationships between people at dyadic, group, organisational and societal levels. Hierarchy guarantees the unequal distribution of, and access to institutions and resources, privileges and prerogatives, power and opportunities, tasks and duties (e.g. Gouldner, 1960; Mills, 1956; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Sidanius, Pratto, van Laar, & Levin, 2004). It represents institutionalised differences; some are privileged and others are not. Hierarchy means advantages and enrichment for a few, disadvantages and limitations for the many. It is meant to benefit superiors and to disadvantage subordinates systematically and with necessity (Gouldner, 1960, p. 174; Jermier, 1998). Any form of hierarchy has got such principles of social inequality, oppression and exploitation incorporated in its blueprint. As a consequence, people not only are treated differently but also have different life chances, even life expectancies. Because of hierarchy, people have different pasts, presents and futures. And this goes on, and on, and on. Apparently, we live in an ever changing world (By, 2005). In change management seminars all over the world, mediocre presenters regularly (try to) impress their audience with the adage that change is the only constant variable which does not change in today’s changing world. Organisations are constantly restructured, turned upside down, and change management initiatives follow each other in ever faster cycles of latest management fads and fashions such as TQM, business process re-engineering, lean management, New Public Management, knowledge organisation, networks or virtual organisations. New organisational forms have emerged and have widened the spectrum from very hierarchical and bureaucratical forms to hybrid and post-modern forms of organisations (e.g. Clegg, Courpasson, & Phillips, 2006; Courpasson & Dany, 2003; Diefenbach, 2007). Even whole societies are in constant makeover because globalisation and technological innovations produce consequences way beyond what humans would have ever imagined. Individuals, too, have to re-invent themselves on an almost constant basis because they are told so, have to and even want to. ‘Generation X’ gang members follow the flaming star of

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individualism like lemmings – each of them little more than a little cock in the great global machinery of ‘dedicated followers of fashion’ and ‘intrapreneurial employees’. However, these epochal developments and the unhealthy and unsustainable ‘change-for-the-sake-of-change freakiness’ may draw away the attention from the fact that there are many things which remain stable and hardly change – if ever. Most change initiatives are arguably not even creating any (positive/sustainable) change whatsoever. Too much time is being wasted on the constant journey of the change cycle, as there are only so many options available at any one time and what we change to is very often exactly the same as what we just changed from. What these change initiatives often do is to create opportunities and quick-fix solutions for the few who are in a position of power to initiate change that suits them and their individual goals. Despite the constant introduction and re-introduction of ‘new’ business concepts and change rhetoric, key principles and mechanisms of management and organisations do not change; the hierarchical order of social relationships, the dominance of superiors, their prerogatives and privileges as well as the well-functioning, obedience and tight control of subordinates via all sorts of physical and virtual bureaucratic means continue whatever the actual change initiative (seemingly) suggests (Courpasson & Clegg, 2006; Diefenbach, 2009). Hierarchical and bureaucratic structures and processes are quite flexible and capable to adapt, to mutate and to transcend time and space (Diefenbach & Sillince, 2011). On the basis of his comprehensive and detailed empirical research of failed attempts to design and maintain non-hierarchical types of organisations, Michels formulated his famous ‘iron law of oligarchy’ (1915/1966, p. 365): ‘Who says organization, says oligarchy’. According to this ‘iron law’, even far-reaching attempts to change social order sooner or later merely produces yet another ruling elite and subservient followers, inequality and injustice, exploitation and oppression. Although our world seems to be changing, most of the changes either happen on the surface or merely repeat in a slightly different design what has been around as social principles and mechanisms since the dawn of time. Apologists of orthodox organisations, thus, might have a point when they claim that hierarchy is a general tendency in human groups organising themselves (Zaleznik, 1989, p. 150). But even critical researchers have made the same observation and come to similar conclusions concerning rules and patterns of vertical social relationships (e.g. Clegg et al., 2006, p. 330; Courpasson & Clegg, 2006, p. 327; Scott, 1990, p. 61). For example, according to Social Dominance Theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Sidanius et al., 2004), it seems that (almost) all human societies tend to be structured

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as group-based hierarchies in which a few dominant groups ‘possess a disproportionately large share of positive social value such as political authority, power, wealth, and social status, whereas the subordinate groups possess a disproportionately larger share of negative social values including low power, low social status, and poverty’ (O’Brien & Crandall, 2005, p. 1 paraphrasing Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, p. 31). From whatever perspective one might look at the phenomenon, hierarchy and bureaucracy seem to be fairly persistent (Laumann, Siegel, & Hodge, 1971; Mills, 1956; Mousnier, 1973; Scott, 1990; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Sidanius et al., 2004; Zaleznik, 1989). One way or the other, most societies have been stratified, divided into social layers or classes, into privileged elites and the disadvantaged masses based on, and protected by comprehensive frameworks of rules and regulations. One might, therefore, say that most social systems are based on hierarchical, bureaucratically administered social relationships of superiors and subordinates – but has this always been the case and is this, indeed, ‘bad’? In the next two sections, we will discuss both issues. Since the persistence and social relevance of bureaucracy is comprehensively analysed in the first three articles which follow this introduction, our focus will be here on hierarchy. We shall start with a ‘historical account’.

AN EXTREMELY BRIEF HISTORY OF NO CHANGE Researchers like Harman (2008) claim that during the early Stone Age/ throughout the (Lower) Paleolithic, there had been hunter-gatherer groups (so-called ‘band societies’) which probably were fairly egalitarian. However, most anthropologists seem to argue that society as we know it only began when humans became ‘civilised’. According to this position, ‘civilisation’ only emerged when humans settled down, started to use advanced food growing and storage techniques and developed more complex social structures. Thus, although mankind has shown fundamental aspects of human culture such as tools, artefacts, symbolic language and social organisation and collaboration for more than two-and-a-half million or so years, the dominant understanding of civilisation defines and confines its ‘relevant’ history to the last 12,000 or so years. It is the prevailing understanding, if not to say ideology of ‘civilisation’ that it links the idea of a larger sedentary society to the phenomenon of unequally distributed private property and ownership, the idea of division of labour to class structure and the idea of social differentiation to social stratification. Seen in such a way, our understanding of society is reduced to

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the equation that human society means civilisation – and civilisation means stratification. In defining civilisation in such a way, writers (and re-writers) of history as well as its leading actors and their followers converge to one overarching historical account; the ideology that ‘civilisation’ means a stratified class society based on private property (and, even more cynically, that only stratified class-societies with private property are ‘civilised’ – and all others are not, i.e. they are ‘barbaric’). Or, in other words: Since ‘civilisation’ means individuals, social groups and classes superior and subordinate to each other, (only) social stratification and the ruling of the many by the few is ‘civilised’. In the face of such a prevailing understanding of civilisation, it is quite understandable that the historical evidence predominantly shows social dominance and social struggles, superiority and inferiority. Of course, the surviving evidence we have of archaic high cultures and their people is very patchy, especially concerning ancient leaders and despots, their personality and ethical convictions, words and deeds, as it provides only a very selective and one-sighted picture, usually quite flattering. The same is true concerning their followers and ordinary people, although in a less flattering, reductive, not enhancing way. But exactly these cartoon-like portraits of actually existing people (as well as some graphic pictures of the social organisation of these societies, evidence from court cases, administrative steps taken or parody in plays) can let us conclude that those societies were organised in a fairly hierarchical manner (Mousnier, 1973, p. 9). In ancient societies, relationships between superiors and subordinates were primarily based on hierarchical power and control, selfish will of the former with little regard to the interests and well-being of the latter. It did not get much better in medieval societies, in many respects it often got worse. For example, Christian societies were highly stratified and an almost perfect example for how ideological justification and factual exploitation can go hand in hand. Especially the Catholic Church had accumulated unprecedented political and administrative power and, as a result, amassed unimaginable wealth and large regular income for its mostly unscrupulous members/leaders. It went to great lengths to make sure that both its organisation as well as the overarching society was one comprehensive and consistent hierarchical order (e.g. Mousnier, 1973, p. 103). Even the angels in heaven were arranged hierarchically and ‘in perfect harmony’ with the eternal order (Parker, 2009). And if people still had doubts that the ‘holy trinity of hierarchy, control and (self-) punishment’ did not represent ‘the best of all possible worlds’, the inquisition would help them to find the right way. It, too, embodied an equally ‘perfect’, hierarchically organised

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system of surveillance and control, investigations and convictions, punishment and torture (e.g. Given, 1997). Autocratic and oppressive regimes based on, and protected by an elaborated system of religious beliefs, have been a phenomenon in almost every known culture. They were developed and prospered in the Middle East (Islam, Judaism), South Asia and Asia (Hinduism, Buddhism), Africa (Islam, Christianity, traditional African religions), the Americas (Christianity, Native American religions) and Europe (Christianity, Islam, traditional religions). Some of them might be more humane, some of them more horrific than Christian belief and the church, but all explain and justify the universe, the world, death/afterlife, social relationships and human affairs in hierarchical terms. Any theocratic society is hierarchical and oppressive by definition. Religion is not only ‘opium for the people’ (Karl Marx) but also very concrete spiritual and physical chain. Then came the Age of Enlightenment – and with it perhaps some optimism that technological progress would mean social progress. Yet, any hope that modernity would change at least some of the very fundamental principles of societies diminished very fast already in the early days of capitalism. What entered the historical scene was simply a new version of ‘stratification via merit-based differentiation’. The capitalist society replaced old ruling elites by new ones, threw the masses into the slaughterhouses and turned whole societies upside down – while leaving the logic of superiority and subordination, of oppression and exploitation intact. It provided even new modes and methods of ruling and exploiting. The means changed, the ends remained the same. ‘The bourgeoisie became gentrified, aping the lifestyles and social mannerisms of the old landed aristocracy, and buying themselves and their heirs into the ranks of the landed interest, so that the dominant class remained y the ‘‘sociological’’ heirs of the pre-industrial aristocracy’ (Abercrombie, Hill, & Turner, 1980, p. 106). One of the most famous and infamous proponents of the industrial system of hierarchical order, F. W. Taylor, provided the blueprint for what would become the prevailing ideology of organisation till today (1911/1967, p. 26): Those in the management whose duty it is to develop this science [Scientific Management] should also guide and help the workman in working under it, and should assume a much larger share of the responsibility for results than under usual conditions is assumed by the management. y And each man should daily be taught by and receive the most friendly help from those who are over him, instead of being, at the one extreme, driven or coerced by his bosses, and at the other left to his own unaided devices. This close, intimate, personal cooperation between the management and the men is of the essence of modern scientific or task management.

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Scientific management became the new Pater Noster for rulers and ruled alike. Since then, even in so-called ‘post-modern’ organisations little has changed. Despite all ‘change management’ rhetoric, ‘team work’, ‘projects’ and window-dressing exercises of ‘empowerment’ and ‘intrapreneurship’, the very logic of hierarchical order and control continues to rule the organisation. Organisations carry on to functioning on the basis of an uneasy relationship between several levels of managers and other employees. Hierarchical structures and processes are more alive than ever before. Hierarchy provides not only the foundations for orthodox organisations such as the military, the Church and other openly bureaucratic organisations; most modern and postmodern organisations are also very hierarchical – though perhaps in more indirect, informal and sublime ways on top of the more direct and relatively crude mechanisms of formal hierarchy. These organisations have still to come out of the closed when it comes to the fact that they are indeed hierarchical, and post-modern organisations come with vertical and horizontal power and control mechanisms more comprehensive and sophisticated than ever before (Akella, 2003; Brown, Kornberger, Clegg, & Carter, 2010; Clegg et al., 2006; Courpasson, 2000; Courpasson & Clegg, 2006; Parker, 2009). And it is not different at societal level. True, most contemporary societies are not thoroughly divided anymore into clearly identifiable classes sharply demarcated from each other. Particularly societies of economically developed and democratic countries became quite multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. It therefore might be more appropriate to refer to Weber’s concept of social order (1921/1980, pp. 177, 531) which does not use so much ‘classes’ (in a Marxian sense) but ‘clusters’. It groups people whose life chances share the same specific causal components (particularly with regard to socioeconomic conditions), whose positions in society are similar because of their occupation and their possession of similar resources to advance their ends (Diefenbach, 2009, p. 183). Using Weber’s concept, a society then appears to be more patchwork-like. These societies have a whole range of prevailing values – and some of them go against the traditional understanding of hierarchy as a very formal and static system. For example, individualism, non-conformism, consumerism, market orientation and fashion orientation seemingly lead individuals to find their own ways within, but also across and against existing hierarchical structures and processes. The rise of new social groups such as self-made entrepreneurs or professionals, celebrities of all walks of life (e.g. pop stars, sports heroes or the mere products of self-creation and media-led gossip) can be interpreted as social phenomena that negate the ideas of social stratification and class society.

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They do, indeed – but there are also reasons that make one cautious to read too much into it. One is that these trends have not replaced older phenomena, structures and processes of stratification and social dominance; they are merely added to them. For example, Brookfield (2005, p. viii) draws attention to the fact that ‘apparently open, Western democracies are actually highly unequal societies in which economic inequity, racism, and class discrimination are empirical realities’. Social and especially socioeconomic differences still put people into hierarchical relations to each other. Stratified societies just became more elaborated and colourful – but even in sheep’s clothing a wolf remains a wolf. In addition, even new structures and processes related to individualism and individualisation are not necessarily anti- or non-hierarchical. Amongst individualists one can easily identify patterns of behaviour which set apart people vertically – though these phenomena are perhaps more differentiated and informal compared to more traditional structures and mechanisms of formal hierarchisation and stratification. But, and this is crucial, the principle is and remains the same; even in the most modern, patchy and fluid societies, social differences and inequalities translate into hierarchical patterns and differences. The notions (and societal ideals) of a ‘middleclass lifestyle’, ‘upward mobility’ or ‘career’ are evidence that such social structuring is still widely appreciated. Thinking (and acting) in hierarchical terms remains people’s primary rationale in most social contexts (e.g. dyadic relationships, family, friends, peer groups, workplace, public sphere). Even in the most technologically and economically advanced societies, stratification remains a reality. All in all, one can say that hierarchy has been a more or less welcomed companion of human civilisation from the very beginning. In almost every culture and epoch, ruling elites and followers can be identified. In archaic cultures there were druids, priests, prophets, royals, rich citizens and military; in medieval societies the ruling elites were royals, clergy, knights, aristocrats, Nobile and merchants; in capitalism it was again some royals and aristocrats, but now competing as well as mingling with capitalists, bourgeoisie and military; and in modern times we have bureaucrats, technocrats, managers, ‘celebrities’, politicians and professionals (and in a few antiquated countries still royals). All these groups and classes are examples of the one fundamental principle that rules mankind (according to the ‘official’ account of its history); social systems are structured hierarchically. As Laurent (1978, p. 223) mentioned: ‘The pecking order seems to have pervasive effects across cultural, structural and political systems’. Whether societies consist of classes clearly demarcated from each other or patchwork

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of clusters and groups of people, whether they are more static or fluid, whether the boundaries between the groups are more closed or transparent, in most societies there still seems to be a deeply embedded tradition and understanding that stratification and hierarchical relationships between people are ‘normal’, even desirable, worthwhile and the ‘only way’. Thus, although extremely short and general, the ‘brief history of no change’ rightly gives the impression that hierarchy is omnipresent – which is probably also consistent with most people’s daily life experiences. However, although hierarchy is, indeed, hegemonic, there are theoretical as well as empirical examples that this must not always be so. For example, when casting a closer look at the epoch since early capitalism, one can regularly identify ideas and attempts to establish alternative, democratic, even egalitarian organisations, communes and even whole societies. Participative democratic organisations comprise ideas like employee’s participation in strategic and operational decision-making (‘workplace democracy’), empowerment, autonomous work groups, joint consultative committees, profit sharing and share-ownership, even co-partnership or worker-owned firms (de Jong & van Witteloostuijin, 2004; Rothschild & Ollilainen, 1999; Wilson, 1999). Besides democratic organisations, one can discover a whole range of attempts to create ‘hierarchy-free’ organisations such as heterarchic organisation (Fairtlough, 2005), collectivist organisation (Rothschild-Whitt, 1979) or utopian communities (Kanter, 1972). The most determined and far-reaching attempts to realise and practice non-hierarchical forms of work and collaboration can be found where people agree on ‘egalitariandemocratic’ criteria as the leading principle of their co-existence and co-operation (Rothschild & Ollilainen, 1999, p. 598) and the fundamental idea is that no member of a social system should be allowed to dominate the others in any form (Boehm, 1993, p. 228; Fournier, 2002, p. 206). Whether or not such endeavours might be successful over time, they are proof and evidence that hierarchy is not a ‘natural’ law or the only possible way to organise social systems (Fairtlough, 2005) – but it is also true that they are more the exception than the rule.

ADVANTAGES, DISADVANTAGES AND THE CONTESTED TERRAIN OF HIERARCHY Although hierarchy is the prevailing mode of structuring in many social contexts, it is far from being undisputed. There are fundamentally differing

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views concerning the functional, social and ethical qualities of hierarchy. In the following, these three dimensions of hierarchy shall be discussed in some more detail. 1. The functional qualities of hierarchy Following sociobiologists, who focus on the (most efficient) functioning of ‘natural systems’, orthodox management and organisation theorists see organisations and management primarily, if not exclusively, in functional terms (e.g. Chandler, 1962; Fayol, 1949; Jaques, 1990; Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967; Taylor, 1911/1967; Zaleznik, 1989). Organisations are portrayed as rationally designed enterprises, functioning smoothly because of thoughtthrough policies and procedures. Management is said to be based on so-called ‘value-free’ and functional concepts; ‘management tools have no feelings and no emotions; tools take care of the general interest’ (Courpasson, 2000, p. 156). Managerial ideology (or ‘managerialism’) explains and legitimises existing hierarchy and power relations in functional terms (Chiapello & Fairclough, 2002, p. 187). For example, in his ‘Praise of hierarchy’, Jaques (1990, p. 127) made very clear ‘that managerial hierarchy is the most efficient, the hardiest, and in fact the most natural structure ever devised for large organizations’. Indeed, one must admit that the functional aspects of hierarchy can represent and produce considerable advantages; if roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and demarcated from each other, people can focus on carrying out the required tasks. If nothing else intervenes, under such circumstances non-task related issues might be reduced to a minimum. According to Merton (1961, p. 50), ‘The chief merit of bureaucracy is its technical efficiency, with a premium placed on precision, speed, expert control, continuity, discretion, and optimal returns on input. The structure is one which approaches the complete elimination of personalized relationships and nonrational considerations (hostility, anxiety, affectual involvements, etc.).’ Hierarchy enables a smooth, regular and in certain ways efficient functioning of organisational policies, structures and processes. In this sense, there are good functional organisation-specific reasons for hierarchy. Moreover, according to the theory of isomorphism, an organisation blends in with its external environment in more efficient ways if it fits to those institutions that appreciate hierarchical structures and processes. In such cases, these stakeholders provide additional legitimacy and, of course, important resources to the organisation (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). To observe organisations from and in functional perspectives makes quite some sense.

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Nonetheless, functional approaches also have their limits. According to Willmott (1987, p. 254) ‘the horizontal and vertical differentiation of tasks between individuals and groups cannot adequately be explained by references to functional imperatives’. Instead, phenomena such as hierarchy and the social dominance of individuals or groups of people are to be seen more as the result of social conflict (and preconditions for new social conflict). In this sense, Critical Management and Organisation Studies (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992) follow Labour Process Theory and Industrial Relations. Seen in such way, formal hierarchy, and even more so informal hierarchy, is the result as well as the framework for organisational politics (Burns, 1961; Cohen, Duberley, & McAuley, 1999; Mintzberg, 1985; Thompson, 1961) – and organisational politics (can) happen whenever people come together. Thus, in the tradition of organisational behaviour (Cyert & March, 1963; Mintzberg, 1979), organisations should be more regarded as ‘political organisations’ (Burns, 1961, p. 258) or ‘negotiated arena’ (Cohen et al., 1999, p. 475). The political order of organisations (i.e. governing principles, policies and procedures), power relations (i.e. domination of particular individuals and groups over others), social inequalities (i.e. differences between individuals and social groups), and individual and group interests (i.e. people’s different interests because of their social roles and positions) are what really characterises and drives social systems, not functional imperatives. Accordingly, hierarchy is primarily seen and criticised as a tool for gaining and securing privileges and prerogatives for specific individuals and groups rather than following functional logics of an abstract or ‘natural’ system. Behind hierarchical systems and their functional structures and processes, one can find individual and group interests, strive for power and control, and political behaviour particularly of powerful actors and ruling elites. Although hierarchy prevents, and shall prevent, some forms of non-task related social conflict, at the same time it simply produces and enables other forms of non-task related social conflict. It simply changes the rules and conditions of the game, not the game itself. 2. The social qualities of hierarchy In addition to the functional aspects mentioned above, hierarchy provides its members with a whole range of institutions and resources. In so doing, it defines the social dimensions for the system and each member. The most relevant institutions and resources might be grouped and listed as follows (Abercrombie et al., 1980, p. 130; Beetham, 1991, pp. 48–50; Diefenbach, 2009, p. 126; Pollitt, 1990, p. 6; Sidanius/Pratto, 1999; Sidanius et al., 2004):

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a. Socio-cultural: positions, status, tasks, functions/artefacts, symbols, rites, rituals/information, knowledge, ideology/tradition, social background, membership, elites/education, health care, infrastructure, public life; b. Material/economic: land, property, goods, money/financial assets, income, modes of production, allocation, dissemination and consumption; c. Legal: rights, duties, entitlements; d. Political: constitution, political actors and agendas; e. Technological: technologies, access to, and knowledge of technologies; f. Environmental: physical and virtual entities, locations and spaces. Such social institutions and resources have a direct impact on people’s power and status, privileges and prerogatives. Opportunities, even life chances, depend on where people are on the social hierarchical ladder, whether people are superior or subordinate. According to Willmott (1984, p. 361) ‘The power or powerlessness of any particular group or individual is directly related to their structurally limited access to the resources needed to secure compliance with their demands, y ’. If a social system (e.g. an organisation or society) is hierarchical, societal institutions and resources represent a comprehensive framework of structural social asymmetries. In this sense, institutional discrimination contributes considerably to the differences in conditions and consequences superiors and subordinates experience in a hierarchical social order. In any stratified, comprehensively developed society, members of the ruling elite or other dominant groups ‘possess a disproportionately large share of positive social value’ (Sidanius/ Pratto, 1999, p. 31) across the whole range of societal institutions and resources. They have, for example, ‘political authority and power, good and plentiful food, splendid homes, the best available health care, wealth, and high social status’ (ibid.). Obviously, all these factors add up to what someone might call ‘having a better life’; however, this is defined in a certain cultural context in a particular point of time. The higher-ranked people are within a hierarchical system, the greater is their possession of, and access to institutions and resources which enable them to pursue what is portrayed in that cultural context as a good or successful life. Superiors are simply better off in absolute as well as in relative terms. Correspondingly, subordinates ‘possess a disproportionately large share of negative social value, including such things as low power and social status, high risk and low-status occupations, relatively poor health care, poor food, modest or miserable homes, and severe negative sanctions (e.g., prison and death sentences)’ (Sidanius/Pratto, 1999, pp. 31–32). They are systematically excluded from many crucial aspects of societal institutions

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and resources which contribute to a good and successful life (Beetham, 1991, pp. 48–50) – again, in relative as well as in absolute terms. The lower people are ranked within a hierarchical system, the more they are excluded from institutions and resources which enable a good or successful life. Altogether, one can conclude that social institutions and resources positively related to the principle of hierarchical social order privileges superiors and disadvantages subordinates systematically – with necessity. The complex institutional context and resources of hierarchical social order provide a strong scaffolding/platform for the existence and continuation of the system as well as for its members. Moreover, it provides certainty. Clearly demarcated areas and levels, explicit rules and regulations, formalised procedures and routines provide members with certain forms of stability, predictability and security (Crozier, 1964, p. 55). Every hierarchical social order stabilises the behaviour of people. Hierarchy and its related institutions do not really eliminate personal conflicts (e.g. over power, influence and resources), but they establish ‘the terms of engagement for such competition’ (McKinlay & Wilson, 2006, p. 659). Hierarchical order and control, rules and regulations can be very powerful tools to reduce the power that some people would otherwise have over others (Courpasson, 2000, p. 156). Hierarchical order means protection from others by rules (Crozier, 1964, p. 189) – at least in some respects. When it is about routine tasks and collaboration within the normally accepted boundaries of daily life, explicit rules and regulations empower comparatively more people, especially those who are otherwise weaker. In this sense, a fully developed and rule-based hierarchy protects subordinates against arbitrariness and randomness and it reduces some forms of organisational misbehaviour (while, at the same time, it provides the conditions for other forms of mistreatment). It, therefore, is quite understandable that ‘the least empowered in an organization often support the very rules they might be expected to resist because, lacking other forms of power, they can use rules to limit what others can do to them’ (Jacques, 1996, p. 111). Nevertheless, it probably is fair to say that hierarchical social order supports more the interests of leaders, ruling elites and their supporters. This is what hierarchy does, and what it is really good at; it provides and protects a certain social order which is advantageous for certain groups of people and their interests, privileges and prerogatives – whatever the actual ruling elite is. Actually, that hierarchical social order guarantees primarily the status and interests of superiors is the very reason for its existence. Of course, officially it is claimed that formal hierarchical order is necessary because of functional reasons. If hierarchy would not be around and

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provided order and discipline, allegedly disorder, chaos, even anarchy would emerge (e.g. Zaleznik, 1989, p. 151). However, ‘order’ and ‘discipline’ do not only emerge out of hierarchical power and control. They can be achieved by very different means. For example, robust policies and procedures of democratic governance, together with people’s understanding of active citizenship, can achieve the same objectives of social order, stability and continuity – possibly even in more efficient and convincing terms than crude hierarchical order. This example highlights even more the fact that organisational hierarchy, or hierarchy in general, is anti-democratic and alien to a liberal society (Rothschild & Ollilainen, 1999). Courpasson and Clegg (2006, p. 329) summarised this fundamental inconsistency quite neatly: ‘Democracy encourages pervasive feelings of equality shared by every member of the society. In the political sphere, these are institutionalized in periodic elections, where we get to choose which members of the political elite will rule over us. In organizations in general, however we have no such choice. We are, in law, masters or servants – the very categories that democracy was supposed to abolish.’ Hierarchically achieved and maintained forms of order and control, hierarchical leadership, autocratic rules or any other social dominance of little or un-controlled power elites are fundamentally incompatible with the notion of democracy. There cannot be much legitimacy of, and justification for, any hierarchical social system – at least not in societies which claim to be just and democratic. Hierarchy is a fundamentally anti-democratic and oppressive social order. 3. The ethical qualities of hierarchy As argued above, it is the key principle of hierarchical social order that it provides superiors and subordinates with different opportunities and means, privileges and prerogatives to pursue their interests, to live their lives and to develop their identities and personalities (e.g. Beetham, 1991, p. 50; Braynion, 2004, p. 449; Jacques, 1996, p. 120; Rueschemeyer, 1986, p. 31; Thompson, 1961, p. 486). However, this needs to be explained and justified. Moreover, in the case of a hierarchically organised social system, it also needs to be explained and justified why there are superiors and subordinates at all. It is the primary problem of all hierarchically organised social systems ‘why one group is dominant and another dominated, why one person gives orders in a particular enterprise while another takes orders’ (Chiapello & Fairclough, 2002, p. 187). For example, management is not about a ‘valuefree’ conduct of office, but ‘a set of predominant values, beliefs, rituals, and institutional procedures (‘‘rules of the game’’) that operate systematically

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and consistently to the benefit of certain individuals and groups at the expense of others. Those who benefit are placed in a preferred position to defend and promote their vested interests. More often than not, the ‘‘status quo defenders’’ are a minority or elite group within the population in question’ (Lukes, 1974, p. 16). One way or the other, there shall be ‘good reasons’ why superiors inherit positions higher up the hierarchical order (and enjoy the privileges and prerogatives which come with them), why superiors deserve to be there, why they must be there and, of course, why subordinates deserve to be subordinates. The ideology of hierarchy shall provide a compelling justification of why social differentiation should lead to social stratification. Proponents and opponents alike know very well that hierarchical social order means social differences and that social stratification produces social inequality. Where they differ is whether or not these are justified and just. Proponents usually try to justify hierarchical structures and processes, inequalities and differences in life chances as the result and appreciation of people’s different capabilities and/or merits – whatever these merits actually are. Beetham (1991, p. 59) described this position as follows: ‘the inequality of circumstance between dominant and subordinate is justified by a principle of differentiation, which reveals the dominant as specially qualified, suited or deserving to possess the resource, pursue the activity or hold the position which forms the basis of their power, and the subordinate as correspondingly unsuited or unfitted to do so, and hence rightly excluded from it’. The official explanation and justification of a hierarchical social system and the people within it is an ideology of domination based on (constructed) legitimacy and (alleged) merits. Superiors’ interest in providing further justifications for what seems to be justified already by its mere existence has several reasons. One is that superiors can never be fully certain that status quo, which makes them superiors, will in fact last. For superiors, the ‘threat of uncertainty’ is very real and probably their greatest concern. In stark contrast to all their public claims, what they definitely do not want is uncertainty or fundamental change. Nothing scares them more than fundamental change because that may include change to the hierarchy – their very platform of being who they are. All rulers are first and foremost interested in the stabilisation and continuation of the hierarchical system and, thus, of their ruling and social dominance. In contrast, for subordinates, i.e. for the very majority of people, the existing arrangements are not convincing per se since they usually have far too many ‘imperfections’ and inconsistencies for them, to put it mildly. Subordinates, too, do not like uncertainty and are scared of

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social change. But this is mainly due to their lifelong socialisation and conditioning. This means that there is at least a theoretical possibility that they could change their minds. And superiors, members of ruling elites all over the world, know this very well. Therefore, superiors are usually quite keen to justify (Beetham, 1991; Diefenbach, 2009) (a) their ruling and their superior positions, privileges and prerogatives, (b) the lower positions and duties of subordinates, (c) why despite all differences between superiors and subordinates a common interest unites both and (d) why this system is not only the best of all possible worlds but the only sensible solution. For example, managerialism is such an attempt to explain and justify why the managerial organisation is structured and functions in the ways it is structured and functions, i.e. (a) why a few are at the top (real leaders and competent senior managers), (b) some are in the middle (experienced middle managers) and many at the bottom (lower managers and employees), (c) why everyone gets what they deserve and (d) why this altogether is the most efficient way to organise work. However, even if one accepts for a moment the very heroic assumption that a person’s position in the hierarchical social order reflects his or her capabilities and merits, the portrait of hierarchy as a just order can be criticised on several grounds. (1) According to the logic of hierarchy, everything which goes beyond the actual tasks assigned to a certain position and role holder will be decided and judged at a higher level – usually the next level up since this is the idea of line management. This is also the case with regard to the assessment of an individual’s capabilities and merits (perhaps with some other specialist functions involved such as human resources or committees). But even if one abstracts from possible errors of judgement, bias or cronyism on the side of the line manager, there remains a fundamental problem. From a higher level, the individual and his or her capabilities and merits can only be judged from the system’s perspective, i.e. to what extent the individual’s personality, conduct of office and achievements correspond with the general values and requirements of the hierarchical social system. In a certain way this might be regarded as ‘just’. But it is not ‘just’ for the individual and from the individual’s perspective because his or her capabilities and merits are judged neither in their own right nor within the relevant context. This means that when it comes to justice within hierarchy, absolute as well as relative measures are missing. The ‘justice’ hierarchical social order provides is, at best, incomplete. (2) Also in accordance with the logic of hierarchy, resources, privileges and prerogatives are always more available higher up and less available lower down in a hierarchical organisation. Since there cannot be complete

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information about an individual’s capabilities and merits, their appreciation and reward will always be comparatively more higher up, and comparatively less lower down the hierarchical ladder. This means that within the system some individuals or groups of individuals (rulers or ruling elites) receive a relatively larger share of the overall outcome in relation to their contributions than others. Thus, any hierarchical social order systematically privileges a few while marginalising the many. This privileging of individuals and some groups based on a created situation where they are higher up the hierarchical ladder cannot be called ‘just’ – whatever understanding of justice one is referring to. (3) Allocation of most resources, privileges and prerogatives within a social system is a zero-sum game (if one person gets something, another person loses out). Since some individuals and groups get comparatively more within the hierarchical social order, others will get comparatively not only less, but too little in return for their effort and contributions. Hence, the privileging of the few means not only marginalisation but exploitation of the many (Burnham, 1941, p. 123). Hence, because of (1) the appreciation of an individual’s capabilities and merits predominantly from the system’s perspective, (2) the systematic privileging of people higher up the hierarchical ladder and (3) the systematic marginalisation and exploitation of the many lower down the hierarchical ladder, any hierarchical social order is unjust in principle. Hierarchy is a social order specifically designed and maintained not only for social dominance but also for exploitation or parasitism (Beetham, 1991, p. 58). For individual superiors, or smaller dominating minorities such as power elites, hierarchical social order is the most suitable form of social system to extract labour, goods, services or any other values from a majority (Scott, 1990, p. 21). Hierarchical social systems such as the monarchy, tyranny, other autocratic regimes and most types of organisations are nothing more but comprehensively institutionalised and systemised form of discrimination and exploitation (Gouldner, 1960, p. 165; Sidanius et al., 2004, p. 847). All in all, as the discussion above has shown, hierarchy, indeed, is highly contested. Concerning its functional, social and ethical qualities, fundamentally differing positions could have been identified. The same could be said about bureaucracy. Despite all functionalistic rhetoric and ideological justifications, hierarchy and bureaucracy are identified and criticised as one of the main reasons for the pathological and schizophrenic status quo of many of our institutions, organisations, social relationships and distorted personalities of superiors and subordinates. This is more than enough to justify a call for having a closer look at them. Call in the CSI.

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THE CHAPTERS OF THIS VOLUME For this special volume we have grouped the chapters into three sections: I. Fundamentals and historical accounts of bureaucracy II. Organisational, cultural and socio-psychological aspects of hierarchy III. Alternative views on, and alternatives to hierarchy The first section provides accounts of the fundamentals of bureaucracy and its different historical concepts – focusing mainly on the negative effects (McKinlay), providing a differentiated picture (Clegg) or drawing readers’ attention even to the positive effects of bureaucracy (Byrkjeflot & du Gay). In the first article ‘‘‘Little Cogs’’: Bureaucracy and the career in British Banking, c. 1900–1950’, Alan McKinlay provides a very telling analysis of the ‘peculiar case’ of William Notman, a bank clerk who worked in the 1920s and 1930s for the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Mr. Notman was sacked for marrying without his employer’s approval, took finally the bank to court, won the case and got compensation. Alan uses this case to provide a fascinating analysis not only of the rigid bureaucratic system of British banking in the first half of the 20th century but also of the secret inspection system as a widely used and accepted practice and how it impinged on individual careers, private lives and even identities. For this, he refers to Weber’s original concept of bureaucracy and Foucault’s notion of organisational control (and punishment). But Alan goes further and claims that Weber and Foucault could, or even should be used together in order to shed light on ‘the long-run interaction of organisational structures, the nature of the bureaucratic career and individual identity projects’. In so doing, he links the ideas of bureaucracy and hierarchy, bureaucratic control and hierarchical surveillance and shows how both had a comprehensive as well as thorough impact on every single individual employee and his or her career; most employees complied even quite actively with the very system that turned them into ‘little cogs’. The conclusions Alan draws from this case are equally disturbing. This analysis is followed by Stewart R. Clegg’s contribution. In his article ‘The end of bureaucracy?’ Stewart reviews the career of the concept of bureaucracy since the 1950s till today and considers its future prognosis. In contrast to the common view of bureaucracy as ‘one big red-tape concept’, Stewart’s historical account provides quite a differentiated picture. He first highlights the philosophical ideas behind Weber’s concept of bureaucracy, that the ethics of office ‘implied a form of practical wisdom’ which lead to a high level of professionalism and efficiency. Stewart

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demonstrates that research like that from the Aston School indicated an almost ‘law-like’ nature of bureaucracy as a centralised, formalised and standardised iron cage. With Thatcherism and Reaganism, the 1980s then brought Neoliberalism and New Public Management as new nightmares including a ‘managerialist cult of excellence’ for which Peters and Waterman’s ‘In Search of Excellence’ became its famous and infamous ambassador. In a very surprising take, Stewart finds fundamental parallels between Peters and Waterman’s and Mao Tse-tung’s thoughts. But, as Stewart explains, contemporary organisational forms such as networks, alliances, projects or virtual relations also can identify tendencies towards (more) concentration, standardisation and bureaucratic control – in the face of an increasing rhetoric of entrepreneurialism and liquid careers. Stewart therefore concludes that ‘bureaucracy is both being superseded by post bureaucracy and not being superseded by post bureaucracy’. For him, large complex organisations having become increasingly heterodox represent ‘recomposed (or ‘refurbished’) bureaucracies’. They do not represent the ‘end’ of bureaucracy but ‘a more complex and differentiated set of post bureaucratic (or neo-bureaucratic) possibilities that have had the effect of undermining some distinctions previously deemed incontestable (e.g. market versus hierarchy; centralization versus decentralization; public versus private sectors).’ In the final article of the first section, Haldor Byrkjeflot and Paul du Gay ask whether bureaucracy is ‘an idea whose time has come (again)?’ They start with an intriguing problem: Bureaucracy ‘cannot be positively acknowledged, nor can it be magically spirited away.’ On the one hand, ‘bureaucracy’ seems to have quite negative connotations and is regarded as outdated and useless or even counterproductive as an organisational device. On the other hand, attempts to get rid of it such as New Public Management or Public Service Networks lead to deterioration or even loss of organisational memory as well as ethical standards (crises and scandals, such as the recent credit crunch or developments in the former communist countries are telling examples for this). Haldor and Paul reconstruct an empirical case which shows so poignantly what happens when bureaucratic rules are absent – the case of Tony Blair’s/ the British government’s decision-making style (concerning entering the war against Iraq on the false claim of WMD – Weapons of Mass Destruction). They call it ‘sofa government’, i.e. ‘where small groups of ministers and their advisers made momentous decisions frequently without the benefit of minutetakers’. Such ‘un-bureaucratic’ conduct of office is not far away from unaccountability, constitutional as well as administrative arbitrariness.

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In the face of this scandal, Haldor Byrkjeflot and Paul du Gay argue that ‘bureaucratic practices are permanent features of government which help constitute the political landscape; they can be ‘‘gotten around’’ in one [way] or another, but only at some considerable cost’. They go even so far to claim, and explain this in much detail and convincingly, that organisations, the modern state and modern societies depend on hierarchical bureaucracy in order to function properly. Freedom and flexibility can only happen in the presence of a functioning bureaucracy producing predictability. The second section provides analysis of organisational, cultural and socio-psychological aspects of hierarchy (and bureaucracy). The three articles interrogate hierarchy in contemporary work via a new framework (Lundholm, Rennstam and Alvesson), the cultural fantasy of hierarchy and sovereignty (Rhodes and Bloom) and subordinates’ challenges to organisational hierarchy (Diefenbach and Sillince). Susanne Lundholm, Jens Rennstam and Mats Alvesson investigate how hierarchy can be understood in contemporary work. They particularly focus on how managerial order coexists and interacts with the social actions of individual employees who often are ‘superior to their managers in terms of operational knowledge’. For this, they draw on empirical data from three ‘ethnographically inspired studies of Swedish business firms’ (a bank, IT consulting firm and an engineering company). The case studies provide a thorough analysis of hybrid hierarchical structures and processes in postmodern organisations. Their analysis reveals ‘a broader spectrum of vertical forms of control in knowledge work, and [that] hierarchy under these conditions becomes a dynamic and emergent process rather than a fixed chain of command’. However, and crucially, the authors do not stop with analysing the cases. Since hierarchy in most contemporary organisations is neither solely vertical, nor horizontal, they believe that new tools are required for analysing such organisational structures and processes. Based on a constructionist approach, they therefore developed a framework that ‘enables a deeper study of hierarchy and hierarchization in times when the conception and execution of work have merged’. Their framework introduces ‘loose coupling’, ‘translation’ and ‘integration’ – three key concepts which can cope with ‘hierarchical ambiguity’ and the interaction between horizontalisation and verticalisation. Carl Rhodes and Peter Bloom then interrogate the persistence of hierarchy from a cultural perspective, ‘especially regarding how its persistence is fuelled by an unfulfilled desire for its realisation as a cultural ideal y ’. According to them, hierarchy ‘retains its vitality as a cultural fantasy that is psychologically ‘‘gripping’’ by way of its romanticized vision of a ‘‘deserving

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sovereign’’ linked to an accompanying bureaucracy where everyone knows ‘‘their proper role’’ and power relations are accepted as ‘‘rational’’ and ‘‘just’’’. For interrogating hierarchy as a cultural fantasy or ideal (and understanding organisational culture and working life in general), Carl and Peter focus especially on humour, parody and carnivalesque culture. First they use the example of Clarence House, the office of the Prince of Wales and Prince William, which officially barred an attempt of an Australian comedy team to spoof Prince William and Kates’ wedding, to show that the powerful actually fear the humour of their subordinates. Thankfully, making fun of the powerful or the average is allowed in most circumstances and countries – as Will Ferrell’s parody of George W. Bush and Steven Carell’s comedy ‘The office’ demonstrate. Two examples Carl and Peter use comprehensively in order to demonstrate the idea of how the cultural fantasy of hierarchy can be criticised in a humouresque way. Nonetheless, despite all serious or light-hearted criticism of hierarchy, it persists as a ‘desire for spiritual perfection not only amongst leaders, but also amongst those they lead’. Carnival humour cannot change this. It can only contribute to provide the basis for more serious criticism – hopefully followed by serious actions. In the final article of the second section, Thomas Diefenbach and John A.A. Sillince cope with the paradox that subordinates’ (occasional) misbehaviour does not threaten organisational hierarchy but often even strengthens it. They want to find out when exactly subordinates’ deviance might contribute to the (further) stabilisation, continuation and persistence of a hierarchical social order and when it might be indeed system-threatening. For this, they especially refer to Scott’s (1990) sociological/anthropological concept of public and hidden transcripts and key concepts of social action, interests, identity and ideology (Abercrombie et al., 1980; Clegg et al., 2006; Diefenbach, 2009; Lukes, 1974; Weber, 1921/1980). On the basis of these concepts, they have developed a model of superiors’ and subordinates’ dynamic hierarchical relationship. With this model they were able to interrogate the specific conditions and consequences of subordinates’ deviance within organisational settings, particularly subordinates’ weak, medium and strong crossings of boundaries in the realms of social action, interests, identity and norms and values. On the basis of their systematic and thorough analysis, Thomas and John formulated propositions which state the specific conditions under which subordinates’ deviance either strengthens or threatens the system of hierarchical order and its future existence. One of their key findings is that

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serious threats to the prevailing system might not necessarily start with subordinates’ strong crossings of boundaries. The third, and final, section comprises two articles which provide some ‘Alternative views on, and alternatives to hierarchy’. One is alarming (Fleming), the other is puzzling (Parker). First, in his thought-provoking article, Peter Fleming interrogates the ‘birth of biocracy and its discontents at work’. ‘Biocracy’ means concepts and trends where ‘life itself y becomes an essential ‘‘human resource’’ to be exploited’. For example, ‘fun culture’ in some organisations or ‘just be yourself’ management concepts can be seen as attempts to tap into the personal and social resources of employees which are not accessible with the usual management, control and punishment methods. With introducing the concept of biocracy, Peter wants to make three contributions to employment studies: (1) to understand better ‘the emergence of novel modes of domination’, (2) to ‘unsettle the widespread assumption that ‘‘liberation management’’ might signal the relaxation of hierarchies’ and (3) to understand ‘how dissent and resistance has been recalibrated among the workforce’. For this, Peter has developed a whole framework defining biocracy, comprising features such as internalisation, horizontalisation of power, formalised informality, social factory and surplus necessity (social regulation). One of his worrying key insights is that ‘the appearance of ‘‘life itself’’ in today’s workplace does not represent a moment of freedom, but the insidious extension of the regulation of labour’. According to Peter, work is not confined anymore to a certain place and time but has become a way of life or lifestyle. Self-exploitation blurs the boundaries between work and non-work, societal production and reproduction; biocracy is yet another example for ‘how capitalism exploits labour’ – with little chances to escape it. In a final article, Martin Parker elaborates on the idea of ‘super flat’ and what this concept would mean for hierarchy, culture and dimensions of organising. For this, he first refers to the work of a famous Japanese artist, Murakami, since it goes against established wisdoms, challenges structures and processes, and questions hierarchy. Murakami’s work ‘flattens’ everything. Martin uses this idea ‘to see organizations in different ways, with power as an effect of particular organizational arrangements, rather than the reason why all organizing inevitably has to be hierarchical’. And he asks: ‘So what happens when all judgements have been suspended, and everything is as good as everything else? Is it possible, or even desirable, to have super flat forms of organizing?’

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Martin extends his analysis of Murakami’s notion of ‘super flat’ to Japanese culture and the possibility (or impossibility) to non-hierarchical organising and ‘post-hierarchical’ organisations. Such organisations still would have structures, positions that co-ordinate, centres, nodes and steering positions. But, as Martin stresses, a ‘flat depiction of a division of labour doesn’t necessarily assume that some bits are more important than others, or that some parts can see the whole’. Nonetheless, he also cautions everyone who might get too much carried away by this exotic concept: ‘My point is that many of the claims about the world being flat – empowerment, the wisdom of crowds, post-modernism, post-bureaucratic organization – should not be treated as empirical statements. Indeed, sometimes they should be treated with extreme caution because the person who claims that we are all in the same boat usually isn’t. y So we cannot wish hierarchy away with fashionable words, but neither should we assume that hierarchy is a necessary organizational form. Other worlds are possible.’ All in all, we think that the articles constituting this volume provide a colourful kaleidoscope of the contemporary state-of-the-art of analysis of bureaucracy and hierarchy. The articles range from minute accounts of a single case, broader historical analysis, the ‘classical’ journal paper to essaylike elaborations. In this sense, with this volume we hope to contribute to ongoing and further developments in those areas of management and organisation studies where the phenomena, implications and consequences of bureaucracy and hierarchy play an important role. But, most importantly, together with all contributors we hope that the reader finds many surprising, challenging and puzzling ideas.

REFERENCES Abercrombie, N., Hill, S., & Turner, B. S. (1980). The dominant ideology thesis. London: Allen & Unwin. Akella, D. (2003). A question of power: How does management retain it? Vikalpa, 28(3), 45–56. Alvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (1992). Critical theory and management studies: An introduction. In M. Alvesson & H. Willmott (Eds.), Critical management studies (pp. 1–20). London: Sage. Beetham, D. (1991). The legitimation of power. Houndmills, Basingstoke: MacMillan Education Ltd. Boehm, C. (1993). Egalitarian behavior and reverse dominance hierarchy. Current Anthropology, 34(3), 227–254. [and comments and reply] Braynion, P. (2004). Power and leadership. Journal of Health Organization and Management, 18(6), 447–463.

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Brookfield, S. D. (2005). The power of critical theory for adult learning and teaching. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Brown, A. D., Kornberger, M., Clegg, S. R., & Carter, C. (2010). Invisible walls and silent hierarchies: A case study of power relations in an architecture firm. Human Relations, 63, 525–549. Burnham, J. (1941). The managerial revolution. New York, NY: The John Day Company. Burns, T. (1961). Micropolitics: Mechanisms of institutional change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 6(3), 257–281. By, R. T. (2005). Organisational change management: A critical review. Journal of Change Management, 5(4), 369–380. Chandler, A. D. (1962). Strategy and structure: Chapters in the history of the industrial enterprise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chiapello, E., & Fairclough, N. (2002). Understanding the new management ideology: A transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and new sociology of capitalism. Discourse, & Society, 13(2), 185–208. Clegg, S. R., Courpasson, D., & Phillips, N. (2006). Power and organizations. London: Sage. Cohen, L., Duberley, J., & McAuley, J. (1999). Fuelling discovery of monitoring productivity: Research scientists changing perceptions of management. Organization, 6(3), 473–498. Courpasson, D. (2000). Managerial strategies of domination: Power in soft bureaucracies. Organization Studies, 21(1), 141–161. Courpasson, D., & Clegg, S. R. (2006). Dissolving the iron cage? Tocqueville, Michels, bureaucracy and the perpetuation of elite power. Organization, 13(3), 319–343. Courpasson, D., & Dany, F. (2003). Indifference or obedience? Business firms as democratic hybrids. Organization Studies, 24(8), 1231–1260. Crozier, M. (1964). The bureaucratic phenomenon. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Diefenbach, T. (2007). The managerialistic ideology of organisational change management. Journal of Organisational Change Management, 20(1), 126–144. Diefenbach, T. (2009). Management and the dominance of managers. London: Routledge. Diefenbach, T., & Sillince, J. A. A. (2011). Formal and informal hierarchy in different types of organizations. Organization Studies, 32(11), 1515–1537. DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organization fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147–160. Fairtlough, G. (2005). The three ways of getting things done: Hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy in organizations. Greenways, Dorset: Triarchy. Fayol, H. (1949). General and industrial management. London: Pitman. Fournier, V. (2002). Utopianism and the cultivation of possibilities: Grassroots movements of hope. In M. Parker (Ed.), Utopia and organization (pp. 189–216). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Given, J. B. (1997). Inquisition and medieval society: Power, discipline, & resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gouldner, A. W. (1960). The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American Sociological Review, 25(1), 161–178.

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Harman, C. (2008). A peoples history of the world. First published by Bookmarks 1999. London: Verso. Jacques, R. (1996). Manufacturing the employee – Management knowledge from the 19th to 21st centuries. London: Sage. Jaques, E. (1990). In praise of hierarchy. Harvard Business Review, 68(1), 127–133. Jermier, J. M. (1998). Introduction: Critical perspectives on organizational control. Administration Science Quarterly, 43(2), 235–256. de Jong, G., & van Witteloostuijin, A. (2004). Successful corporate democracy: Sustainable cooperation of capital and labor in the Dutch Breman Group. Academy of Management Executive, 18(3), 54–66. Kanter, R. M. (1972). Commitment and community. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laumann, E. O., Siegel, P. M., & Hodge, R. W. (Eds.). (1971). The logic of social hierarchies. Chicago, IL: Markham Publishing Company2nd printing. Laurent, A. (1978). Managerial subordinacy: A neglected aspect of organizational hierarchies. Academy of Management Review, 3(2), 220–230. Lawrence, P. R., & Lorsch, J. W. (1967). Organization and environment: Managing differentiation and integration. Boston, MA: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University. Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A radical view. London: Macmillan Press. Mast, M. S., Hall, J. A., & Schmid, P. C. (2010). Wanting to be boss and wanting to be subordinate: Effects on performance motivation. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40(2), 458–472. McKinlay, A., & Wilson, R. G. (2006). ‘Small acts of cunning’: Bureaucracy, inspection and the career, c. 1890–1914. Critical Perspective on Accounting, 17, 657–678. Merton, R. K. (1961). Bureaucratic structure and personality. In A. Etzioni (Ed.), Complex organizations: A sociological reader (pp. 48–61). Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 340–363. Michels, R. (1966). Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. New York, NY: Free Press. Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mintzberg, H. (1979). The structuring of organizations: A synthesis of the research. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Mintzberg, H. (1985). The organization as political arena. Journal of Management Studies, 22(2), 133–154. Mousnier, R. (1973). Social hierarchies. New York, NY: Schocken Books. O’Brien, L. T., & Crandall, C. S. (2005). Perceiving self-interest: Power, ideology, and maintenance of the status quo. Social Justice Research, 18(1), 1–24. Parker, M. (2009). Angelic organization: Hierarchy and the tyranny of heaven. Organization Studies, 30(11), 1281–1299. Pollitt, C. (1990). Managerialism and the public services-The Anglo-Saxon experience. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Prentice, W. C. H. (1961/2005). Understanding leadership. Harvard Business Review on The Mind of the Leader (pp. 149–167). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

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Rothschild, J., & Ollilainen, M. (1999). Obscuring but not reducing managerial control: Does TQM measure up to democracy standards? Economic and Industrial Democracy, 20, 583–623. Rothschild-Whitt, J. (1979). The collectivist organization: An alternative to rational-bureaucratic models. American Sociological Review, 44(4), 509–527. Rueschemeyer, D. (1986). Power and the division of labour. Oxford: Polity Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., van Laar, C., & Levin, S. (2004). Social dominance theory: Its agenda and method. Political Psychology, 25(6), 845–880. Taylor, F. W. (1967). The principles of scientific management. New York, NY: Norton & Company. Thompson, V. A. (1961). Hierarchy, specialization, and organizational conflict. Administrative Science Quarterly, 5(4), 485–521. Van Vugt, M. (2006). Evolutionary origins of leadership and followership. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(4), 354–371. Weber, M. (1980). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (5th revised ed.). Tu¨bingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Willmott, H. C. (1984). Images and ideals of managerial work: A critical examination of conceptual and empirical accounts. Journal of Management Studies, 21(3), 349–368. Willmott, H. C. (1987). Studying managerial work: A critique and a proposal. Journal of Management Studies, 24(3), 249–270. Wilson, F. M. (1999). Alternative organizational ownership forms: Their effect on organizational behaviour. Organizational Behaviour, 171–181. Zaleznik, A. (1989). The managerial mystique – Restoring leadership in business. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

SECTION I FUNDAMENTALS AND HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS OF BUREAUCRACY

‘LITTLE COGS’: BUREAUCRACY AND THE CAREER IN BRITISH BANKING, C. 1900–1950 Alan McKinlay ABSTRACT Michel Foucault and Max Weber dominate contemporary organisation theory. At least in part, Foucault can be read as an extension of Weber’s concepts of bureaucracy and rationalisation. Or, more profitably, Weber can be read through Foucault and vice versa. Central to the development of the bureaucracy was the construction of the career as a life-long project of the self. From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, British banks developed extensive forms of surveillance predicated upon the career. Not all clerks satisfied the banks’ close inspection of the individual’s personal life. Here, we use Weber and Foucault to tell the story of William Notman, a Scottish bank clerk who successfully sued his employers for dismissing him because he married against their wishes. Keywords: Weber; Foucault; surveillance; rationalisation; bureaucracy

Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 31–57 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035004

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INTRODUCTION Weber and Foucault have exercised a powerful influence on different generations of organisational sociologists. In the 20 years after 1945 Weber was the source of the organisational sociology that measured organisations in terms of their functions and individuals in terms of the responsibilities of their roles. This ‘neutral’ organisational sociology has all but disappeared in the last two decades. In the last two decades, Foucault has dominated our ways of thinking about contemporary organisation and the identity projects of individuals and professions, a focus that assumes the irrelevance of organisational structures. Here we argue that Weber and Foucault can be used together to shed light on the long-run interaction of organisational structures, the nature of the bureaucratic career and individual identity projects. We begin by considering Weber and Foucault’s paradoxical interpretations of modernity, the individual, bureaucracy and the bureaucrat. The nature of the career in British banking and the elaborate bureaucratic and disciplinary systems that made it possible is considered in the second section. Before 1964, British banks operated as a series of ‘perfect’ internal labour markets. No bank hired from another bank; above the entry-level, all positions were based on internal promotion; promotion was meritocratic and judged entirely by internal criteria and processes. Individual careers were based on the banks’ centralised inspection systems which collected secret reports on individual performance: technical, social and moral. Individual lives were closely monitored for strict conformity to convention, and deviation was punished more harshly than for any technical failing. The banking career measured individual accomplishment and the increasing depth and security of the bureaucrat’s vocation. Only by using Weber and Foucault together can we understand the unfolding of the inspection system and the career as a cultural as well an economic project. Finally, we turn to the peculiar case of William Notman, a Scottish bank clerk who was sacked for marrying without his employer’s approval. All British banks operated a form of marriage bar that required their male clerks to meet certain criteria before they could apply for permission to marry: be aged at least 28; have passed their professional exams and made satisfactory progress in their career; earn a salary of not less than d200 per annum, the minimum considered necessary for a middle class lifestyle; and have chosen a bride who will enhance the clerk’s reputation or, at the least, do nothing to harm it. Notman applied four times between 1932 and 1936 and was rejected each time. On every count, the bank inspectors concluded, Notman – and perhaps his fiance´e – was found wanting. In 1936 Notman

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was sacked on the day of his marriage to Lilias. The Notman case became notorious when he took the bank and its directors to court. Over a three-day trial and two appeals, the bank’s directors and the secret inspection system was held to account. The reach of the bank’s surveillance system and the directors’ presumption that their authority was beyond question was examined and opened to public ridicule. Notman’s conduct and the way that small exchanges between colleagues became the basis for the bank’s severe judgement also permits us an unusual glimpse of the depth of the selfcontrol expected of the vocational bureaucrat. The jury found in Notman’s favour and he was awarded damages equivalent to five years’ salary plus all costs. The Notman case proved to be a mortal blow to the secrecy of the banks’ inspection system although the scope and depth of organisational scrutiny remained intact: the ‘little cogs’ did not reject surveillance, simply that the banks accept that their personnel systems allow a limited degree of transparency to increase their legitimacy.

WEBER AND FOUCAULT At first sight, Weber and Foucault appear to have little in common, intellectually or politically. Above all, Weber has a reputation as an epic social theorist where Foucault denied the possibility of grand theory. Of course, Foucault was a deeply ambiguous miniaturist: his use of striking events and images that were both historical and fictive, was to question received notions of historical truth as well as to mark radically different ways of exercising power and thinking about individuals and institutions. There is, however, a growing literature on the parallels between Weber and Foucault. Both Weber and Foucault owed an intellectual debt to Nietzsche; politically, both were sceptical that simply transferring ownership from private hands to the state would have any real benefits for working people (Diggins, 1996, p. 79). Or, as John O’Neill (1986, p. 42) suggests, both Weber and Foucault shared a common intellectual and political point of departure: how did man subject himself to ‘the rational discipline of the applied human sciences?’ Weber thus becomes a precursor to Foucault whose concern with the body adds a physiological dimension to his forebear’s formal historiography. Christopher Dandeker (1990, p. 10) goes further by arguing that for Weber ‘rational administration is a fusion of knowledge and discipline’. For Dandeker (1990), then, it is not just that Foucault and Weber can be read as providing complementary commentaries on modernity but that both can be fruitfully read together and through each

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other. Perhaps, rather than seek the chimera of synthesis, one should simply accept that a Foucauldian Weber is as productive as a Weberian Foucault. For Weber, the ‘man of calling’ is the moral core of modernity and epitomises the modern individual (Gordon, 1987, p. 311). ‘The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so’ so that work becomes ‘an end in itself, a calling’ (Weber, 1976, pp. 62–63). If Protestant asceticism was the moral compass of the early capitalist then, for Weber, this had become a general attribute of a capitalism in which the entrepreneur could rely on ‘sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workers, who clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God’ (Weber, 1976, p. 177). For Weber, Protestantism meant that the divine was unshackled from the church and worship and suffused throughout everyday life. Religiosity now pervaded the secular and the mundane and was not the special preserve of particular places, times or people. In turn, the individual’s everyday life now carried a constant ethical burden. Indeed, this was a complex double burden: to God and the self, mediated and validated by worship and personal conduct. Weber’s claim was nothing less than that Luther had turned the whole world into a Monastery (Kim, 2004, pp. 34, 86). The idea of calling or vocation was central to Weber’s entire project from the Protestant Ethic in 1904 through to his famous lectures on science and politics in 1917 and 1919 (Barbolet, 2008, pp. 46–48). Indeed, ‘Science as a Vocation’ can be read as Weber’s reply to the despairing question he posed himself in the Protestant Ethic: ‘specialist without spirit, sensualists without heart, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved’ (Weber, 1976, p. 182). That is, how to restore meaning to a world organised around the systematic deconstruction of belief beyond calculation. For Weber, the career was a life-long project of the self. ‘The career is the secularised calling of modern capitalism, bringing order to everyday conduct’ while pursuing a strategy seeking recognition over the course of the individual’s lifetime (Chalcraft, 1994, pp. 26–27; Mannheim, 1940, pp. 56–57; Sayer, 1991, pp. 131–132; Szakolczai, 2000, p. 115). After all, one of Weber’s most celebrated lectures, ‘Science as a Vocation’ begins with a nuts and bolts description of the typical career paths of German and American scientists. The American system was based on a salaried bureaucracy, the individual’s role, status and earnings were modest to begin with but were coupled with job security and reliable prospects. The German system, by contrast, was capricious and fraught with peril for the young scientist. The German academic career, despite some hesitant bureaucratisation, remained ‘a wild gamble’ (Weber, 1989, p. 8). Nevertheless, the successful academic

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career, Weber argued, required deep specialisation, and a stoic acceptance that one’s work would almost certainly be quickly superseded. Meaning could not be derived from the pursuit of lasting intellectual impact but only from the methodical application of self, nothing less than a devotion, to the task at hand (Hennis, 1988, pp. 71–72). ‘Science’ was also a metaphor for careers in general and, indeed, modern life. Paradoxically, the amorality of the bureaucracy rests on the individual’s passionate embrace of duty and service. Where the calling of ascetic Protestantism promised eternal grace, the bureaucrat’s vocation held no hope of transcendence, merely that the daily futility of the rationalised life could be invested with the consolation of some meaning, however fleeting (Gane, 2004, p. 46). A second paradox is that the successful lifetime career is based on how completely one can confine oneself to the demands of the moment. The cultural significance of bureaucracy lies in the contrast between the dispassionate instrumentality of institutions and the passionate rationality of the individual bureaucrat. In ‘Science as a Vocation’ Weber was a deeply ambivalent advocate of young scientists choosing their specialisation, something he recognised as inevitable, irrespective of individual choice. Weber recognised the necessity and the tragedy of the modern career. Weber acknowledged that he was unable to offer his young audience a strategy for career management and struggled to provide a satisfactory ‘functional metaphysics’ of the everyday: to reconcile oneself to a rationalised task was psychologically healthy; to embrace rationalisation as a vocation made possible moments of spiritual peace, but no more than that (Scaff, 1989, p. 227). Even here, however, Weber’s language suggests that the demands of the bureaucratic calling were both a blessing and a curse for the modern individual. He uses a supernatural metaphor strikingly at odds with stark images of instrumental reason, a disenchanted world stripped of magic: Today the spirit of asceticism – whether finally, who knows? – has escaped from the cage. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. (Scaff, 1989, pp. 88–89; Weber, 1976, pp. 181–182)

For Weber, the modern career offered something of a return to the spiritual discipline of Puritanism but stripped of its religious meaning and embedded in secular routine (Goldman, 1988, pp. 211–212). Weber’s bold but sobering claim was made to a student audience in thrall to romanticism, anxious to remake German society. Weber’s obligation – his vocation – was to disabuse such romantic notions, to point out that they were both makers and captives of an increasingly disenchanted world, a world in which all mysteries could be dispelled and all things mastered through calculation

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(Weber, 1989, p. 139). The possibility of technical mastery of the world is achieved at the cost of the certainty of meaninglessness (Mitzman, 1970, pp. 225–230). The consolation – and agony – of scholarship was that all compromises were considered and acknowledged; unlike the compromises of the unthinking bureaucrat or the cunning politician. This was the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge. The distance between oneself and one’s actions was essential to measure oneself against the possible and the necessary. This gap allowed the possibility of a comforting, but ultimately self-defeating, self-deception. Accepting the rigours of a calling was, then, necessary not just to resist the hollow temptations of irrationalism but also to prepare the individual for the trials of life. Weber’s speech was in several registers. ‘Science as a Vocation’ was political and of the moment, a public statement and yet deeply personal, perhaps even confessional: the moment Weber understood that defining one’s vocation as the only way of reconciling professional and personal morality (Eden, 1983, pp. 139–142; Schluchter, 1996, pp. 9, 33). After Foucault, it is impossible to read Weber without hearing echoes of discipline, self-surveillance and confession. Both provided a vision of modernity in which institutions and individuals are predicated upon a hermeneutics of suspicion. For Weber, the self-surveillance of Calvinism made the individual continuously scrutinise his or her conduct, motives and morals. If every soul was a ledger, then every individual was an accountant. Where Weber looked to the way that Protestant asceticism transferred into the self-discipline required by capitalism, Foucault traced the ways that the external constraints of ‘sovereign’ power gave way to the internalised disciplined of modern individualism (Van Krieken, 1990, p. 355). The restless individual’s search for self-discipline and self-improvement was as important to Foucault as for Weber. Foucault’s discussion of the individual self and the methodical conduct of life echoed Weber: The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern is not to accept oneself as on in the flux of passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration. (Foucault, 1984, p. 41)

Stewart Clegg has observed that Foucault was something of an unwitting Weberian in that he failed to appreciate their shared interests in power, religious and moral codes, and that their interrogation of classical societies was intended to better understand modernity (Clegg, 1994). But this is only partly accurate. At the very least, Foucault had a passing knowledge of key Weberian terms, although he was careful to avoid offering any detailed commentary (Foucault, 1991, pp. 78–81). Towards the end of his

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life, however, Foucault first recognised – and acknowledged – the close affinity between his work and that of Weber. Foucault’s reading of Weber began in 1978 and Arpad Szakolczai (2000, pp. 210–211) goes so far as to suggest that his return to the term ‘governmentality’ was an acknowledgement of their overlapping theoretical and historical work (McKinlay & Pezet, 2010). During these years Foucault reflected that he had paid too much attention to systems of domination and that he intended to redress this imbalance by researching how individuals increasingly came to govern themselves (Bonnafous-Boucher, 2001, p. 113). This was the moment that ‘governmentality’ moved from being a term of uncertain provenance towards being a key concept, both abstract and analytical. This was a risky conceptual shift and there is, indeed, a certain hesitancy evident in the language of Foucault’s lectures and essays during this period (Dupont, 2010, p. 189; Paras, 2006, pp. 113–120). Foucault’s ‘Weberian turn’ provided him with the questions that guided his research into the histories of sexuality. More precisely, Foucault inverted Weber’s enquiry into the cost to the self of the many denials essential to rational action: ‘I posed the opposite question: How have certain sorts of interdictions required the price of certain kinds of knowledge about oneself? What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything?’ (Foucault, 1988a, p. 17). Echoing Weber, Foucault also regards the construction of individual identity as a process that involves agency and constraint: ‘the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in the culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group’ (Foucault, 1994, p. 11). Weber is careful to avoid any hint of institutional determinism. Bureaucracy is a form of power which provides the possibility of obedience for its procedures and office-holders. Obedience, however, relies not just on bureaucratic compulsion but on the active engagement of clerks. For it is the clerks’ belief in the legitimacy of a bureaucratic order which prompts their obedience: each command is weighed in terms of its congruence with impersonal rules and derives no legitimacy from the person who gives the order. Each order is, then, a moment which provides an opportunity for obedience and also for its rejection as inconsistent with established practices or given by an office-holder overstepping the limits of their position. Bureaucracy is both a formidable, compelling, structure but is also performative in that its procedures leave some scope for individual deviance, a space that allows the clerk to embrace, not just endorse, the organisation’s

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rules. The power of bureaucracy is more than the institution. Rather, Weber notes that even if all the files were eliminated, bureaucracy would survive in the souls of the clerks. Despite the way that Weber has been appropriated as a prophet of rationalisation, he was insistent on the need to ground concepts in their historical context. In this sense, Weber provided a tool kit of concepts, much like Foucault. Both were equally sceptical of grand theory. Both drew on similar organisations as the harbingers of new forms of organisation, power and knowledge, especially religious and military. One of the striking images used by Foucault to convey modern discipline is the minutely choreographed movements of military cadets rising from their beds and preparing their uniform, all to the steady beat of a drum. Like Foucault, Weber takes it as self-evident that military discipline is the source and the ideal for modern capitalist organisation. This account of the unremarkable and private nature of disciplinary routines stands in contrast to the execution of Damiens in 1757, a century before, a public, spectacular demonstration of sovereign power. Where sovereign power targets the body of the condemned, as something to be marked; disciplinary power, by contrast, aims at the permanent reformation of the souls of the many. Again, we can surely hear this Foucauldian theme in Weber’s analysis of the protestant who subjects himself to continuous and systematic self-control rather than the occasional pieties of Catholicism where the quality of worship depends on the subordination of the self to the other. Where Weber goes beyond Foucault is his insistence that ‘the management of the modern office is based upon written documents (‘‘the files’’)’ (Weber, 1978, p. 957). That is, where Foucault proceeds only as far as the thoughts of criminologists or physicians, Weber requires us to drill down to routine patterns of information processing, of classifying colleagues and clients. The importance Weber ascribed to ‘the files’ was more about their stability than about their form. Files were, like bureaucracy itself, ordered hierarchically with information produced locally, according to centrally proscribed formats, but consolidated and interrogated by headquarters. At most, the branch office had only partial knowledge. In turn, the headquarters produced more complete and authoritative forms of knowledge which further legitimised its power over lower, dispersed offices. Foucault, like Weber, does not search for the origins of new organisational forms and ways of living, for that would surely prove to be futile or trivial. Now, in Foucault, these contrasting images signify the emergence of continuous forms of monitoring and self-management which echo Weber. However, where Foucault is clear

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that he is suggesting a clear historical disjuncture, Weber uses discipline as a transhistorical category. The content of discipline is nothing but the constantly rationalized, methodically prepared and exact execution of the received order, in which all personal criticism is unconditionally suspended and the actor is unswervingly and exclusively set for carrying out the command. In addition, this conduct under orders is uniform. (Weber, 1978, p. 1149)

Cromwell’s Ironsides closed formations of troops acting in unison is the example Weber used to illustrate the superiority of rational organisation. Discipline is, for Weber, a neutral term that does not signify a particular place or period: ‘no special proof is necessary to show that military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalist factory, as it was for the ancient plantation’ (Weber, 1978, pp. 1155–1156). The technical superiority of bureaucracy lay not just in the machine-like precision and uniformity of its operation but its capacity to expand and evaluate its knowledge base. Bureaucracy was an organisation perfectly suited to the grinding routines of administering disciplinary lives or, at least, lives to be disciplined. Foucault comes closest to Weber in his argument that modern power is not concentrated in particular individuals, institutions or places but widely dispersed in the daily routines of state, society and economy. Although Foucault asks us to consider the practical implications of forms of power and knowledge, he tells us nothing about the mechanisms that construct and reconstruct specific regimes. In Foucault’s terms, disciplinary professionals reproduce discipline across institutional fields. At the core of this is a very Weberian concern with a form of economic calculation in terms of the effectiveness and comparison of alternative techniques of treatment, rehabilitation or production. Equally, where Weber regarded bureaucracy as a representation of an instrumental rationality that had been freed from any institutional anchor, so Foucault had a similarly jaundiced view of the possibilities for the humanistic reform of prison or asylums. Any temporary improvements in the conditions of prisoners or workers were most likely to be won through looking for the extension of rules and greater consistency in their application: in other words, only by endorsing disciplinary logic, not by displacing it. For Foucault, personal fulfilment lay in political engagement with subaltern or marginal groups. Again, we hear echoes of Weber’s pragmatic ethics where virtue is not derived from a set of transcendental values but lies in the daily struggle to find meaning in a meaningless world (Brubaker, 2006, pp. 96–97).

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BANK WORK AND ORGANISATION Until the last decade of the nineteenth century, British banks operated a career system based on seniority. However, the rapid expansion of branch networks entailed the construction of new organisational structures able to capture, communicate and compare dispersed financial data in standardised formats and allowing ever shorter time-lags. Previously, local branches had been managed by agents who were personally liable for any shortfalls in cash or loan defaults: this structure could not stretch to meet the demands of network growth. This shift from a system based on financially liable agents to a hierarchy of bank employees was analogous to the movement from internal contractors to supervisors in British and American factories. In both cases, the creation of ‘the employee’ called forth ‘the manager’ (Jacques, 1999; McKinlay & Wilson, 2012). A career system based on merit and seniority was introduced as a way of governing the banks’ increasing staff and as a proving ground for salaried managers responsible for local operations but without the financial obligations of agents (Boot, 1991; McKinlay, 2002). Formally, banks operated ‘perfect’ internal labour markets and aspired to complete bureaucracy: hierarchy, selected through examination; paid fixed salaries; employment as career; promotion through achievement or seniority; conduct subject to strict and systematic discipline and control (Savage, 1998). The internal labour market had three major advantages for the banks. First, it all but eliminated labour turnover among experienced staff. No other Scottish bank would hire a clerk who had left another Scottish bank. The same limit on job mobility applied to English banks. For the bank clerk, leaving his employer meant emigration or exiting the sector completely. Second, it provided a closed system with endless possibilities for formal and informal scrutiny of individual employees. Finally, it reduced the attractions of fraud by increasing the penalties over time. Bank staff were locked into a system of small salaries and slow promotion that increased the individual’s ‘investment’ in their career over time: other Scottish banks were off-limits and exit meant relinquishing job security and the promise of a step-change in salary in middle age.1 The career requires the organisation to establish systems that measure tasks, establish job ladders, records that monitor individual performance and progress, and evaluate the trajectory of the employee population over the long run. The assumption was that ambition makes more perfect slaves than necessity. And that legitimate individual ambitions could be met by the career. The career became a project that was intensely personal and, at the same time, an object to be measured and managed by the organisation.

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Inside the banks, ledgers were used not just to record the performance of each clerk but also to provide the information necessary to compare the relative progress of individuals and cohorts over time. The progress of an individual could be measured relative to his peers, a measure, in other words, of his worth and merit. The construction of the individual career entailed the making of populations. The career becomes a neutral technical issue, an object to be administered, not a subject to be debated far less negotiated (Murray Li, 2007, p. 7). The paradox is that the career, as an object to be governed, created a workforce with a shared interest in ensuring the transparency and equity of the system. The very techniques that proclaimed their neutrality also invited questions that were necessarily sceptical of such claims. Much of the clerical work in banks before 1939 was repetitive and called for little beyond complete compliance with a set of procedures, much centred on ledger recording. This held true for all clerks, whatever their seniority or experience (Dale, 1962, pp. 2–5). ‘The individual bureaucrat’, Weber observed, ‘cannot squirm out of the operation into which he has been harnessed. y the professional bureaucrat is chained to his activity in his entire economic and ideological existence. y he is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march’ (Weber, 1968, pp. 987–988). Binding the individual to the pace of a machine, whether in a factory or office, is a familiar trope. However, perhaps in this passage there is a chink in Weber’s otherwise overwhelming pessimism that the only concern of the bureaucrat was how to make some incremental gain in status. That is, the image of the ‘squirming’ bureaucrat conjures up the possibility not just that this is an uncomfortable harness but also one in which the clerk becomes aware of his limited autonomy and control. The very fact of the clerk’s discomfort speaks of a degree of self-awareness, of some limited understanding of the bureaucratic division of labour. In banking, simplified clerical tasks left little scope for distinguishing significant differences in individual performance, especially in the early years of a career. This increased the importance of non-technical aspects of employment, the depth of the individual’s conformity to the work and non-work behaviours specified by the banks. Only discipline and diligence brought reward. Hard work, personal reserve and unfailing courtesy were not simply personal characteristics but embodied the organisation. While technical breaches of procedures were punished these were normally one-off ‘fines’. Social breaches, mild insubordination in word or deed, were punished more severely through delays in awarding salary increases, a punishment which could have lasting effects on salary and pension.

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The cornerstone of administrative control and innovation in the banks was the central inspectorate. Inspectors examined all aspects of the branch network operations, and arrived without notice. To be a bank inspector was, then, to be a member of the bureaucratic elect, invested with expert status and responsible for ensuring compliance to administrative procedures. In some banks the inspectors reported directly to the board of directors, a further fillip to their career (Moneta, 1904, p. 74). More than this, inspectors also completed private reports on personnel performance that formed the basis for salaries and career progression. As one former bank clerk explained, inspection was a ‘superlatively thorough’ process that went much further than ensuring compliance with administrative procedures: The inspector writes a short report upon each man, stating how his duties are performed, whether he considers him specially suited for any particular post, and, actually, if he dresses well. A resume of these reports is entered in the clerk’s character-book, which is kept at the head-office. Many of the writer’s sins are, doubtless, chronicled therein. (Rae, 1900, p. 559; Warren, 1900, p. 84)

Similarly, the bank clerk, as an industry textbook noted, ‘will, of course, be carefully watched y At unknown times an inspector will call at the office with a clerk, and take possession of all the books, going through them in detail till he is able to report fully on every advance made by the manager, and on the nature and technical perfection of the security held’ (Leaf, 1935, p. 236). Such were the ‘small acts of cunning’ by which surveillance – ‘the political anatomy of detail’ – became unremarkable and ubiquitous throughout the organisation (Foucault, 1977, p. 139; McKinlay & Guerriero Wilson, 2006). The inspector’s reports were not confined to office routine: PRIVATE CONDUCT. The espionage upon the private conduct of their officials, throughout the establishment, which your Directors countenance and encourage, is gall and wormwood to certain of your staff, and appears to be regarded with some disfavour even by yourself; not that you fear the closest watching, you remark, but because it is humiliating to be suspected. There are limits, well defined, within which even the enquiring gaze of your Inspector may not penetrate; but beyond these, the conduct of every officer in a bank is justly open to the surveillance of its Directors. (Rae, 1918, pp. 181–182)

The inspectors’ reports were not open to challenge by the clerk, nor subject to any organisational checks for accuracy or fairness. The individual’s location in the organisational hierarchy equated to mastery of bureaucratic processes and was paralleled by a status system of almost infinite detail. In the intimate space of bank branches individual performance – from the technical

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to the moral – was subjected to constant collegial as well as organisational scrutiny (Miller & O’Leary, 1987). Inspection was, then, not restricted to the workplace but extended deep into the employee’s personal life. Inspectors embodied the rigour of the inspection process: ‘The tall well-dressed austere man from Head Office fascinated him, his restless searching eyes, his quick movements, his uncanny power of discovering mistakes hidden under a year’s growth of entries, his knowledge, his confidence and his authoritative pronouncements on every subject from formal minutes to farm manure’ (Union Bank of Scotland (UBS), 1946, p. 17). Bureaucratic rules assumed that the organisation was entirely male, but these rules used a language that sublimated gender, power and hierarchy. ‘Bureaucracy’, argued Weber, ‘develops the more perfectly, the more it is ‘‘dehumanized’’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal y and emotional elements which escape calculation’ (Weber, 1968, p. 988). Bureaucratic writing sought to render gender and power invisible and anonymous. The formal, curt syntax marked the individual as a professional. Only by writing and talking in this distant, authoritative tone could the individual clerk demonstrate his competence and maintain the objectivity of their relations with colleagues (Etherington-Wright, 2009, p. 24). Personal reserve was a key marker of respectability. James McBey, later a distinguished artist, described his years as a clerk in a pre-1914 Scottish bank, contrasting the easy familiarity of village life: All the clerks looked alike, clean, drab, and very busy. Everyone was addressed and referred to as ‘Mr. this or Mr. That’. Here was a self-contained world of impersonalities, so different from the kindly familiarity of the village, already ages away. (1993, p. 25)

Again, Weber was clear that bureaucracy is not necessarily antithetical to personal relations or emotion at work. Only in institutions such as a bank was impersonality critical to the bureaucratic ethos, places in which emotion might impede judgement or expose the clerk to partiality, if not outright corruption (Du Gay, 2000, p. 75). For the bank clerk, no space could be considered completely private, beyond the organisation’s gaze, and no practice was regarded as too trivial to reflect on the clerk’s character. Even the rarest moments of impulsiveness or self-indulgence, far less sustained fecklessness, would compromise the clerk’s image of manly restraint, a risk that he would be judged as juvenile or effeminate (Tosh, 1999, p. 232). The only safeguard was to ‘cultivate method in everything’: Lift the lid of a man’s desk, and you may almost certainly tell his real value as an official to be depended on. Should it present a heterogeneous chaos of papers, pens, and parcels,

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This was an organisation suspicious of itself. At once, the bank clerk was expected to have a vocation that stretched from the immediacy of the task to their domestic and community life. The assumption that bank clerks would exercise deep self-control and become ascetic bureaucrats was belied by the depth of the surveillance used to check on their behaviour. There is little doubt, however, that bank clerks were acutely aware of the need to develop and demonstrate the individual virtues through public display. One latenineteenth century Scottish clerk itemised his exhausting routine of long hours in the bank, extra-mural economics classes at the local university, and volunteering to keep the books of two small local businesses for a nominal fee. Nor was this the sum of what he regarded as activities that were both civic obligations and essential to his bank career. Just as important as this litany of service was its visibility inside the community and to his bank superiors: I belonged to a literary or debating society which met twice a month y For one year I acted as secretary (and another) as president. y I belonged to the Rifle Volunteers and attended military drill once a week. y I was a member of the church choir and had to attend the weekly meeting for practice. y I managed to get in an occasional round of golf on the famous St Andrews links. This I did on Saturday afternoons and holidays y (or) sometimes y at night after my day’s work was done. (Forgan, 1924, pp. 43–44)

The most notorious control over the lives of male bank clerks was that they were required to meet certain criteria before they could even apply to their employer for permission to marry. As a minimum, the male clerk had to be aged at least 28 in the Commercial Bank and at least 31 in the case of the National Bank of Scotland; and have served anything between 8 and up to 16 years’ service. In practice, for the vast majority of clerks first hired as youths, only completing at least 16 years of ‘onerous and responsible work’ could prepare the male clerk for the rigours of ‘matrimonial state’. These controls were rigidly enforced and could not be evaded by the clerk.2 Yet by the end of the nineteenth century the increased volume of information processing and mechanisation meant that clerical work was not exclusively male and that banks were not entirely male organisations. Before 1914 almost all female clerks were concentrated in commercial and business premises, the inferior end of clerical work. In large-scale organisations, the development of clerical hierarchies and new technologies opened up

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new spaces where routinised tasks were defined as exclusively female: stenography, filing, or machine operations (Holcombe, 1973, p. 144; Lewis, 1984, pp. 158, 196). Before 1945 bank branches remained almost entirely male preserves both because of their small scale and their reliance upon labourintensive methods. Clerical tasks in branches had not been rationalised in the same way as headquarters and telling, in itself a relatively simple task, remained wholly masculine and was the place and the moment where the organisation demonstrated its competence to customers (Kennet, 1942, p. 4; Wilson, 1984, pp. 3–4). The extremely limited career prospects of female clerks reflected the gendered division of labour: ‘women worked with women, under women, and in women’s jobs, processes or parts of processes’ (Zimmeck, 1986, p. 159). In some cases, clerkesses not only worked in offices designated as female-only but even had separate entrances (Dohrn, 1988, pp. 57–58). Female clerks were hidden so as to be protected from the corrupting gaze of men. They worked for organisations from which they were concealed, a confinement that only broke down during the Great War. An absolute female marriage bar operated in all large-scale organisations, notably the civil service, explicitly before 1914 and continued, if not intensified in the 1920s, beneath the thinnest veneer of equal opportunities (Zimmeck, 1984, pp. 904, 909–910). The marriage bar prohibited the hiring of married females and ensured that female staff resigned before their marriage, with no prospect of reinstatement even on inferior contracts (Smith, 1984, p. 943). If anything, the prospects for women bank clerks were even more dismal than for female civil servants. Women employees were overwhelmingly concentrated in headquarters where the volume of typing, filing and copying work permitted sufficient specialisation for only a few departments to be staffed by female staff. Between 1887 and 1926 the Bank of Scotland employed just five females in its branch networks: four were bookbinders managed by a stationery firm, although paid by the Bank; the fifth was a widowed cleaner – likely of a bank messenger – who cleaned a branch in return for a free house, coal and gas. Even under the pressure of wartime conscription the banks proved extremely reluctant to recruit women, preferring boy apprentices even though they were eligible for military service within two years.3 Women quickly left the Bank after the Armistice, or were dispensed with. After 1918 the annual recruitment of women to each Scottish bank, for example, numbered less than a handful until 1942. The spectre of the female bank clerk was bound up with that of mechanisation and was read as a sign that bank employment would become increasingly competitive and stratified. Discussions of the spectre of the female bank clerk should be read, then, as signs of a broader uncertainty

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over the future viability of the career, not about an immediate contest for jobs: One sometimes wonders whether the coming of the woman bank clerk will hasten a process which seemed to have begun before the war, viz., the differentiation of the staff into two classes. It may be that young men of superior education and qualifications will be admitted as ‘first division clerks’ into the services of the great banks, with a view to their being trained for responsible administrative posts, while the routine work will be performed by ‘second division clerks’, male and female. (Anonymous, 1918, p. 572)

In truth, the threat from female clerks to male careers was more imaginary than real. None of the three females who had achieved some limited managerial authority in Scottish banks in 1911 were married or widowed. Although the absolute numbers of females employed in Scottish banks increased between the wars the relative career opportunities for women declined and the female marriage bar remained intact and unquestioned by the bank trade union (HMSO, 1913, Tables 3, 4, 7, 12; 1924, Table 2; 1933, Table 16). After 1918, more women had jobs in banks but few had careers in anything but the most restricted sense.

MR NOTMAN Notman’s early career was unremarkable: like many, he was the son of a banker and was hired by the Commercial Bank of Scotland in February 1925; was successful in associate examinations for the Institute of Bankers in 1926; completed his apprenticeship in February 1928; and received modest annual increases every year to raise his salary to d170 in 1935. In May 1934 when Notman lodged his first application for permission to marry, his family were prepared to make good any shortfall in his salary to the necessary d200 threshold. A salary of d200 was the minimum specified by many banks as commensurate with – or at least the possibility of – a respectable married life. Indeed, a series of surveys conducted by the bank unions and the government statistical services strongly suggested that the ‘average bankman’s annual expenditure ranged from d250 to d1,700 (BOG, 1932). In general, a salary of d200 was achieved at the seventh year of employment; that is, somewhere between the ages of 24 and 26.4 Here bank employment clearly departed from Weber’s ideal type of rational domination in which there is a clear demarcation of the official and the private spheres (Schluchter, 1981, p. 120). Notman’s first application to marry was curtly rejected by the Commercial Bank which offered neither explanation,

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regret, nor encouragement. Since there was no mention of his fiance´e being unsuitable, the burden of failure fell exclusively on him. His performance over the next year was noted by the annual inspection. There were no technical problems with his work but his readiness to make self-deprecating jokes about his managerially lengthened engagement was judged to make his colleagues uncomfortable. Alternatively, Notman’s silence was described as sullen. Even the quality of the individual’s silence was interpreted and ascribed meaning by the inspectors. Silence, on the one hand, could be eloquent testimony to the required self-control, perhaps self-censorship. On the other hand, the reserve much prized by banks as a marker of responsibility could, then, be read as a silent resentment against an organisation that failed to reward those virtues it insisted upon. For the individual, the career was not simply an economic project: notions of manliness were bound up with notions of independence, mobility and achievement. The bureaucratic career allowed not just for ascent through a hierarchy but for manly progress (Davis, 2000, pp. 146–149). A thwarted career, could cast a doubt over the individual clerk’s sense of manliness. A year later, Notman’s second application also failed and again without elaboration by the Commercial’s management. He turned to his branch manager to intercede on his behalf. In April 1935 his branch manager commended him as a ‘very capable Clerk and anxious to improve his position. He is strictly of sober habits and is very attentive to his duties’. The Bank was unimpressed by this unsolicited testimonial since it spoke of Notman’s readiness to press his career claim outside the normal inspection process. Notman was caught in an exquisite bureaucratic trap; he could not beg for that would be unmanly; even to enquire about the reasons for the Bank’s refusal to grant him permission to marry was to question their judgement and the authority of those who made it. By bringing other testimony to bear on the Bank’s inspection was to question the legitimacy of the secret system and the integrity of its decisions. The substance of this breach of the Bank’s conventions was compounded by the supportive manager’s reporting that his ‘anxiety’ was coupled with his ambition. Notman was, after Weber, a squirming ‘small cog’. For the bank, refusal was an opportunity for self-reflection and self-improvement. The fairness of discipline is most readily apparent to those exercising discipline. For the Bank, d200 was not just a financial landmark but also signified that the clerk had achieved the required level of professional competence and that his character had been tested satisfactorily for over a decade. Any judgement of the clerk’s work was, then, also a measure of his moral worth. Privately, the Bank expressed its damning judgement that Notman ‘was quite satisfactory

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as a routine clerk but was not of average ability and attainment’, a judgement that defined him as unready for marriage. Since the tasks allocated those clerks that the Bank deemed ‘routine’ and ‘average’ were exactly the same, this was a clear judgement of character rather than technical competence (Court of Session, 1937, pp. 10–13). Notman’s first appeal to the Bank raised doubts about his docility, the depth by which he submitted to bureaucratic routines. He had to prove himself by undertaking a wider range of duties but also through his personal conduct, his willingness to accept not just the indefinite postponement of his wedding but also that his employer had a legitimate right to reach this decision for him. For Notman, this was a judgement not just about his work performance but also about his maturity and manhood. Victorian manliness was defined through one’s standing in the eyes of one’s peers, especially at work. The public face was independence, ‘the capacity to make one’s way in the world and to be one’s own master’ combined with the prioritisation of the companionate marriage and the home (Tosh, 1999, p. 4, 2005, p. 335). The Commercial Bank moved Notman several times between widely dispersed branches, and at short notice. Moving single clerks between branches was a commonplace, a way of increasing their experience of different clienteles. This was also a simple check against clerical malfeasance since any resulting sharp change in transactions could then be investigated. However, Notman was moved more frequently and without the week’s grace usually accorded the clerk to organise his affairs. Dutifully, Lilias shuttled alongside him, each time forced to find suitable – separate – accommodation and work for a respectable single woman. Respectable accommodation was difficult, but finding work often proved impossible. Notman’s third application was no more successful. His desperation was increasingly apparent in his work life and he grew more distant from his family who unsuccessfully counselled patience, to persuade him to await the Bank’s judgement. Instead, he arranged a personal interview with the Bank’s Secretary, Peter Crerar, a formidable man with a distinguished military record. The interview took place on a fine spring afternoon, and Notman was invited to stand before a roaring fire in Crerar’s office. He was not invited to remove his heavy overcoat – ‘his best’ – or to sit, but stood with his back to the fire, a military technique to make interviewees as uncomfortable as possible. The perfunctory interview confirmed Notman’s thoroughgoing emasculation: by begging for permission to be a man; he had failed to prove himself fit to be a man in the bank hierarchy and his unfitness was confirmed by his plea that the Commercial set aside its rules, even if only temporarily. For Crerar, the substance and manner of his plea spoke of immaturity and

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impulsiveness. Notman had tried to circumvent the Bank’s formal procedures, a manoeuvre that also cast doubt on their legitimacy. Crerar dismissed Notman’s appeal and concluded that it confirmed the Bank’s judgement that he was unready for marriage. In May 1935 Notman lodged his fourth and final application for the Bank’s permission to marry. Again, he was refused, although this time he was informed that his application would be reconsidered in three months’ time. In July Notman informed the Bank that he was to marry immediately: he was summarily dismissed. William and Lilias Notman started their married life without an income or job prospects. After two years of unemployment Notman approached the banking trade union, the Scottish Banking Association (SBA), for assistance in finding work. The SBA was unable to assist but seized on the publicity potential of his plight and agreed to establish a fighting fund for legal challenge to the Bank’s actions. Banking trade unionism was bound up not just with material issues of contracts, careers and salaries but also with securing the status and manliness of the clerk. The SBA, for instance, was founded in 1920 not as ‘a mere money-getting machine’ but to encourage ‘bankmen y for the first time in their history – (to) reach[ing] out towards a newer and fuller conception of their manhood’. The task for this generation, argued the SBA, was to ensure that their successors were left an ‘inheritance of manly respect and freedom from all servility and of loyalty and of service’ (Hood Wilson, 1935, pp. 1–2). Denied any effective means of collective bargaining, the Notman case offered the banking unions an unprecedented opportunity to open up salaries, status and the bank’s surveillance system to public scrutiny. For the bank unions, the first objective was to extend the salary scale to cover the bankman’s entire ‘banking life’ career rather than only the initial 15 years or so. Before 1945, the typical ‘life’ of a female bank worker was ‘short, something less than 10 years and, in the union’s opinion, adequately covered by salary scales which ended at age 29 (Bell, 1951, p. 5). Second, the banking unions regarded the trial as a way of publicly revealing the secret report system of labour grading as ineffective, demeaning and emasculating (Anonymous, 1938, p. 7). For the bank unions, however, the over-riding principle at stake in the Notman case was ‘the liberty of the subject’ (Mackay, 1959, p. 65). The three-day Notman trial was a public sensation. Formally, he alleged that the Commercial Bank had slandered him by making public their judgement that he had fallen short of their professional standards. For all involved, however, what was really at issue was the Bank’s inspection system and its right to debar Notman’s marriage. The trial allowed the bank clerk’s claim to social superiority to be scrutinised; the private lives of clerks

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unveiled. The Commercial Bank’s executives were called to the stand and required to justify the inspection system and their control over their male clerks’ right to marriage. For the Bank’s senior officials, Notman’s decision to marry had amounted to a flagrant disregard of the organisation’s rules and their personal authority. More than this, by making bank management and organisation a matter for public discussion, Notman had breached its preference for privacy: ‘Bureaucratic administration always tends to exclude the public, to hide its knowledge and action from criticism as well as it can. Prussian church authorities now threaten to use disciplinary measures against pastors who make reprimands or other admonitory measures in any way accessible, claiming that in doing so they become ‘‘guilty’’ of facilitating a possible criticism of the church authorities’ (Weber, 1968, p. 992). If, as Weber suggests, bureaucracy is all about accountability, then this is a priority that is first registered inwardly and only with the greatest reluctance externally. Equally, in a bureaucracy, executive power becomes the right to be unaccountable, to claim authority not only within but also beyond the organisation’s formal rules (Herzfeld, 1993, p. 122). From the witness stand, Peter Crerar testified that the inspection reports recorded Notman’s ‘inability to fit into the scheme of things. Notman was not a man who was going to develop into a useful servant of the Bank’. Further, when asked how he had reacted to other clerks who had not taken any advice that he had offered, Crerar replied that this had never happened: ‘they seem to have more sense than to do that’.5 Twice Bank officials had to be reminded that it was counsel’s right to ask them questions and that they could not simply refuse to answer or be dismissed as impertinent. There was more to this than the arrogance of the individual executives. These were men convinced that their mastery of the formal systems – and the fact that they had prospered within the bank’s career system – legitimised their personal power. To challenge them was to question the authority of the bank itself and this could not be countenanced. The bank executives embodied what Mary Douglas (1987, p. 92) calls the ‘pathetic megalomania’ of institutions. The tactics of Notman’s advocate was to delegitimise the inspection system and control over staff marriages and also to highlight the arrogant power of Bank executives. When Notman took the stand he was subjected to hostile questioning by the Bank’s advocate – especially referring to him as a ‘lad’ or as politically motivated – designed to prompt an outburst. Notman proved a restrained and apolitical witness. Public sympathy swung still further towards Notman and against the arrogance of the Bank’s senior officials. Before retiring to consider their verdict, the judge warned the jury that if they awarded Notman his full claim of d5,000 plus all costs this would first,

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ignore that he had mitigated his losses by securing a position with a chemical manufacturer at a salary of d220 and, second, that excessive generosity might jeopardise Notman’s case in any appeal. By a ten-two majority, the jury found for Notman and awarded him d1,000 damages plus all costs. Notman also retained the full proceeds of the legal fund established by the SBA on his behalf. Notman was never a union member and never spoke on any union platform.6 The Commercial Bank lodged two unsuccessful appeals against the Notman verdict. Notman’s repeated appeals and his decision to challenge the Bank in court was the mildest of rebellions by the meekest of rebels. He accepted the SBA’s assistance only in organising a legal fund that he managed at arms-length: he never joined the union nor spoke of his case as anything other than an individual matter. Even the banking trade unions accepted that banking was a moral calling and that all aspects of the clerk’s life should be open to scrutiny; their only demand was that the system of monitoring and reporting should itself be subject to scrutiny. Weber’s ‘little cogs’ did not challenge their position, only that they be more fully involved in the design of the bureaucracy itself. The banking unions, like Mr Notman, were not disenchanted with bureaucracy but with the ways that the banks were incompletely rationalised. Again, Weber would have anticipated the clerks’ search for ways of perfecting the administrative system that at once controlled them and allowed them the moments of self-expression and satisfaction: ‘The official y expects to move from the lower, less important and les well paid, to the higher positions. The average official naturally desires a mechanical fixing of the conditions of promotion. y such grades actually form a character indelebilis of the official and have lifelong effects on his career’ (Weber, 1968, p. 963). Or, to draw on Foucault, the clerks wanted to improve and to render visible – but not to eliminate – the inspection system, the ‘small acts of cunning’ that was essential to their careers.

CONCLUSION Through the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, occupational identities were relatively fixed, consistent across time and space. Craft identities, for example, were based on notions of independence and all-round competence that assumed that the details of work organisation were the worker’s prerogative, not management. Maintaining control over labour supply and definitions of skill, were not simply about economic power but

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also about protecting a birthright. Successive generations regarded themselves as responsible for an economic and cultural stewardship. All origins were, in a very real sense, also destinations. Over the last 30 years, however, occupational identities have become much less certain. Flexibility and multiskilling have blurred the previously sharp boundaries between skilled trades. In British banking, the closed internal labour markets of Notman’s era began to lose their integrity from the mid-1980s. The institutional move from retail banking to the dynamism of financial services was paralleled by the branch becoming a space for trading and the teller representing salesmanship rather than stewardship. There has been an explosion of interest in the making and remaking of identities at work. In large part, this reflects a profound loss of certainty about occupations and professions as stable repositories of manual and technical skills or settled bodies of knowledge. Much of this research has drawn inspiration from Foucault. In particular, this literature has emphasised the malleability of identities and the ways that individuals assimilate, cope and amend organisational norms. Similarly, projects of organisational delayering have sought legitimation by mobilising languages of empowerment and voice. Collapsing bureaucratic hierarchy inevitably diminishes the place and legitimacy of career ladders as a method of motivating – and rewarding – individuals to develop deep organisationspecific expertise. Notman struggled to meet the implicit – but stable – cultural demands of the Commercial Bank but at least he was clear about what these were and how they were rewarded. It is not clear that contemporary ‘little cogs’ work in similarly predictable bureaucracies with clear cultural markers. An important secondary, and in many ways complementary, strand in contemporary organisation theory has been a concern with the ways that management has attempted to ‘re-enchant’ the disenchanted bureaucratic workplace. ‘Re-enchantment’ would include notions of value-driven organisation, leadership rather than management, to spirituality in organisational life. Much of this project is predicated upon the assumption that the bureaucracy was thoroughly disenchanted, a social world devoid of meaning. But this is surely to go further than even the most pessimistic reading of Weber. True, he envisaged rationalisation as a compelling historical force, but one that was also susceptible to periodic disruption and temporary reverses. However, one can read Weber more optimistically. As bureaucracy strips discretion, judgement and fulfilment out of economic lives, so the individual has to struggle even harder to find or, rather, make, meaning. The point is not the success of the pursuit of meaning as much as the struggle itself. This is the kind of quotidien redemption that remains open to us, just as it did to the young scientists addressed by Weber in 1920.

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Weber despaired of the inevitability of rationalisation and the relentless growth of bureaucratic organisation. His anxiety was scarcely tempered by his insistence that the rationalisation process would be punctuated by episodic lurches to charismatic leadership, authority and organisation. Charismatic authority would, in turn, be codified and organised: rationalised out of existence. The figure of the individual bureaucrat remained a paradoxical figure in Weber, at once rationalised, limited and habituated to her or his narrow role but also capable of reflection and choice, however futile. Yet even here Weber concedes some room for manoeuvre. For the Weberian bureaucrat, administration becomes a vocation, a term that suggests a profound attachment to the organisation and to the career. Career progression represents much more than merely the ascent of an organisational hierarchy but the gradual achievement of a kind of secular grace. This requires more than individual instrumentality or simple subordination to rational control. Weber opens up the possibility of a cultural sociology of the organisation and of the bureaucratic career. Foucault shares much of Weber’s pessimism but this is couched in such excessive language that he was surely cautioning against taking his interpretations literally or even, perhaps, too seriously. Foucault never wrote of the administrators of the hospital, the asylum or the prison; nor did he provide a social history of penitents, patients or prisoners. Weber, similarly, used ideal typical constructs of ‘the entrepreneur’ or ‘the charismatic leader’, or drew on fiction. Neither Weber nor Foucault provided accounts of the lives and morals of ordinary, anonymous believers or bureaucrats, gaolers or prisoners. However, the disciplinary systems of these institutions shared important characteristics: individuals were assigned unique indicators; individuals were measured in various ways; and the individual’s development was compared to that of the population. All of this required systems of administration based on continuous, cumulative and accurate record-keeping. Foucault’s disciplinary systems required Weberian bureaucracy.

NOTES 1. Glasgow Herald, 11 August 1919. 2. Scotsman, 15 February 1936. 3. Bank of Scotland, Branches Salary Books, 1877–1926, BOS/8/2/1/1/6. 4. Hilton, Ministry of Labour to The Secretary, GPO, 19 March 1925 (TNA, AB2/1563/stats192/1925). 5. Edinburgh Evening News, 19 October 1938. 6. Scotsman, 22 October 1938.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank the governors of Halifax Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland for their co-operation. The knowledge of Seonaid McDonald, HBOS, has been essential to this research. Thanks also to Peter Scott, Reading University, for his willingness to share his own archival research with the author.

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THE END OF BUREAUCRACY? Stewart R. Clegg ABSTRACT Bureaucracy is under attack and has been for some time, specially these past 30 years. This chapter will outline the specific qualities of bureaucracy, the challenges to it that different critics have posed and the possible futures of bureaucracy that are being imagined. In the 1980s, as a key part of an extremely liberal and influential critique of bureaucracy, new imaginings of how to organize corporations and public sector organizations began to emerge. By the late 1990s these had morphed into a view of the network or hybrid organization as the way of the future. The chapter will suggest that the global future of bureaucracy is not as simple as some of these criticisms suggest when they see it left behind in the emergence of innovative new forms. Instead, it is suggested, there is a spatial disaggregation of organizations occurring that heralds some unsettling new futures of organizations emerging. Keywords: Bureaucracy; Weber; Aston School; critics of bureaucracy; projects; networks

Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 59–84 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035005

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INTRODUCTION Bureaucracy has had a chequered career in social science since its formulation as a concept by Max Weber in the early years of the twentieth century and the subsequent translation of his works in the post-war era. It has been developed as a central plank of one of the most influential large-scale empirically comparative research projects of modern social science, the Aston studies; it has been subject to vitriolic attack by contemporary proponents of the new public management and of entrepreneurial private sector management; it has waxed and latterly waned as the central policy device of modern government, and it has been declared, if not dying, as fading before the onslaught of networks, digitalization, project management, outsourcing and supply chains. The chapter reviews the career of the concept and considers its future prognosis.

THE PAST OF BUREAUCRACY Bureaucracy has long been seen as a cornerstone of the advanced industrial societies, and even as constitutive of modernity itself. Yet, one of the most striking features of contemporary debate is that this hitherto dominant form has been dismissed as outmoded by commentators of virtually all persuasions. This was not always the case. Bureaucracy has a long and distinguished history, not least because of its central place in Max Weber’s understanding of modernity (Weber, 1978). The founding father of the sociology of organizations, Max Weber, whose work on organizations was translated into English from the late 1940s, with his national and liberal concerns with the foundation of the German state, had naturally attended to the pivotal role that Prussian civil and military bureaucracy had played in that state’s founding. For Weber, bureaucracy was neither a novel nor even a distinctively European phenomenon; nonetheless, Germany’s rapid development after 1871 owed much to its modern rational–legal form. For Weber it often seemed that the opposite of bureaucracy was dilettantism. What characterized bureaucracy for Weber was the social embeddedness of different value systems, and his account of bureaucracy centred not just on formal rules but also on the idea that the ethics of office implied a form of practical wisdom that, in Richard Sennett’s (2006) terms, functioned as a gift for organizing time. Weber had a precise understanding of bureaucracy. Members of a bureaucratic organization are expected to obey its rules as general principles

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that can be applied to particular cases and which apply to those exercising authority as much as those who must obey the rules. People do not obey the rules because of traditional deference or submission to charismatic authority; they do not obey the person but the office holder. Members of the organization ‘bracket’ the personal characteristics of the office holder and respond purely to the demands of office. Whether you like the office holder or not is supposed to be unimportant. Police officers may be disagreeable personally, but they hold an office that enables them to do what they do, within the letter of the law. The rule of law is the technical basis of their ability to take appropriate action, in terms of the definitions laid down in law. Weber’s view of bureaucracy to see it was as an instrument or tool of unrivalled technical superiority. He wrote that ‘[p]recision, speed and unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction, and of material and personal cost. These are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration’ (Weber, 1948, p. 214). Weber (Clegg, 1990) defined bureaucracy as having 15 key dimensions: 1. Power belongs to an office and is not a function of the office holder. 2. Power relations within the organization structure have a distinct authority configuration, specified by the rules of the organization. 3. Because powers are exercised in terms of the rules of office rather than the person, organizational action is impersonal. 4. Disciplinary systems of knowledge, either professionally or organizationally formulated, rather than idiosyncratic beliefs, frame organizational action. 5. The rules tend to be formally codified. 6. These rules are contained in files of written documents that, based on precedent and abstract rule, serve as standards for organizational action. 7. These rules specify tasks that are specific, distinct, and done by different formal categories of personnel who specialize in these tasks and not in others. These official tasks would be organized on a continuous regulated basis in order to ensure the smooth flow of work between the discontinuous elements in its organization. Thus, there is a tendency towards specialization. 8. There is a sharp boundary between bureaucratic action and particularistic action by personnel, defining the limits of legitimacy. 9. The functional separation of tasks means that personnel must have authority and sanction commensurate with their duties. Thus, organizations exhibit an authority structure.

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10. Because tasks are functionally separated, and because the personnel charged with each function have precisely delegated powers, there is a tendency towards hierarchy. 11. The delegation of powers is expressed in terms of duties, rights, obligations and responsibilities. Thus, organizational relationships tend to have a precise contract basis. 12. Qualities required for organization positions are increasingly measured in terms of formal credentials. 13. Because different positions in the hierarchy of offices require different credentials for admission, there is a career structure in which promotion is possible either by seniority or by merit of service by individuals with similar credentials. 14. Different positions in the hierarchy are differentially paid and otherwise stratified. 15. Communication, coordination and control are centralized in the organization. Weber’s work proved decisive for organization analysis. Characteristics abstracted from Weber and other writers were subsequently taken to be constitutive categorically shared features that bestowed family resemblances on all organizations. By the 1950s, when scholars in the United States started to think about the nature of organizations, Weber was one of several widely used sources. At this time, when organizations first began to be studied systematically, the world of organizations and the word of bureaucracy were seen as largely coterminous; for instance, the first widely used course text for students of organizations dating from 1952 and still the standard reader when I entered university in the mid-1960s was Robert Merton and colleagues (1952) Reader in Bureaucracy. In the early 1960s the idea of organizations as bureaucracy was developed and focused on a largescale comparative analysis of organizations by the researchers of the Aston School, who narrowed Weber’s sophisticated account of bureaucracy to a structural and essentialist theory of organizations (Pugh & Hickson, 1976). The empirical world that confronted the Aston School was one in which, in a rather empiricist manner, they saw only bureaucracy and its variants as prevalent. All organizations were seen as variants on a theme: organizationally, their research suggested that there could be more or less bureaucracy, the extent of which was seen to depend on one key contingency: the size of the organization. As organizations grew in size they became inescapably more centralized, formalized, routinized, standardized, configured as bureaucracies. Size was the independent variable while the dependent variable was the configuration of the organization, with the relation between the two being

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conceived in essentially contingent terms. The increasing size of an organization, they hypothesized, was a social fact that could be dealt with only in one way – by increasing bureaucratization. Indeed, this was, the Aston School suggested, a law that held universally. In the work of the Aston School (Pugh & Hickson, 1976) the ideal type elements abstracted by Weber with respect to German nineteenth century bureaucracy become the definitive features of a functionalist conception of organization structure as an essential form, determined in its particular patterns by specific local contingencies, such as size or technology. Conceptualized as a set of stable structural arrangements emerging from a composite of variables that denote bureaucratization, the essence of bureaucracy became frozen as organization structure. If all efficient bureaucracies were alike, every inefficient bureaucracy would be inefficient in its own way, one might say. The measure of size that the Aston School used was a personnel measure, the number of employment contracts issued. The Aston School’s insistence on the fundamental social fact that bureaucracy was the necessary mode of organizing any kind of large-scale formal organization, irrespective of whether it was a public or a private sector organization, was an empirical finding of the 1960s that came to be increasingly challenged as the century unfolded. The accuracy of the Aston School’s projection of bureaucracy in relation to British industry is, implies Ackroyd (2010), questionable. One of their sample organizations was the Austin motor works in Birmingham. Empirically, fragmentation and disaggregation were long-standing and endemic features of British industrial organizations such as Austin. Austin was later allied with Morris, Rover and a number of other firms in British Leyland, which, although doubtless a large-scale industrial organization, lacked the centralized direction and unitary structures suggested by classic models of bureaucracy. Similar to many other UK firms, Leyland appeared to be large when considered in aggregate but such firms were frequently comprised of relatively small subsidiary companies governed through a very substantial degree of operating autonomy on the part of local management. The institutional landscape of British firms was based on radically ‘disaggregated’ structures, derived not from functional requirements but from the values, policies and strategic objectives of UK managerial elites (Ackroyd, 2010). In assuming the universality of variants of bureaucracy, Pugh and Hickson (1976) and their colleagues assumed a great deal about the sample frame that was empirically questionable. The conception of bureaucracy that solidified in organization theory was in some respects quite dissimilar to the central ideas of Weber. It was also significantly different from the idea of bureaucracy that came to dominate

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political discourse in the post-war era. In the post-war era bureaucracy provided a novel way of orchestrating the individual–organization relationship through an organization form premised on the ethical values of universalism and meritocracy (Kallinikos, 2006, p. 135), a conception that found its utmost expression in the articulation of Beveridge’s (1944) ideas of a welfare state. In all these early formulations, in Weber (1978), in Aston (Pugh & Hickson, 1976), and in Beveridge (1944), the idea of bureaucracy was both an aspiration concerning how the world should be conceived as being organized as well as a model of concrete practice. Bureaucracy was soon to shift from an aspiration to a term of abuse.

CHALLENGES TO BUREAUCRACY While Weber (1978) provided a strongly liberal and positive account of bureaucracy as a guardian of liberal rights, as a frame that ensured the treatment of each case on its merits according to rational–legal rule rather than the prejudices of officialdom, outside the realms of scholarship this positive view of bureaucracy was contested. Northcote Parkinson (1955), a British civil servant, published a short and humorous essay in The Economist, in which he stated Parkinson’s Law: that in a bureaucracy ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’. For many people who were not scholars, this small essay framed a large part of their judgments about bureaucracy. While Parkinson’s essay was very much of its class and time, other more radical critiques of bureaucracy began to circulate in the later 1960s from Beijing to Paris; perhaps more surprisingly, by the 1980s, critique of bureaucracy had become a dominant trope of right-wing thought. Unlikely resonances occur as ideas travel (Czarniawska-Joerges & Sevo´n, 2005). The Cultural Revolution, as an idea, began in Beijing and travelled widely through China, but it did not end there. It had resonances in European universities in the 1960s. Surprisingly, it also had resonances in American and other business schools from the 1980s onwards. The last place one might expect to find enthusiasm for Cultural Revolution is management. However, there are many echoes. Contemporary organizations and the lives of many people in them have been drastically changed as a result of the revolutionary rhetoric of management consultants such as Tom Peters and Gary Hamel. I shall concentrate on Peters here. Tom Peters’ (Peters & Waterman, 1982) revolutionary rhetoric emerged from his experience as a consultant for McKinsey, based in the San Francisco office and at Stanford University. In order to give shape to the struggle

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against bureaucracy, Peters identifies it with a specific reactionary figure and ethos. The figure is Robert McNamara and the ethos is that of the Harvard Business School. Peters is on frequent record as saying that his whole life has been a struggle against the legacy of Robert McNamara, which he saw as having become the essential de facto wisdom of the Harvard Business School, setting the pace for large American enterprise in the post-war era.1 Against what Peters regarded as the terrible mixture of McNamara, Harvard and Drucker, Peters (Peters & Waterman, 1982) taught eight great lessons. It is worth noting that these eight lessons were remarkably parallel to Mao Tse-tung (1966) thought. Tom Peters battles against reactionaries and revisionists by introducing eight ‘new’ phenomena against eight that are ‘old’. Peters would not normally be thought of as a Maoist but the libertarian synergies are significant. The eight great lessons of Peters and Waterman (1982) function as an archetype almost as powerful – and indexical – as Mao’s thought (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Mao’s and Peter’s Eight Great Lessons.

Peters A bias for action-active decision-making – ‘getting on with it’ Close to the customer – learning from the people served by the business Autonomy and entrepreneurship – fostering innovation and nurturing ‘champions’

Mao The idea of permanent revolution Learning from the masses Champion workers fuelled by Mao Zedong thought to exceed production and harvest targets Learning from the masses

Productivity through people – treating rank and file employees as a source of quality Hands-on, value-driven – management Value driven rationality – the overwhelming philosophy that guides everyday practice – superiority of Mao Zedong thought applied management showing its commitment through Red Guards leading the masses Stick to the knitting – stay with the business The emphasis on communal principles as the that you know basis of organization Simple form, lean staff – some of the best The attack against bureaucracy – Mao’s 20 companies have minimal HQ staff lessons on bureaucracy in The Little Red Book; as Mao said in criticism of the Soviet model, ‘Why does heavy industry need so many rules and regulations?’ Simultaneous loose-tight properties – Chairman Mao thought provides the central autonomy in shop-floor activities plus values coupled with the autonomy of the local, centralized values communal level Red Guards to implement that thought

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Unlike the Maoists, Peters did not employ physical violence but implicitly he did violence to the lives and careers of those whose jobs were subject to the whims and strategies of corporate revolutionaries. Extensive layoffs were the tangible outcome of the cultural revolutionary message as preached by management consultants such as Peters. Layoffs hollowed out companies, middle-class jobs and future dreams. With fewer employees many organizations lost resilience; often they lost knowledge they did not know they had. Costs were cut rather than innovations fostered. Stein (2001) argues that terms such as ‘de-bureaucratization’ conceal not only the cruel nature of many current organizational practices but also naturalize political decisions as if they were the logic of institutions such as markets, economic necessity and shareholder value. Given the present climate of cuts in the recessionary nations that have emerged from the global financial crisis, we are likely to see more this rhetoric occurring, justified as ever, in the name of efficiency and effectiveness. Peters’ rhetoric was aimed at the private sector of corporate America but public sector theorists, responding in part to the emergence of a new politics in the 1980s, soon picked up similar ideas. In the 1980s, under the impact of Thatcherism and Reganism, public sectors became seen not as the bulwarks of a civil society but as an encroachment on market provision. The naturalization of markets was greatly aided from the 1980s onwards by the reforms that the Thatcher government initiated and the idea of the TINA tendency – that There Is No Alternative. Some commentators on the left see the present cuts to the welfare state in the United Kingdom as a continuation of these earlier policies under cover of the crisis bestowed on us by the bankers. There are other continuities with past policies, however. One result of the years of Labour government that ended this year was that there was a disembedding of public institutions and pre-existing norms and machinery of the government. As Paul du Gay (2010) observes, the protocols of bureaucracy have been increasingly usurped and due process surrendered to an emphasis on ‘delivery’ and transformational leadership, in continuity with many of the emphases of the Thatcher years. One significant casualty of this disembedding of public institutions was the ‘disinterested’ public servant, whose vocation was the impartial, impersonal and efficient execution of official duties, independent of any political or moral ‘enthusiasms’. The development of new public management (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992), drawing on elements of ‘public choice’ theory, the managerialist cult of ‘excellence’ and a belief that markets or quasi-markets should supplant ‘bureaucracy’ in public administration

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that has been predominant in recent reform of public sector organization, has hastened the decline of the Weberian ethos further. While today’s senior civil servants remain subordinate to the responsible minister, responsibility for the implementation of policy has become much more diffuse as relations between ministers and civil servants have increasingly been mediated by the actions of ad hoc committees, task forces and special advisors. Moreover, as evidence from the habits of the Blair government suggests, when sofa meetings replaced cabinet meetings, the formal recording of meetings and respect for bureaucratic protocol diminished markedly. Jonathan Powell (Prime Minister Blair’s Chief of Staff) notes that of an average 17 meetings a day at Downing St. only 3 were minuted. The spirit of formalistic impersonality and the ethic of responsibility gave way to ‘responsive’ and ‘enthusiastic’ political appointees. More especially, policy has become increasingly monitored through the achievement of targets and key performance indicators, simulacra that end up being managed more than that which they are presumed to represent. Many of these simulacra are deemed necessary because market reforms have created quasi-markets rather than markets proper. Thus, the market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were quickly followed by a proliferation of new regulatory controls, and recent years, in the wake of the global financial crisis, have seen the return of the state as a central actor in the economic management of the advanced industrial societies. The social and cultural purposes of many public sector bodies have been expanded rather than contracted, precisely because societies have become more complex and diverse and markets have failed.

IMAGINED FUTURES: THE END OF BUREAUCRACY? From the late 1980s the critique of bureaucracy, which to this point had been largely political, became embroiled in arguments about modernism and post-modernism, a theme to which the present author contributed (Clegg, 1990). Bureaucracy was seen as an essentially modern form of organization, based on differentiation and domination, which begged the question of what a post-modern organization might be. The fin de sie`cle provoked a complex discourse of endings in social science, premised in large part on the belief that the age of high modernity had given way to ‘late’ or ‘post’-modernity. The sense that the advanced industrial societies had reached a historic ‘ending’ was germane to Claus Offe’s thesis of ‘disorganized capitalism’

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(Offe, 1985), and the master theme of discontinuity was reflected in the work of those who rejected the rationalist ‘control’ model of organization (Clegg, 1990; Cooper & Burrell, 1988) and the rise of ‘the new public management’ (Greenwood, Pyper, & Wilson, 2002; Hood, 1998). The increasing power and ubiquity of information technology added to the growing sense that bureaucracy was being undermined in the emergent ‘network society’ (Castells, 2000). Manuel Castells’ work on the ‘network society’ and the ‘network enterprise’ (Castells, 1996, 2000), from one of the world’s foremost commentators on the social, economic and cultural consequences of the information revolution, provoked intense debate on the nature of the transformations now under way in organizations. Castells (1996) may be seen as the latest in a long line of technological determinists and fetishists for whom digital technology has become the altar for a new secular religion of change. As secularized religions go, that of the digital devotees is fairly apocalyptic and a little messianic. There was a past, irrevocably broken with through the advances of digital technologies, and there is a bright sunlit future, a veritable New Jerusalem, just out of reach but visible through the miasma of the imperfect here-and-now. Only more devotion to newer and better digital technologies, an utter commitment requiring more dollars and tithes on the altar plate, can clear the present miasma. There are many disciples from the IT and consulting world spreading this message. The New Jerusalem will be a robust, almost Quaker, Protestantism not a Catholicism, with its attendant hierarchy and bureaucracy. The post-bureaucratic individual, lost in the lonely existence of their soul, digital virtuosi all, will communicate in a wholly unmediated and direct way. No priests; no bureaucrats; just believers and their digital devices, the only artefacts the new religious virtuosi need. The major advantage of digital technologies for business and organizations is their virtual possibilities for disaggregating existing designs. Increasingly, organizations are able to segment activities that are critical to their competitive advantage and to specialize those that are not elsewhere. The non-core functions, such as back-office accounting, telemarketing or programming, are outsourced to parts of the world where the wage is one-third to one-tenth the cost in the home market, dramatically reducing operating costs and increasing competitiveness. The ‘network enterprise’ thesis emphasizes collaboration, partnership and high-trust working relationships whilst neglecting the key issue of power. The political reality of corporate life is one in which a diverse range of hybridized control regimes allow power elites to devolve operational autonomy whilst retaining a streamlined and effective centralized strategic control over

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productive organizations. Separate, but related market, hierarchy, and networked modes of control are determined not by the abstract logic of a new informational paradigm, but by the ‘dynamics of domination’ that inhere in the process of network formation. In these networks, the digital world is moving fundamentally towards concentration, standardization and control. The digital revolution has led to an even tighter centralizing tendency and dismantlement of the institutional pasts and organizational memories of a great many organizations. The virtual organization, apart from its digital accoutrements, suggests Kallinikos (2006, p. 109), entailed the near-total dominance of market values. Ideological project of marketization that stressed the virtues of private sector models over those of the public sector was pursued vigorously under cover of digital innovation; thus, in parallel with the technological changes were a series of institutional changes from the early 1980s onwards, captured by the term the ‘shareholder value’ movement, which stressed the primacy of returns to capital investment as the only mark of firm effectiveness. One consequence was the development of impatient capital: from the 1965 average of US pension funds holding stocks for an average 46 months, by 2000 this had declined to 3.8 months. The stock price came to overrule other more traditional measures such as price/equity ratios and the most highly praised company in the United States became Enron – because its performance was so unbelievably good. Of course it was unbelievable, as we now know. During the 1980s and 1990s organizational change of previously solid business organizations proceeded apace such that the willingness to disrupt one’s own organization became seen as a positive market signal. Whilst large complex organizations have become increasingly heterodox, what has emerged is not the ‘end’ of bureaucracy, but a more complex and differentiated set of post-bureaucratic (or neo-bureaucratic) possibilities that have had the effect of undermining some distinctions previously deemed incontestable (e.g. market vs. hierarchy; centralization vs. decentralization; public vs. private sectors). Whilst there can be little doubt that real and significant change is under way, changes in the bureaucratic form cannot be characterized as a straightforward trajectory of historical decline, still less a necessary one. The major difference from the bureaucratic organizations imagined by Aston in their measures is the changing nature of contract relations. Contemporary contracts are less likely to relate a multiplicity of people to a single organization and more likely to relate a multiplicity of organization in a complex value-chain. Activities that can be performed anywhere, such as call centre work, or processing of basic accounting data, interpretation of

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radiological data or the preparation of a manuscript for publication, can be digitized and located in a much cheaper labour market. Wherever material or immaterial matter to be worked on can be easily moved around the world, outsourcing of labour can cheapen its production. Such work can be organized globally so that it flows 24/7. Outsourcing also occurs in organizations such as hospitals, sometimes overlapping with medical tourism where wealthy people fly to countries where health care costs are much lower for surgical procedures, or in the military (where, for instance, much of the work of the war in Iraq has been outsourced to companies such as Haliburton). The costs of activities are lessened by arranging for some elements of them to be done more cheaply by specialists in these activities, either elsewhere where costs are much cheaper or in a less-regulated segment of the market than that controlled by specific professions or states.

POST-BUREAUCRACY Power in bureaucracy was largely determined through career opportunities. An inability to fit in, to comport in the appropriate way or to simply blend into the habitus was a sufficient reason, on many occasions, for a person’s career opportunities to be questioned and perhaps restricted (McKinlay, 2002). Even when, in many ways, the person might appear singularly inappropriate as an organization member, if there was good fit in terms of habitus, their future was usually relatively unquestioned (see Kim Philby’s, 1968 memorable account of Guy Burgess’ everyday life). The question of power remains at the core of post-bureaucracy but it is no longer habitus and career that structure it. What is distinctive about the contemporary post-bureaucracy is that the major mechanism of the career has undergone a substantial change. In the bureaucracy, the career was an enclosed phenomenon, classically contained within one organization. Post-bureaucracy differs significantly on this dimension. Careers become increasingly discontinuous and project-based in post-bureaucratic organizations. Increasingly they will be liquid careers, flowing like mercury, before reconsolidating in a new plane of activity. The project – whether innovation, R&D, engineering, marketing or whatever – becomes the major vehicle for organization networks and alliances and developmental tasks within specific organizations, although, increasingly, these will involve team members from other organizations. As discussed elsewhere, this shift signifies a need for new competencies of emotional intelligence (Clegg & Baumeler, 2010) that

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are able to handle the issues of ‘swift trust’ (Meyerson, Weick, & Kramer, 1996). The person in post-bureaucracy is not the epitome of the trusting and the trusted subjects as suggested sometimes. Lack of trust is the very reason why post-bureaucracies’ organizational arrangements are somewhat authoritarian. As a hybrid, post-bureaucracies build bridges between domination and self-determination (Romme, 1999), in ‘the paradoxes and tensions that arise from enacting oppositional forms’ (Ashcraft, 2001, p. 131). The pressure to perform is intense, and business leaders implement underlying authoritarian mechanisms largely constituted by tight time-reporting schedules for milestones and progress in specific projects. Taking together the characteristics of networks, alliances, collaborations, virtual relations, multiple stakeholders, liquid careers, financialization, increasing work in projects and an intensifying rhetoric of entrepreneurialism and the importance of swift trust, it is not surprising that the figure of the project manager should have emerged as the point at which many of the contradictions of post-bureaucracy are concentrated. In such hybrid and often unclear situations conflict and confrontation are inevitable, so managing emotions becomes a crucial skill. These project-based models gained impetus from the 1990s as new century US business models were reinvented in terms of ‘financialization’ of value and ‘flexibility’. The former meant the ascendancy of models of shareholder value and ‘incentivisation’ of executives through stock options and other financial packaging; the latter meant the network model that emerged from California’s Silicon Valley from the 1980s onwards, seen by many commentators as indicative of future strategy. If one compares it with the Corporate American model, whose heyday flourished in the 1950s and the 1960s, there is a quite sharp contrast (see Table 2). The core of the Silicon Valley model is its project-basis that depends for its success on a ready pool of known, mobile and highly technologically qualified labour that can learn and move fast. The project form is also encouraged by the roles that venture capital plays: risks could be spread and realized with relatively low transaction costs. The strategy is one of backing ideas that will disrupt, reconfigure or create markets, forming projects to develop them, and rapidly realizing gains or moving on quickly. These project-based knowledge networks seem to be quite specific to certain sectors of business activity, such as highly knowledge specific and highly trained technological expertise in areas such as information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology. Moreover, they rely on a specific kind of infrastructure of defence contracting, large pharmaceuticals or a

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Table 2. Contemporary US project versus Corporate Models. Silicon Valley Model Highly flexible small-firm start-ups able to rapidly reconfigure the nature and organization of core activities and skills Limited diversification Rapid commercialization and speed to market new products and services, exploiting niches and discontinuous innovations, with strategic competition against existing capabilities – including those of the innovating organization Shallow hierarchies Extensive network linkages externally

Knowledge workers and creative industry employees controlled by culture rather more than structure, with the culture being focused on ‘can-do’ and ‘change’, not unionized Highly responsive to rapid changes in markets and technologies, with highly skilled knowledge workers and knowledge networks focused on particular projects that can be rapidly developed and terminated Value delivered through start-up focus so that those who are in the ground floor can get rich quick with initial public offerings (IPOS) that deliver equity ownership, with informed venture capital supporting start-ups Workers who move fluidly from project to project rather than building organizational careers, who are able to operate in highly dynamic and uncertain environments Clustering of related industries and firms in ecological proximity to one another, and to major technology-based universities, creating a ‘hot-house’ talent pool

Corporate American Model Large size

Diversified divisions The mass production of standardized goods, mass marketed and distributed to largely homogenous mass markets

An extensive hierarchy of managerial controls Systematic centralized managerial coordination and control of the disaggregated elements of development, production and marketing A largely proletarianized and unskilled workforce, unionized

High development of mechanization limiting flexibility and favouring long production cycles

Value delivered through a strong focus on cost reductions through capital intensity, (downwardly) flexible labour markets, and outsourcing to suppliers who could be beaten down on price Lifetime employment in the model of the ‘organization man’

Extensive supply chains and subcontracting, with contracting largely based on ‘at-length’ hard money contracts

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sophisticated health-based industry ready to buy-in innovation, and researchbased universities with either private, state or a mix of funding, to supply the knowledge-based personnel. Hence, behind the new forms reside the old bureaucracies. The post-bureaucratic hybrid creates a ‘loosened community’ (Courpasson & Dany, 2003), in which relationships and groupings are temporarily maintained, individuals’ destinies are more and more separated, and the institutionalised dialogues and interactions are operated through sometimes uncertain and barely legible networks of control, of influence and of friendship. Consequentially, there is far less opportunity for the formation of stable views of the person in situ. These tendencies can only be exacerbated by the collapse of the hyperflexible financial markets of the 2000s in 2008–2009 and the reality of cuts, even as they are assuaged by the rhetoric of entrepreneurialism. In the hybrid political structures of post-bureaucracy, elites remain sharply differentiated from sub-elite members and the former distinguished from the necessary minimal similarity of the latter population of knowledge workers, experts and professionals, with regard to values, demographic characteristics and types of aspirations. Post-bureaucratic organizations cultivate a culture of ambition and a method of circulation. As members cycle through projects they strive for visibility for their achievements in managing the projects as innovative, creative and exciting but also as timely, on budget and dependable. Like Weber’s Protestants, they strive to show that the state of leadership grace moves through them sufficiently to join the ranks of the elect, or at least those elites who are currently elect. Corporate leaders have a direct interest in shaping, grooming and educating selected aspirants, constituting what might be called subjects with an appropriate comportment, etiquette and equipage, able to qualify as disciplined elites who will have a career outside of the projects. Mostly, these characteristics pertain to an ability to accept and work creatively with an existing order and existing rules; thus, they go far beyond merely technical and professional expertise. They are the new way of re-invigorating habitus when organizational borders have become porous, careers liquid and professional identities contingent. The world of projects directly influences elite power structures in contemporary post-bureaucratic organizations for three major reasons. First, they differentiate between those likely to be able to aspire further and those who will not. The latter will end up either specializing in project management or going back to their initial working environment. Project management therefore helps differentiate between pre-selected individuals.

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Second, different kinds of top management decisions (such as resource allocation, project termination, team leaders’ demotion/promotion) can shape the chances of those in the project roles. Third, project management both creates more complex elite strata to traverse and enables a route of social mobility within the organization. Project management is premised on a high degree of transparency of project performance. Creating a powerful network of shared values regarding career and ambition also facilitates the activation and embodiment of common reference points that structure the attention and commitment of project members. Such reference points include milestones, key performance indicators, profit-margins, annual performance, respect for deadlines, respect for budgets, deference to which is progressively internalized as incontrovertible business and moral values, essential for the healthy survival of the entire organization (Courpasson & Dany, 2003). These reference points strengthen the regime through weaving the social fabric of allegiance for would-be leaders. Bureaucracy is both being superseded by post-bureaucracy and not being superseded by post-bureaucracy. While this may sound nonsensical it all depends on whether one focuses on re-composition or decomposition. It is clear that in the new electronic panopticons of the call centre, often globally located on the margins of modernity, bureaucracy is alive and well in a particularly centralized, standardized and routinized form. Here the bureaucratization of the shop floor has proceeded into the heart of the white collar, pink blouse and colourful indigenously attired digital factory, which we may refer to as the decomposition of bureaucracy. If, on the other hand, one investigates the upper echelons of leaner and more entrepreneurially oriented organizations, then one might draw the conclusion that they were, indeed, re-composed bureaucracies that had managed to turn the iron cage for many into golden chains for the few. The theme of decomposition is redolent of extended supply chains, outsourcing, the virtual organization and call centres. The theme of re-composition takes us into the world of new, but as yet ill-defined organizational forms. The shift to outsourcing and organizational disaggregation may coexist with some very familiar politics of surveillance and control. Re-composed (or ‘refurbished’) bureaucracies feature a range of more innovative developments in which the project leader has superseded the central figure of the bureaucrat. The ‘politics of the project’ have become the arena in which the strategic interests of aspirant elites are played out. It is in the land between that there lies the road less travelled. Here, above and outside the routines embedded in the digital factory are the innovation, construction, design and research projects through which young Turks

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circulate. Doubtless, many ‘post-bureaucratic’ elements and processes are retained as controls for those excluded from the internal career options such that a life in projects involves ‘the refurbishment of bureaucratic procedures rather than their renunciation’ (Clegg & Courpasson, 2004, p. 542). Innovations such as ‘networks’ and ‘project management’ are, as Hugh Willmott (2010) suggests, extensions of bureaucratic modes of organization – but not for all. In the words of Matthew (22:14, King James Version of The Bible), ‘Many Are Called, But Few Are Chosen’. The zone in-between, the arenas through which individual recruits cycle and circulate, managing their careers as they manage their projects, becomes a panoptical space for the elites to watch and for the project managers to be aware that they are under surveillance, never knowing whether this is the project that will lift them out of the in-between zone and get them over the threshold into the promised land. Since the post-Second World War era the idea of the organization was assumed to be an equivalent theoretical and empirical object. (On these distinctions, see Bachelard, 1984 and Althusser, 1968.) Recently, the dialectics of re-composition and decomposition have sundered the presumed unity. The nature of reality is constantly in the process of becoming rather than merely being in a transcendent manner (Kornberger, Clegg, & Rhodes, 2005). In order to understand the processes of organizing fully today, we need to realize that organizing capabilities of focal organizations are often vested in the chains, networks, alliances and collaborations that they are party to. These are traversed by a multiplicity of projects and panoptical devices, organized around creativity and innovation on the one hand and strictly defined key performance indicators on the other. The organization is much less than the sum of the relations and spaces it traverses. The centrality of relations of employment – the proxy for organization size in the old accounts – has been superseded by the centrality of relations of production, distribution, service provision and supply. Organization – conceived on the old model of bureaucracy – is decomposing into global supply chains, alliances, networks and projects and re-composing into core entities focused on design and strategy, whose members are bound by beneficial golden chains.

BEING IN BUREAUCRACY AND BEYOND We all learn to make sense of the situations we are in. However, just like a fast-flowing river, these situations are often changing in imperceptible ways. Before too long we find that the ways we have been using to make sense

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leave us out of our depth! Managers can find that what they took for granted no longer helps them survive as well as it did in the past. Wellestablished direct techniques of the past, such as management by rules and instructions, by oversight and surveillance, by command and control, on the part of hierarchical managers, are changing. Today, what they seem to be changing to is use of more indirect techniques, such as managing in and through vision, mission, culture and values, leading to a lot less imperative instruction and command and a great deal of more dialogue and discussion. When everyone can be connected to anyone everywhere, when the value basis of employees is shifting radically and when the organization laces itself over the globe and employs many of the diverse peoples that the globe has to offer, the old certainties are harder to hold on to. Organizations are, in some respects, sedimented structures (Clegg, 1981): where there is sedimentation, we can expect to find fossils of an earlier era. Indeed, many organizations are like this with different generations occupying different slots in the hierarchy, often holding on to different paradigms for organization and management that are, in part, generationally imprinted as devices for sensemaking. A paradigm comprises a coherent set of assumptions, concepts, values and practices that constitute a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline, in which the views are widely shared as a result of training and induction into the methods of the discipline. However, all such paradigmatic formation is generationally imprinted: that which one generation finds normal may not be accepted by another; those post-war boomers trained in organizations of the Aston era, for instance, will seem needless bureaucracy to people brought up on social media as a major mode of communication. Different generations are imprinted with different paradigms for organizing and managing that constitute different forms of sensemaking. We can capture the implications of the generational and sedimentational hypothesis by considering a classic of the boomer generation, The Organization Man (Whyte, 1960). The organization man: If the term is vague, it is because I can think of no other way to describe the people I am talking about. They are not the workers, nor are they the whitecollar people in the usual, clerk sense of the word. These people only work for The Organization. The ones I am talking about belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions. Only a few are top managers or ever will be. In a system that makes such hazy terminology as ‘junior executive’ psychologically necessary, they are of the staff as much as the line, and most are destined to live poised in a middle area that still awaits a satisfactory euphemism. But they are the dominant members of our society nonetheless.

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They have not joined together into a recognizable elite – our country does not stand still long enough for that – but it is from their ranks that are coming most of the first and second echelons of our leadership, and it is their values which will set the American temper. The corporation man is the most conspicuous example, but he is only one, for the collectivization so visible in the corporation has affected almost every field of work. Blood brother to the business trainee off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics Ph.D. in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory. They are all, as they so often put it, in the same boat. Listen to them talk to each other over the front lawns of their suburbia and you cannot help but be struck by how well they grasp the common denominators which bind them. Whatever the differences in their organization ties, it is the common problems of collective work that dominate their attentions, and when the Du Pont man talks to the research chemist or the chemist to the army man, it is these problems that are uppermost. The word collective most of them can’t bring themselves to use – except to describe foreign countries or organizations they don’t work for – but they are keenly aware of how much more deeply beholden they are to organization than were their elders. They are wry about it, to be sure; they talk of the ‘treadmill’, the ‘rat race’, of the inability to control one’s direction. But they have no great sense of plight; between themselves and organization they believe they see an ultimate harmony and, more than most elders recognize, they are building an ideology that will vouchsafe this trust. .

Traditionally, the organizations that housed the ‘organization man’ were neither very responsive nor flexible because of their bureaucratic nature. They had tall hierarchical structures, relatively impermeable departmental silos and many rules. Such organizations offer little incentive for innovation and, typically, innovation was frowned on because precedents went against the rules. Such organizations could hardly be responsive – they were not designed to be. The heyday of the bureaucratic organization man was populated by the ‘boomer’ generation, who are now slowly moving out of the workforce, to be replaced with people drawn from Generations X and Y. The boomers were the last generation that might reasonably have expected to create a career as organization men (and a few women, although there was a pronounced gender bias towards men: for instance, although women, unlike their older sisters or mothers, were not obliged to cease employment upon marriage, many were more focused on home and family than career as the norm). Generation X, broadly defined, includes anyone born from 1961 to 1981. In the West, Generation X grew up with the Cold War as an ever-present backdrop. During their childhood they saw the dismantling of the post-war settlement and the advent of neo-liberal economics (such as Thatcherism)

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and the collapse of communism. They often grew up in single-parent households, without a single clear or guiding moral compass. They had to negotiate the hard years of global industrial restructuring when they were seeking their first jobs; they experienced economic depression in the 1980s and early 1990s, and saw the decline of traditional permanent job contracts offering clear career structures. Instead of careers they were invited to accept insecure short-term contracts, unemployment or junk jobs in McDonaldized organizations, or get educated. Many of them ended up overeducated and underemployed, with a deep sense of insecurity. Not expecting that organizations will show them much commitment, they would often offer little themselves. For Generation Y, born in the late 1980s and 1990s, sometimes to professional boomer couples that had left childrearing later than previous generations or, as a result of boomer males mating with much younger women, may be entering into reproduction the second or third time around, bureaucracy aversion is intensified. Generation Y are captured well in Keith Gessen’s (2008) ‘slacker’ novel, All the sad young literary men, in which one of the characters, Keith, now in his 20s, reflects that he has no idea what will become of him in the years ahead. His college career had been disappointing. He had kept waiting for someone to tell him what he should do, should be, what particular fate he was fated for. Unlike the organization man of the 1960s, no one did, and there were no obvious openings in which fate could be predetermined. Joining a bureaucracy was less of an option, both aspirationally and realistically, than had been the case for the organization men. There weren’t so many any more: contracting out, outsourcing and increasing privatization in much of the world had rendered less of them whilst also making such bureaucracies less attractive. Young people born as Generation Y are the first digital generation for whom the computer, internet, mobile, ipods, DVDs and the Xbox were a part of what they took for granted growing up. If they needed an answer to a question, they found it themselves rather than patiently waiting for a bureaucracy to provide it for them. While Generation X was shaped by de-industrialization in the West and the fall of communism globally, Generation Y developed into maturity during the War on Terror, grew up reading Harry Potter, and has enjoyed relatively prosperous economic times, in part because of the success – for the West – of globalization. The employment of Generation Y members offers real challenges for managers seeking to motivate and gain commitment from employees. The Y generation will be more cynical than its predecessors and less likely to accept rhetoric from management that is not backed up by actions. For Generations X and Y,

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according to Sennett (1998, p. 25), there is a predisposition towards high uncertainty and risk-taking as defining features of the challenges they want from work because they do not expect commitment. In part this is because they do not expect anything solid or permanent: they have seen casino capitalism at close quarters as brands they grew up with moved offshore or were taken over, or radically changed by new ownership, and so tend to distrust prospects of long-term or predictable futures. Using traditional bureaucratic management control and command devices to manage people who desire to explore will not be appropriate. Instead, the emphasis will have to be on creativity and innovation, pursued within the frame of a projectbased life, for a global transnational, if lucky. The more innovative of these organizations will seek out employees who are capable of problem solving rather than having to refer any problem, deviation or precedent to a higher authority. Such people need to be trained and engaged in styles of managing and being managed that reinforce empowerment, using far more positive than negative approaches to power. Managing will mean more developmental work oriented to renewing staff’s specific skills and general competencies rather than seeing that they follow the rules, issuing imperative commands and generally exercising authority. Managing will mean negotiating the use and understanding of new technologies, contexts and capabilities, and facilitating the understanding of those who will be operating with the new tools and environments. As Sandberg and Targama (2007, p. 4) note, citing Orlikowski’s (1993) influential work on Japanese, European and US firms, many technology implementation projects fail because of what the employees do – or do not – understand. Changing technological paradigms means that managers must be able to make sense of the new technology for all those who will use it. New technologies attach a premium to a flexible, timely approach to customer requirements. In order that such flexibility can exist in an organization, it has to be premised on ways of managing employees that allow them to be responsive to customer requirements in developing products and services. Especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, from the 1980s onwards, the extensive adoption of strategies of deregulation, privatization and contracting out, often on the back of significant changes in technology, led to profound changes in the nature of not only private but also public sector work. The young project-based employees who are depicted by Ballard (2001) in his dystopian novel of future organization life, Super Cannes, work in technological environments subject to rapid and radical change. Contemporary employees, liberated from bureaucratic rules, are expected to be

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multi-tasking, innovative, mobile and venturesome, with the ability to cooperate with people of various backgrounds and cultures. They are autonomous, informed, spontaneous, creative and able to adapt to different work tasks. Additionally, they have a talent for communication and are capable of relating to others. Moreover, ideal productive subjects are active in continuing education and enthusiastic. Because of rising job insecurity, they accumulate social capital and cultivate expanding contact networks, which help secure continuing employment in changing fields of work. They are capable of building and switching emotional investments in a mode of swift trust as they move from project to project. New competencies and skills are constantly required (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007, see also Sennett, 1998). More likely than not these managers will be working globally, gaining experience in the international division of corporate labour. A giant multinational like Fuji or General Motors sets its own morality. The company defines the rules that govern how you treat your spouse, where you educate your children, the sensible limits to stock-market investment. The bank decides how big a mortgage you can handle, the right amount of health insurance to buy. There are no more moral decisions than there are on a new superhighway. Unless you own a Ferrari, pressing the accelerator is not a moral decision. Ford and Fiat and Toyota have engineered a sensible response curve. We can rely on their judgment, and that leaves us free to get on with the rest of our lives. We’ve achieved real freedom, the freedom from morality. Unconvinced by his case, I said: ‘It sounds like a ticket to 1984, this time by the scenic route. I thought that organization man died out in the 1960s’. He did, our worried friend in the grey-flannel suit. He was an early office-dwelling hominid, corporate version of Dawn Man who assumed a sedentary posture in order to survive. He was locked in a low-tech bureaucratic cave, little more than a human punch card. Today’s professional men and women are self-motivated. The corporate pyramid is a virtual hierarchy that endlessly reassembles itself around them. They enjoy enormous mobility. While you’re mooning around here, Paul, they’re patenting another gene, or designing the next generation of drugs that will cure cancer and double your life span. (Ballard, 2001, pp. 95–96)

Enormous mobility provides many different metrics to measure (dis)satisfaction in the project one is currently in. Experience in discontinuous projects discontinuously prepares for a series of new beginnings while simultaneously creating anxieties about swift and painless endings if one project fails to morph into another, as one contract expires and another fails to materialize (Bauman, 2005). For those whose being is now less in organization and more in projects, the idea of being an organization man or woman no longer makes much sense, although the idea of becoming one, caught in golden chains of privilege, may well function as a desire. Organizations as shells of and for experience no longer persist in any comprehensibly stable

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way as given forms for any significant period of time for a world of work in projects; network relationships, premised on contracting and markets, erode stable bureaucracies in both public and private sectors.

CONCLUSION It is clear that organizations still exist as empirical objects. However, their status as theoretical objects has been transformed. The theoretical object of organizations, crystallized in the 1950s and 1960s, froze some elements of becoming. It captured in a series of snap shots a moment in the becoming of an empirical object. It was the age of the organization man, of the complete complex organization. Today it is less the organization and more the processes of organizing which comprise the salient theoretical objects, constituted as specific practices such as outsourcing and supply chains rather than a specific concrete thing. Does bureaucracy have a future? Yes, indubitably – but it is one that is very different to that which Weber imagined and which subsequently Beveridge (1944) and Aston (Pugh & Hickson, 1976) developed in their own ways. Universalism and meritocracy, as suggested by Beveridge (1944), have now joined bureaucracy almost as terms of abuse, abandoned in the name of targets, selectivity and efficient markets. More specifically, to imagine that a science of organizations, as suggested by Aston, could predict the degree of bureaucracy of an organization on the basis of simple contingency of size now seems to have been nothing but a delusion that took some fleeting elements of modernity’s management for granted as ontological universals. Bureaucracy, in its literal sense, characterized by work in a career, with a pension, and steady progression, seems now to be a diminishing and elite privilege, with elites having exponentially expanded benefits: in US corporate firms the returns to the top managerial echelons exceed those of the average by a factor of 400% (Chang, 2010), for instance. Doubtless, bureaucracy will continue to flourish in all large, complex and personnel-intensive organizations – but the pressures to outsource, downsize and contract out will not likely disappear, as increasing numbers of members manage their identity, as entrepreneurs of the self, severed from the core bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, as a mode of being in organization, has for many given way to a far more liberal and ontologically insecure state. Such ontological insecurity makes the future more open than the endless repetition of routines and rules that characterized bureaucracy, but it also makes it much more a matter of personal responsibility. Under bureaucratic modes of

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responsibility when the present fails to conform to past expectations of the future, responsibility can be attributed to system failure, requiring system reform, even in so far as any rogue individualism may have flourished as deviance within the ordered universe. The more entrepreneurial the enterprise the more individuals will be held personally responsible for the failures of the situations in which they find themselves. The ethos that Weber saw as so characteristic of modern rational–legal bureaucracy – an ethos of responsibility best served by the character of one schooled in a vocation – is much less evident than it once was in the age of post-bureaucracy. If we consider Weber’s list of qualities of bureaucracy once more, post-bureaucratic ideas have compromised the notions of office, impersonality, codified rules, precedents and files. Doubtless, authority still remains, albeit on a very different basis from that grounded in career; in addition, while there would still appear to be clear elements of specialization, legitimacy, hierarchy, credentialism, stratification and centralization, the ensemble that was bureaucracy has been broken in both public and private sector organizations. The knot that tied them together was career and it is this concept, more than any other, that post-bureaucracy has displaced and replaced with the ontological insecurity of the market as the pre-eminent institution. For young people facing this insecurity at the start of their working lives today, the future of organizations offers them many opportunities to be liquidly modern; whether such liquidity is a stable frame for identity construction is another matter. It will certainly make life more interesting than in the old style bureaucracy but not necessarily more rewarding or stimulating than the pursuit of a chosen career with a foreseeable future. Increasingly, perhaps, looking back to the recession that produced punk, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones (1977) seem to have nailed it: ‘Career opportunities, the ones that never knock’.

NOTE 1. Source: http://www.businessballs.com/tompetersinsearchofexcellence.htm, accesses 02/08/2010

REFERENCES Ackroyd, S. (2010). Post-bureaucratic manufacturing? The post-war organization of large British firms. In S. R. Clegg, M. Harris & H. Ho¨pfl (Eds.), Managing modernity: Beyond bureaucracy? (pp. 178–203). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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BUREAUCRACY: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME (AGAIN)? Haldor Byrkjeflot and Paul du Gay ABSTRACT In this chapter, we focus on the stabilizing functions of public bureaux and examine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make them less hierarchical and more ‘flexible’. In so doing, we seek to evidence the ways in which what are represented as anachronistic practices in the machinery of government may actually provide political life with particular required ‘constituting’ qualities. While such practices have been negatively coded by reformers as ‘conservative’, we hope to show that their very conservatism may serve positive political purposes, not the least of which is in the constitution of what we call ‘responsible’ (as opposed to simply ‘responsive’) government. Through a critical interrogation of certain key tropes of contemporary programmes of modernization and reform, we indicate how these programmes are blind to the critical role of bureaucracy in setting the standards that enable governmental institutions to act in a flexible and responsible way. Keywords: Bureaucracy; flexibility; hierarchy; Weber; anachonism

Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 85–109 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035006

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INTRODUCTION ‘What is new in the modern world is not acceptance of diversity in styles of life. It is hostility to hierarchies’ John Gray The Two Faces of Liberalism

It is not currently easy to make a case for the importance of hierarchy, whether one wishes to do so in the world of formal politics or in the world of formal organization. Wherever one looks, hierarchy is routinely represented as antithetical to the realization of any number of cherished values – pluralism, freedom, equality, enterprise, creativity and innovation, for instance – the list is long as many of the basic premises informing its compilation are misguided. For the last three decades that form of hierarchical organization which we call bureaucracy has been the subject of constant political and managerial criticism. While such criticism has not been levelled exclusively at public sector organizations, it is the latter that have been most frequently associated with the dysfunctions of bureaucracy, seen as the epitome of hierarchical organization, and thus to whom the imperatives for reform and modernisation have been most vociferously addressed. There is still much debate about whether rhetorical injunctions to de-bureaucratize have been matched by practical achievements. Both modernisers and defenders of bureaucracy alike may have been hostage to exaggerating claims about the end of the bureau (Thompson & Alvesson, 2005). What is less in doubt, however, is the size and near constancy of public sector organizational reform across many countries over the last few decades, and, at its centre, a desire to banish, breakthrough or otherwise transcend, bureaucracy. Under the auspices of modernisation and de-bureaucratization, the working methods and conditions of many thousands of public sector workers have been altered. However, despite the claims of politicians, management consultants and social theorists, for example, that the end of the bureau is (and, indeed, should be) nigh, there remain a number of reasons to be cautious. In the aftermath of the corporate scandals at Enron, Worldcom et al., even the fulsomely anti-bureaucratic The Economist (2003) noted that organizational life was bearing witness to a ‘partial return to values we thought were gone forever’ (2002, p. 118). In particular, it was noted that the cult of ‘the charismatic leader’ was ‘being cast aside’, and in its place was espied an increased value being placed on dull but (once again) worthy management skills of ‘attention to detail’ and attention to formal procedures. Linked to this, a renewed concern with hierarchical forms of management was noted. This, it was argued, followed from recognition of the personnel problems

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deriving from a lack of clear guidelines. ‘People’, they suggested, ‘like to know to whom they are reporting. This will start to be built into company structures. Gently, the middle manager will stage something of a comeback’ (2002, p. 118). Taken together, these developments pointed to a return of that which dared not utter its name: ‘Bureaucracy, after many years of decline, will be on the rise again’ (2002, p. 118). The Economist baulked at its own conclusions, however, stating that this (re)discovery of bureaucracy had ‘nothing at all to commend it’, despite the logic of its own analysis pointing in the opposite direction: that bureaucracy was a tool to solve a problem – one relating to the disasters that deliberate attempts to transcend bureaucracy had brought into being. Even now, during a remarkable economic and regime crisis (Crouch, 2008; Valukas, 2010), whose anti-bureaucratic roots are not too difficult to discern or trace, bureaucracy is still a word that appears to be unnameable to positive political coding (Olsen, 2008). It is represented as so thoroughly ‘out of time’ that to invoke its name is to be labelled at best nostalgic, and at worse, irrelevant. As Peters (2003) has indicated, contemporary public administrators find it increasingly difficult to give voice to the values of Weberian public bureaucracy without appearing to be anachronistic. And yet, the values of bureaucracy – hierarchical integrity or integrality, due process, thoroughness – are continually attested to, if nearly always (with certain honourable exceptions) indirectly or otherwise elliptically. In this chapter, we focus on public bureaux, instituted to pursue distinctive purposes on behalf of the state, and examine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make them less hierarchical and more flexible in the name of various epochal imperatives of ‘change’ or ‘modernization’. In so doing, we seek to evidence the ways in which what are represented as anachronistic practices in government – the hierarchical structuring of offices, from which governance is conducted, for example – may actually provide political life with particular required ‘constituting’ qualities. While such practices have been negatively coded by reformers as ‘conservative’, we hope to show that their very conservatism may serve positive political purposes, not the least of which is in the constitution of what we call ‘responsible’ (as opposed to simply ‘responsive’) government. In this respect, we argue that bureaucratic practices are permanent features of government which help constitute the political landscape; they can be ‘gotten around’ in one or another, but only at some considerable cost. Finally, through a critical interrogation of certain key tropes of contemporary programmes of modernization, specifically that of ‘flexibility’,

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we hope to indicate how bureaucratic practices in governmental administration can be seen to provide some useful illustrations of the ‘conservation standards’ appropriate to the political management of the state, including the management of ‘change’ within the state. We suggest that there is not only a suppleness and integrity to the practices of hierarchical bureaucracy, but also that bureaucracy itself in producing predictability in a state’s decisions, actually enhances, indeed, even constitutes, the freedom and flexibility of those operating within the state’s field of vision (Larmore, 1987, pp. 40–42; Law, 2001). As Larmore (1987, p. 41) has argued in relation to the latter point, ‘to the extent that a state’s decisions are less predictable, institutions in the rest of society are less able to plan their own activities. Thus, to a greater predictability in government corresponds a greater freedom of the other spheres of social life’. More generally, this focus on ‘conservation standards’, we suggest, offers a useful corrective to the widespread, and frequently de-contextualized representation of ‘change’ as progressive, and ‘constraint’ or ‘limit’ as reactionary. The chapter is organized as follows. We begin by exploring the ways in which and the tropes through which bureaucracy as an institution of government is represented as anachronistic within contemporary discourses and programmes of public sector modernization. We note, in particular, the metaphysical and theological aura permeating modernizing discourses, and suggest that it is the latter, rather than the bureaucratic practices they criticise, which might be more plausibly accused of anachronism. There is no attempt in modernising tracts to describe bureaucratic practices in their own terms, for to do so would require modernisers to be open themselves to the possibility that such practices might actually serve positive political purposes rather than simply being ‘outdated’ and ‘broken’. In the second section, we seek to make explicit some of the positive political purposes that hierarchical bureaucratic organization in government performs. Here, we show how bureaucratic practices are not waste products that can be removed or transcended without cost, but rather permanent features which constitute the political landscape, and whose dissolution or disappearance can come at a very high price. In the third section, we seek to articulate some of these costs through an examination of the practical application of one of the key norms of contemporary modernising discourse: ‘flexibility’. We argue that current attempts to make bureaucracies more flexible can undermine their political efficacy and effectiveness. We conclude with some observations on the importance of bureaucratic practices to the functioning of states and representative democratic government as well as to effective and accountable management in private sector organizations.

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THE CRITICISM AGAINST BUREAUCRACY FOR BEING ANACHRONISTIC In recent and ongoing discussions of public sector reform, accusations of anachronism proliferate. Such accusations are most readily identified with claims about the need for reform in the first place. Thus, for example, we find the opening pages of Osborne and Gaebler’s (1992) classic modernizing tract Re-Inventing Government replete with images of an outdated and thus ‘broken’ bureaucratic public administration, no longer able to fulfil its instituted purposes, because it is fundamentally out of step, temporally, with the environment in which it now has to operate. In this reading, bureaucracy is positioned akin to what Ulrich Beck (2005) terms ‘a zombie category’: something still living but effectively dead. This bureaucratic anachronism is contrasted with the practices of ‘entrepreneurial governance’, whose modernity is not in doubt, and which is deemed to offer the public sector the possibility of salvation, and hence a viable future. As has been argued elsewhere (du Gay, 2003), modernizing tomes such as Osborne and Gaebler’s operate with an ‘epochalist’ frame, deploying a periodising schema in which a logic of dichotomisation is established, in advance, either for or against. Thus, in such a schema, ‘bureaucratic public administration’ is associated only with a failed past, whereas ‘today’s environment demands institutions that are extremely flexible and adaptable’ and ‘that are responsive to their customers y that lead by persuasion and incentives rather than command; that give their employees a sense of meaning and control, ownership even’ (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992, p. 15). ‘Entrepreneurial governance’ is represented as in tune with needs of history, while the past is simply represented as unworthy of serious consideration, so bound up is it with what has failed and what cannot possibly be sustained in the future. Perhaps one of the most dramatic and explicit examples of such future-oriented thinking can be found in the opening pages of Hammer and Champy’s (1995) Re-Engineering The Corporation Re-engineering is about beginning with a clean sheet of paper. It is about rejecting the conventional wisdom and received assumptions of the pasty How people and companies did things yesterday doesn’t matter to the business re-engineer. (1995, p. 2)

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

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Such epochalist discourses establish a periodising logic – between modern and post-modern, for instance – which is also a dichotomization between particular styles of public management – bureaucratic and entrepreneurial, for example. Because the co-ordinates are set up so far in advance, there appears no escape for the frame of reference, and thus from the conclusions reached. In this sense, as Ronald Moe (1994, p. 113) has argued, epochalist forms of argumentation are often quite metaphysical, possessing what he describes as a ‘theological aura’. This ‘theological aura’ makes them precisely anachronistic because they operate outside of historical time. Their conception of history is, so to speak, normative in the sense of holding contexts (in this case ‘public administration’) accountable for the degree to which they are able historically to realize certain idealities. Commenting specifically on the National Performance Review in the United States, Moe argues that the latter was never framed in terms of a set of propositions subject to empirical or temporal proof or disproof, but rather registered as a group of statements exhorting acceptance and action. The ‘bureaucratic paradigm’ was the cause of the government being broken in the eyes of the entrepreneurial management promoters. It had not proven flexible enough to permit change to occur at the speed considered necessary in the new information-driven, globalized world. The report argued, deterministically, that the entrepreneurial management paradigm must prevail and the alternative was increasingly dysfunctional government. Those who questioned this paradigm were fundamentally out of step with the demands of the present and future (Moe, 1994, pp. 113–14). In indicating the ‘theological’ and ‘metaphysical’ aura permeating such epochalist schemas, Moe makes an important point: that epochalists, while ostensibly depending on historical explanation to construct their periodisations, are actually anachronistic, precisely because they seem to think they know what is needed in advance. According to modernizers, the entrepreneurial management paradigm will succeed; there is no room for historical contingency here, only destiny and, hence, teleology. As March (1995), for example, has argued, such a future orientation with no regard for the contingencies of the past may lead to the establishment of organizations that become victims of ‘rigidities of imagination’. Similarly, this anachronism also pervades the manner in which epochal analyses seek to describe that which they also wish to refute. Thus, we find that the ‘bureaucratic paradigm’ is effectively re-described in terms set for it by entrepreneurial principles and norms. No attempt is made to offer ‘grey, meticulous or patiently documentary’ (Foucault, 1986) descriptions of any actually existing bureaucracies or bureaucratic practices. Rather, a whole

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host of different practices and purposes are reduced to one overarching designation, ‘bureaucracy’, whose historical ‘failure’ and supersession is represented as largely due to its inability to operate according to the norms and principles advocated by modernizers. Perhaps it is only by depriving bureaucratic practices of their own raison d’eˆtre, and assessing them simply in terms of a cluster of alternative assumptions and norms, that they can then be represented as anachronistic. What if bureaucratic practices do not and were not designed to give voice to entrepreneurial principles, and operate according to their own distinctive ethics that entrepreneurial principles and norms simply cannot recognize in the terms they set out ‘in advance’? Who or what would then be best considered anachronistic? As Conal Condren (2006) has argued, ‘It is little better than giving up if we admit the anachronisms involved in some of our descriptive vocabulary, and then still proceed as if they did not matter.’ If we rely simply on contemporary norms and principles of public management to frame the terms in which we are to understand the past, we may gradually cease to know what so-called ‘old public management’ was, and instead, simply trade on stereotypes about it, ad infinitum.

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

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involve a number of radical departures from bureaucratic norms and techniques of conduct, with some serious consequences for the organization of memory for the provision of responsible, efficient and effective governance. The serial restructurings associated with modernizing efforts, he indicates, chip away at the knowledge and skills associated with established practices of organizational memory (archiving, record-keeping, filing etc.) and also leads to the loss of experienced staff who knew how to maintain such practices in the service of public administration as a distinctive art of government. In this sense, the loss of organizational memory may not only entail the diminution of the conservation standards associated with bureaucratic administration, but those associated with representative democratic government too. After all, as we will discuss at greater length in the third section, practices such as minute-taking are banal but crucial devices in the establishment of organizational memory, key elements in the practice of bureaucratic forms of governmental administration and, as a number of commentators have indicated, equally important to the securing of political accountability in representative democracies (Olsen, 2006, 2008). For without a clear and agreed record of a decision made, there is no way of holding the decision makers to account (Hennessy, 2004; Wilson, 2004). Similarly, if the civil service were to fulfil its constitutional role as instituted counsel to government, for instance by indicating how contemporary policy proposals relate to past policy failures or successes, it is not clear how it can do so if record keeping and archiving is not viewed as a valuable form of activity in contrast to a focus on delivery, for example (Quinlan, 2004). An increased reliance on a network mode of governance, as Pollitt (2008) suggests, may also undermine organizational memory, since such networks do not necessarily rely on a central (or any) unit for storing and distributing knowledge relating to past activities and events (such as rules, records or files). As he argues, it is not just whether information is stored or not that matters, but also to what extent there are practices of remembering instituted within organizations. The past must be continuously articulated, checked and be reflected upon in order to become memory. Without such an institutionalized practice, also called bureaucracy, ‘we will have no warnings about potential dangers y and no opportunity to gain a richer awareness of the repertoire of possible remedies’ (Misztal, 2003, p. 14). Here Pollitt’s arguments, as well as those presented by the recent Better Government Initiative in the United Kingdom (2010), intersect with a longer history of work within organization studies, where various organizational devices or instruments – formal rules, for example – have long been seen to

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provide codes of meaning that facilitate interpretation of an ambiguous past. As the work of James March has clearly indicated, for instance, one may speak of internalized organizational rules as lessons which are encoded by actors drawing inferences from their experiences (March, Schultz, & Zhou, 2000). Rules, procedures, technologies, beliefs, and cultures are conserved through systems of socialization and control. They are retrieved through mechanisms of attention within a memory structure. Such organizational instruments not only record history but shape its future path, and the details of that path depend significantly on the processes by which the memory is maintained and consulted. (Levitt & March, 1988, p. 326)

As arguments such as these suggest, contemporary discourses of public sector modernization, and the devices they deploy to give practical effect to their dreams and schemes, both express and create an enmity or contempt for the past which can have a serious impact upon the ability of organizations to establish and maintain practices of remembering. After all, the ways in which humans and organizations give meaning to experience, including the capacities to learn from experience, are intimately related to the devices or techniques of ‘meaning production’. The latter – grids of visualization, vocabularies, norms and systems of judgment – produce experience, and are not simply produced by experience. Changing the vocabularies by which people understand the activities they are engaged in changes the identity of those activities; altering the devices and practices of meaning production changes the ways in which past actions and present and future conducts are held to relate one to another. As Pollitt’s (2008) work suggests, in their headlong rush to the future, organizationally impatient enthusiasts for public sector modernization have reduced both the potential and actual influence of organizational memories. They have done so both through the norms they advocate for a ‘re-invented’ public sector, and crucially through the devices they institute as means of reforming what they view as the ‘anachronistic’ practices of bureaucratic forms of public administration. However, as we have suggested, and as Pollitt’s arguments imply, it is perhaps modernising reforms which are really anachronistic, rather than those practices they seek to ‘modernise’. Having briefly indicated some of the ways in which bureaucratic techniques and devices serve important ‘conservation’ functions in government, not least through their provision of ‘institutional memory’, we proceed now to widen our argument and by indicating how and why the bureau performs a central and multifaceted role in democratic governance more widely,

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

BUREAUCRACY AS HIERARCHY, RULES AND EXPERTISE As we suggested earlier, bureaucracy has been represented as an anachronism not least because the values it embodies and expresses – hierarchy, authority, formality, impersonalism – are seen as fundamentally out of kilter with the demands of the present and future – which it is argued are to be better managed through the promotion of alternative set of criteria, such as informality, flexibility and personal empowerment. In the following, we want to make an argument as to why bureaucratic principles of organizing may still provide important underpinnings for the modern democratic order. In doing this, we follow a line of reasoning recently presented by Olsen (2008) who argues that the idea of bureaucracy, both as outlined by Max Weber and in the way it has been institutionalized in democratic states, combines three principles of governance: hierarchy, rules and expertise. Since governments and parliaments have legislative supremacy and authority, there has to be a hierarchical system in place – a bureaucracy – in order to ensure that the will of parliament is implemented and officers of state and government are held accountable for their decisions and actions. Democratic–bureaucratic authority is embedded in constitutions and has to be rule-bound, not least because it regulates the relationships between citizens and representatives, as well between politicians and administrators, law and administration and within the bureaucracy itself. Furthermore, bureaucracy is expert authority since civil servants are selected on the basis of their professional, impartial and non-partisan knowledge. It follows from this that bureaucracy is not just an instrument, but also an institution ‘with a raison d’eˆtre of its own’, the bureaucracy is ‘a changing mix of fairly enduring and legitimate organizational forms’ that has developed differently in different states and political contexts (Olsen, 2008). Recently, there has been a call for a return to bureaucracy, both as a response to some of the accountability problems associated with the fragmenting forces of NPM, as well as the crises and scandals, such as those

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associated with the ongoing credit crisis, which have also triggered demands for legal rules and an ethos of responsibility. The World Bank, among others, has given increased attention to the relationship between good government, economic development, reduced corruption and poverty. Also, market reforms in the former communist countries have had consequences that in turn have led to calls for the establishment of well-functioning bureaucratic governance. Many of these countries jumped straight into adopting market principles and management systems without previously establishing a solid basis for democratic development – ‘pre-eminently a bureaucratic administration with autonomy from the political and economic spheres’ (Raandma-Liiv, 2009). A similar argument was made long ago by Carl Friedrich (1950, p. 57), no friend of Weberian bureaucracy, who warned that easy sloganeering about the need to de-bureaucratize in the name of liberty and democracy evidenced a rather simplistic understanding of both bureaucracy and democracy. As he observed: ‘A realistic study of government has to start with an understanding of bureaucracy y because no government can function without it.’ Similarly, as Holmes and Sunstein (1999, p. 14) point out, these bureaucratic practices may be the ‘costs’ that society has to bear in order to enjoy the liberties it values so highly. Not least because those rights and liberties are the product of ‘vigorous state action’ (1999, p. 14). As Holmes (1994, p. 605) has argued, ‘statelessness means rightlessness. Stateless people, in practice have no rights’: inhabitants of weak or poor states tend to have few or laxly enforced rights. Without centralized and bureaucratic state capacities, there is no possibility of forging ‘a single and impartial legal system – the rule of law – on the population of a large nation. Without a well organized political and legal system, exclusive loyalties and passions’ are difficult to control. Seen in this light, the unresponsiveness and impersonality of bureaucratic conduct against which critics of the bureau rail becomes instead ‘a condition of freedom’ (Larmore, 1987, p. 42). The bureau is integral to the whole process of governance, it is an instrument not just for rule but also for response, which implies that the influence of the bureau may be bottom-up via citizens and expertise as well as top-down via elections and associated institutions for rule and hierarchy that provide informed direction and confer practical meaning on policy (Goodsell, 2005). In order to serve these functions the bureaucracy must have certain autonomy from outside interests and from politics. Some of the preconditions for such an autonomous position of the bureaucracy were outlined by Max Weber particularly in his political writings.

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Weber’s view of bureaucracy has often been misinterpreted and translated into the so-called Weberian ideal type, putting emphasis on the machine-like and one-dimensional character of the bureaucratic model. By criticising this idea, and following Olsen’s emphasis on the institutional and composite aspects of bureaucracy, we build upon the work of Weberian scholars, such as Hennis (1988, 2000) and Goldman (1988, 1992), who approach Weber as a historical anthropologist of Lebensfu¨hrung, making it clear that his work on bureaucracy is neither unequivocally celebratory nor overtly critical. Indeed, it is apparent that Weber was not mainly interested in offering a formal organizational theory of ‘bureaucracy’ at all (Byrkjeflot, 2000; Shenhav, 2003), but was rather, as Hennis (1988, 2000) observes, was mainly interested in specifying the ethical – cultural attributes of bureaucratic conduct, most particularly as these relate to politics. When approaching Weber’s work in this way, it appears that we may begin to see bureaucracy as furnishing political life with some important constituting qualities, in the manner testified by Olsen, Friedrich, Holmes and Goodsell. In particular, Weber (1978, p. 983 ff) stresses the ways in which the ethos of bureaucratic office-holding constitutes an important political resource because it serves to divorce the administration of public life from private moral absolutisms. Indeed, without the ‘art of separation’ (Walzer, 1984) that the state bureau effected and continues to effect, many of the qualitative features of government that are regularly taken for granted – for instance, formal equality, reliability and procedural fairness in the treatment of cases – would not exist. As Weber makes clear, the crucial point of honour for bureaucrats is not to allow extra official commitments to determine the manner in which they perform the duties associated with their office. ‘On the contrary’, the bureaucrat ‘takes pride in preserving his impartiality, overcoming his own inclinations and opinions, so as to execute in a conscientious and meaningful way what is required of him by the general definition of his duties or by some particular instruction, even – and particularly – when they do not coincide with his own political views’ (Weber, 1994a, p. 160). ‘The official has to sacrifice his own convictions to his duty of obedience’ (1994a, p. 204). This does not mean that officials only do the boring, routine work of public or state administration. Independent decision-making and imaginative organizational capabilities are usually also demanded of the bureaucrat, and very often expected even in large matters (Weber, 1994a, p. 160). This was not only the case for public bureaucrats, Weber argued, since many of the same principles would be used in private organizations. It is thus a mistake, as has been frequently made in organization theory, to draw

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a sharp distinction between the mechanistic form of organizing allegedly associated with bureaucracy and the organic form associated with other kinds of organizing, lately associated with the distinction between bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy. As Styhre (2007, p. 12) has argued, ‘Bureaucracies are by no means mechanical systems, but rather organisms structured in accordance with some mechanical principles, yet capable of responding to and dealing with external changes.’ The key to understanding the ethos of bureaucratic office, Weber argued, resides in ‘the kind of responsibility’ associated with it, which he refers to as the ‘ethos of office’ (1994b, p. 330) which means that the civil servants ‘sense of duty stands above his personal preference’. Without this ‘supremely ethical discipline and self-denial’, Weber (1994b, p. 331) continued, the whole apparatus of the state would disintegrate, and thus all the political benefits deriving from it would too. Also, as he made clear on a number of occasions, the ‘formalism’ of bureaucratic conduct – its instituted blindness to inherited differences of standing and prestige – produces the very substantive effects – democracy and equality, for example – that the critics of his own time, and indeed, ours, claimed bureaucratic conduct would destroy (Weber, 1978, 1994b). This idea that the ‘formal’ rationality of bureaucratic conduct itself gives rise to substantive ethical goals and effects and is rooted in its own Lebensordnung or ethical life-order, that of the bureau, has been largely ignored by critics keen to ‘rehumanize’ official life through ‘post-bureaucratic’ means. In this way, as Holmes and Sunstein (1999) have indicated, they have been able to avoid asking some important questions, concerning the political and governmental costs of attempts to practically achieve or ‘deliver’ the dreams and schemes they advocate. As John Rohr (1998) has persistently inquired: why do reformers never seem to consider the constitutional and political impacts of their organizational reforms? After all, government has its own specific regime values, and failing to consider these when seeking wholesale changes in the bureaucratic apparatuses of state seems to pose a ‘forest and trees’ question of the first order. In the following section, we explore some of the political and governmental consequences of attempts to reform state bureaucracies to make them accord with particular principles at the heart of contemporary modernization discourse. The principle focus is contemporary norms of ‘flexibility’. As we hope to show, there are reasons to be sceptical about the usefulness of making institutions of state accord with these principles, when seen from the standpoint of their contributions to the securing of responsible and predictable, and not merely ‘responsive’ government.

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THE DEMAND FOR FLEXIBILITY: SOME PROBLEMS As we indicated in the introduction, a certain assumption has come to frame discussions of organizational change in recent times, one which stresses the overriding importance of the qualities of flexibility and adaptability to organizational survival. Consequently, anything that reduces flexibility can be construed as a threat to survival. Constraints on change are, by this account, antithetical to flexibility, and thus are to be avoided, or where evidenced, to be done away with. This assumption has become something of a truism in discussions of organizational change in a variety of different organizational domains, and can be registered as frequently in debates about programmes of public administrative reform as it can in those focused on the appropriate conduct of commercial enterprises. However, as Herbert Kaufman (2007, p. xi) points out, such a truism is also something of a simplification. As he puts it, ‘For one thing, organizational flexibility is not unequivocally beneficial; it, too, entails risks to survival. For another, survival means the maintenance of many established behavioural and structural patterns; organized entities are essentially lasting patterns of these kinds. If many prevailing patterns in a given organization are disrupted, the organization loses its form and character, its identity, its very existence as an ongoing entity.’ In so doing, the purposes it has been instituted to pursue are also placed under erasure. We have focused on organizations instituted to pursue distinctive public purposes, on behalf of the state, and will now further examine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make them more ‘flexible’ and ‘adaptable’ in the name of various overriding imperatives of ‘change’ or ‘modernization’. In particular, in the following section, we will discuss some problems associated with the development of what was termed an informal ‘sofa-style’ of government in the United Kingdom as revealed in testimony to two committees of inquiry focusing in their rather different ways on the process that led to the decision to go to war with Iraq; we will also focus on arguments deployed by critics of bureaucracy in relation to the presumed need to relax financial control in government in order to achieve more flexibility.

Informalism and Flexibility: The UK Government’s Decision to Go to War with Iraq In the light of continued disquiet concerning the justifications provided by the British government in support of its decision to go to war with Iraq in

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2003, and in particular, its use of materials provided by the intelligence services, a committee of inquiry was set up in February 2004 to explore the intelligence that underpinned the government’s decision-making in this regard. The Committee, chaired by Lord Butler of Brockwell, a former head of the British Civil Service, like the related inquiry into the death of the government weapon’s expert, Dr. David Kelly, conducted by Lord Hutton, yielded an exceptionally detailed picture of how the centre of the Labour government had been operating. A good deal of this, for all the cries and whispers of media commentators, came as little surprise, and was not considered particularly troubling to those who’d had some practical familiarity with what we might term ‘the fog of government’. However, there were, as Sir Michael Quinlan (2004, p. 125) has pointed out, ‘significant exceptions to that relaxed recognition’. The Butler Committee Report, Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, voiced a number of serious critical comments upon how the relationship had come to function between the secret intelligence services and a small number of important policy-oriented persons in and around the Prime Minister’s Office in No. 10 Downing Street. Similarly, and, perhaps, more importantly, for our purposes, the report ended with what was, in effect, a scathing denunciation of the way in which the then prime minister had organized and conducted certain elements of the leadership of the government, including the collective cabinet dimension of that leadership. These two elements highlighted in the Butler report – the relationship between the intelligence arm of government and its political leadership, and the more general conduct of the machinery of political administration by the government – revealed a tendency, also present in testimonies and in the recent report from the Better Government Initiative (2010), for traditional practices of governmental administration – practices we wish to locate within a broader notion of ‘bureaucratic rationality’ – to be superseded or transcended by a more informal, flexible, style of conduct. As the Butler report indicated, this informal, flexible ‘sofa-style’ enabled significant decisions to be made by small groups of governmental actors – ministers, special advisers and some officials (frequently imagined as an undifferentiated central executive resource) in un-minuted meetings. Embedded safeguards in the constitution, such as collective cabinet responsibility, proper audit trails and minuted meetings, and respect for the relative independence, impartiality and expertise of official advice had been set aside or seriously degraded. These practices, we argue, characterised, as they are by a marked impatience with due process, rest upon an assumption that traditional

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patterns of governmental administration are anachronistic and unsuited to the demands of contemporary social, political and economic existence. However, as we also hope to show, attempts to bypass or otherwise transcend them in pursuit of a more flexible, swift and ‘results’ oriented style of management – in pursuance of what Jane Caplan (1988) in another context called the fantasy of ‘government without administration’ – risk undermining the very conditions for governmental stabilization and reproduction, in terms of policy-making procedures and institutional effectiveness. In this way, the ‘conservation standards’ appropriate to the political administration of the state are jeopardised. One of the most commented upon moments in the Hutton inquiry occurred when in giving evidence, Jonathan Powell, the then prime minister’s ‘Chief of Staff’, disclosed that of an average 17 meetings a day held in Downing Street, only three were minuted (Hutton Inquiry Transcripts for 18 August 2003). For Wilson (2004, pp. 85–86), such an approach was potentially quite dangerous. For while ‘formal meetings and minute-taking, for instance, may seem ‘bureaucratic’’ and not ‘modern’ technologies, they played a crucial practical role in ensuring good government and provided a necessary underpinning for the realization of constitutionally sanctioned accountability requirements – of ministerial responsibility to Parliament, for example – by ensuring that a proper record of governmental decision-making existed and that agreed actions were clearly delineated. In other words, good minutes make sure that everyone knows what had been decided. As Wilson (2004, p. 85) continued, ‘the official machine responds well to a decision which is properly recorded y I believe that there is a connection between proper processes and good government’. Quinlan (2004, p. 127) has similarly argued that the Blairite belief that existing governmental administration was anachronistic appeared to rest upon an insufficient understanding: that existing patterns of government had not been developed without practical reason y Where, as in Britain, there is no written constitution and governmental practice rests largely upon convention, rather than entrenched rule or statute, changes may be more easily made than in a more formalized setting, but that does not render thorough, timely y evaluation any less important y

As we have seen, the Butler committee’s characterisation of the Blair style of governmental decision-making as ‘sofa government’, where small groups of ministers and their advisers made momentous decisions frequently without the benefit of minute-takers, was both constitutionally and administratively disabling. It nonetheless sits well with the demands for a more flexible, ‘can do’

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approach to public administration that also characterised previous Conservative regimes. The niceties of consultation, discussion, recording – all elements of the traditional, much derided, bureaucratic style of public administration – are, in this view, inhibiting to the ‘efficient’ dispatch of affairs (O’Toole, 2006, p. 200). For instance, the more informal and personalized ways of conducting official business established by Blair and his coterie had serious repercussions, for the possibility of the Cabinet exercising the constitutionally important role of ‘collective responsibility’ on what Butler described as the ‘vital matter of war and peace’. Linked to this informality and flexibility of approach was the government’s obsession with ‘delivery’. The New Labour administrations of Blair and Brown were infused with a strong impulse to achieve practical results. This salutary concern, though, has continually been contrasted with the practices of traditional bureaucratic administration, which are represented as inherently antithetical to the securing of ‘delivery’. However, this focus on delivery can quite easily: slide into a sense that outcome is the only true reality and that process is flummery. But the two are not antithetical, still less inimical to one another. Process is care and thoroughness, it is consultation, involvement y legitimacy and acceptance; it is also record, auditability, and clear accountability. It is often, accordingly a significant component of outcome itself; and the more awkward and demanding the issue – especially amid the gravity of peace and war – the more it may come to matter. (Quinlan, 2004, p. 128)

As we have suggested, the idea that public administration as an institution of government must be flexible is one of the most characteristic and at the same time disabling aspect of ‘epochal’ attitudes to public management. Here, as we have seen, traditional bureaucratic forms of public administration are represented as out step with the demands of the present and future, and their continued presence within the machinery of government is regarded as testimony to the rigidity and inefficiency of that machinery and its need for its complete overhaul. It is not necessary to make a fetish of role-demarcation in government, to know that different actors in the governmental machine have different purposes, related to their ‘official’ position and ‘core tasks’, and a somewhat contrasting set of ethics framing their conduct, and for very sound practical reasons. As Weber (1994a, pp. 177–178) argued long ago, for instance, given the very different requirements of the respective ‘offices’ occupied by the professional politician and the public bureaucrat, ‘it would be quite astonishing if abilities which are inwardly so disparate’ were to coincide within the same persona. Ignoring ‘office’-based professional boundaries, in

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the name of enhancing flexibility, though, carries with it a temptation – or perhaps may be a reflection of a lack of consistent and dependable system. That was certainly the impression left by the Hutton and Butler inquiries. As Quinlan (2004, pp. 127–28) puts it, the government appeared to exhibit: Little interest in or tolerance for distinctions of function and responsibility between different categories of actors within the government machine y there was a sense of all participants – ministers, civil servants, special policy advisers, public relations handlers – being treated as part of an undifferentiated resource for the support of the central executive.

For modernizers, such sentiments cut no ice. They appear, rather, as little more than expressions of an obstructive old fogeyism that they see as the hallmark of the worst aspects of the forces of conservatism within the public service. Modernizers have sought to reduce public bureaucracies to something akin to a ‘delivery mechanism’, framed by a ‘just do it’ mentality, and to represent impartial state service as a dangerous fiction. In so doing, they appear to have little appreciation of the positive and enduring reasons for not encouraging too much flexibility in arrangements in the public administration as an institution of government, nor those for sustaining the UK’s 150-yearold tradition of unified, permanent, politically neutral crown service. Public service neutrality, or party political impartiality, means not being committed, by convictions guiding one’s official actions, to the creed and platform of a current political party, while being able, without crisis of conscience, to further the policies of any current party (Parker, 1993, p. 138). Civil servants are therefore likely to greet the enthusiasms and panaceas of all political parties with caution. That is an important part of their job – one assigned to them by the constitution – and in fulfilling that role they can be seen as servants of the state. This is the kernel of the case for keeping the public service open to all those with the requisite talent and for keeping the appointments and promotions of the main body of its membership independent of party control. This does not preclude ministers from having political aides, but it may have costs in the form of a lesser enthusiastic and committed official embrace of party programmes of social change than party enthusiasts might wish. While it is easy to see how such a critical role can be viewed by politicians as a licence to obstruct, it was, until comparatively recently, generally considered to be indispensable to the achievement of ‘responsible’ as opposed to merely ‘responsive’ government because it was seen to balance and complement political will, making it more effective in the longer run. There are, in fact, any numbers of areas in which attempts to remove what are seen as anachronistic bureaucratic constraints have been pursued

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in the name of a liberating flexibility, or a flexibility that will liberate. Executive freedom to act, for instance, has come to be seen as the product of an absence rather than the presence of bureaucratic mechanisms and constraints. Tom Peters’ rallying cry ‘I beg each and everyone one of you to develop a passionate and public hatred of bureaucracy’ was just one of the more infamous of the calls to managers to smash the stultifying chains of bureaucratic rules and procedures in the name of organizational and personal liberation. The ethos that allowed and encouraged the pursuit of private policies by stealth, or the bypassing of bureaucratic process, in Enron and Worldcom, on the one hand, and Lehmann Brothers and HBOS, on the other, can be traced to the logics of liberation articulated so passionately by Peters and his ilk without too much difficulty. Perhaps it is time, once again, to return to some of the less-dramatic classics of the management genre, for a more nuanced understanding of the positivities of bureaucracy (du Gay & Vikkelsø, forthcoming). In his elegant, but now largely forgotten text, Explorations in Management, the businessman and organizational analyst Wilfred Brown (1960) argued that bureaucratic rules and procedures should be seen as mechanisms through which managerial freedom to act was constituted, rather than the means by which such freedom was undermined or eliminated. In this sense, the so-called rigidities of bureaucracy should not be regarded as ‘the other’ of flexibility – its diametric opposite – but rather as an organizational means through which a certain flexibility of outcome is arrived at. By assuming that bureaucracy is a waste product that inhibits or undermines freedoms and flexibilities, we fail to see that bureaucracy is a mediator which constitutes those flexibilities in certain forms and creates the spaces within which freedom can be exercised (Feldman & Pentland, 2003) – Not natural freedom, of the sort espoused and advocated by managerialist metaphysicians such as Tom Peters, but artificial freedom, the only sort that can be formally organized into existence, and, according to Hobbes (1991), the only one worth having (see also, Latour, 2007). As Kohn (1971, p. 473) has argued, the power of nonbureaucratic organizations over their employees is more complete; ‘the alternative to bureaucracy’s circumscribed authority is likely to be, not less authority, but personal, potentially arbitrary authority’.

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

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pre-existing commitments can be just as problematic, politically, administratively and organizationally, as too passionate a fixation on the imperatives of change and modernization. Institutions must be allowed to adapt from their original purposes if the circumstances in which they operate have changed. However, the point we wish to underscore here is that the modern state and hence a functioning modern society depends on hierarchical bureaucracy, and thus upon a non-partisan public administration for its own functioning and reproduction. There is, in effect a battle ongoing here, and not simply in regards to the ‘proper’ organization and conduct of public management, for it applies equally to debates about private sector management too. The hierarchical kind of organization named bureaucracy, Jaques (1990, pp. 2–3) argued, had come to persist because it is ‘the only form of organization that can enable a company to employ large numbers of people and yet preserve an unambiguous accountability for the work they do’. (1990, pp. 2–3). These points were reiterated in his commentary on the scandals besetting Enron and Arthur Andersen, pointing to a direct relationship between anti-bureaucratic management thinking and the proliferation of ‘weak or non-articulated accountabilities’, a lack of formal authority and the presence of compensation systems that ‘alienate people and require selfish and even corrupt behaviours’ (Jaques, 2003, p. 136). As we indicated earlier, similar points have been made in relationship to the recent financial crisis (Valukas, 2010). Contemporary anti-bureaucratic thought has much in common with its historical predecessors, though its own imperviousness to historical contextualization ensures that it cannot register this, and thus acknowledge some of the problems that have, historically, beset attempts to de-bureaucratize the state or, indeed, formal organizations in the private sector too. Advocates of radical reform are, as we have suggested, anachronistic in this regard. The arguments deployed against hierarchical organization are emotionally attractive at some gut level, particularly in contexts where personal autonomy is considered a prime ethical value. And yet, as we have suggested there are good reasons to ignore the siren calls of those advocating the dissolution of hierarchical bureaucracy in the name of autonomy, equality, economy and liberty, for example. Such calls demand that society liberates itself from the very laws, institutions and practices that have made it possible in the first place. Without a hierarchical ordering of offices in a bureaucracy, the state would not exist; without centralised bureaucratic state capacities, there would be no practically realisable legal or organized political system, and thus no enforceable rights, for example,

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In stating these and related arguments in defence of hierarchical bureaucracy we do not claim originality-there is a growing chorus of voices making similar cases concerning the importance of hierarchical bureaucracy to responsible administration in government and in business, or stressing the relationship between the ethos of bureaucratic office and the securing of representative democracy (Goodsell, 2004, 2005; Olsen, 2006; Peters, 2003; Suleiman, 2003). Our specific focus on anachronism in public management is, however, an attempt to mount another line of attack on the assumptions underpinning contemporary anti-bureaucratic thought. As we have argued, the epochalist and future-oriented nature of much contemporary antibureaucratic thought raises a number of important issues concerning organizational memory and forgetting. One of the central functions of the public administration as an institution is to provide government with expert advice. This cannot be done in a proper way without a system of archives and files and routines for checking and making use of them. As noted by Karl Deutsch (1966, p. 206) some time ago, memory is essential for ‘‘any extended functioning of autonomy’’ and thus for the role of bureaucracy as an autonomous agent in government, where its role is one of ‘‘feeding back of data from some form of memory, and thus from the past, into the making of present decisions’’. A public administration that is denied this possibility – because it is fragmented or decentralised, or its core functions have been outsourced or distributed across networks or partnerships- is not fulfilling its politico-administrative role – acting as ‘‘the nerves of government’’, its ‘institutional memory’, or as the ‘‘constitutional ballast’. Remembering and checking how things have been done before, and what the effects of previous reforms and policy initiatives were, ought to be one of the central functions of public administration as an institution of government, yet it is precisely this that the practical implementation of modernising norms and techniques of conduct organizes out of existence. We have thus suggested that the time is ripe for a return to many of the practices of hierarchical bureaucracy, but have so far concluded that such a return is not likely given the current preoccupation with anti-bureaucratic reforms. However, it is possible and necessary to put hierarchical bureaucracy back in time, which means defending some of the central practices of bureaucratic administration against the claims of anachronism. Not least, as we have argued, because bureaucratic practices provide many of the ‘conservation standards’ appropriate to the political management of the state, including the management of ‘change ‘within the state.

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More generally, our focus on organizational ‘‘remembering’’ and ‘‘forgetting’’, offers a useful corrective to the widespread, and frequently decontextualized representation of ‘change’ as progressive, and ‘constraint’ or ‘limit’, as reactionary. A future orientation with no regard for the contingencies of the past, may lead to the establishment of organizations that become inflexible. In order to achieve the right sort of flexibility, especially in government, it may be necessary, we suggest, to maintain a bureaucratic form of public administration that is able to make qualified interpretations of current laws, principles and rules, and which maintains respect for democratic and professional values. Making a talisman of one kind of flexibility, the wrong sort, in fact, can be very problematic for the securing of public purposes, as illustrated by Wedel’s (2004, 2009) studies of ‘‘flex’’ organizations in Eastern Europe, and elite circles in US foreign policy-making, and Moe’s (2001) studies of Quasi Government in the United States. All forms of government have costs. If we are lucky we can choose what problems to have but not whether we have problems or not. The problems we have with maintaining the ideals and institutions connected with Weberian bureaucracy are potentially less serious, we suggest, than those associated with the alternatives posited by the reform movements associated with New Public Management and ‘‘self-governed networks’’.

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SECTION II ORGANISATIONAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HIERARCHY

UNDERSTANDING HIERARCHY IN CONTEMPORARY WORK Susanne E. Lundholm, Jens Rennstam and Mats Alvesson1 ABSTRACT The chapter aims to bring out the dynamic nature or hierarchy in organizations and presents a conceptual framework for making sense of hierarchy in contemporary work. We describe hierarchy as the result of a contradictory dynamic that incorporates both vertical and horizontal practices of organizing. The vertical practice, verticalization, draws on and reproduces the formal organization, whereas the horizontal practice, horizontalization, orders people on the basis of their knowledge and initiatives. The dynamic between these two practices varies, we argue, depending on the social and epistemic distance of formal managers’ from the operative work process. Three different dynamics between verticalization and horizontalization – loose coupling, translation, and integration – are identified and illustrated, drawing on three ethnographically inspired studies of knowledge work. Through these three dynamics, the chapter casts light on and provides nuances to the current discussion in the literature on postbureaucracy. Keywords: Hierarchy; postbureaucracy; knowledge work; vertical and horizontal practices; managers; subordinates

Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 113–140 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035007

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INTRODUCTION Organizational hierarchy is generally understood as the formal, documented system according to which people in an organization are ranked in terms of authority along a vertical axis. The role and nature of hierarchy has been widely debated in recent decades, not least in terms of its positive and negative effect on organizational success and employee motivation. Those who are skeptical of hierarchy point out its connection to oppression and injustice, the lack of discretion, initiative, and flexibility, and the fact that hierarchy tends to be perceived as a demotivating force in the organization (McGregor, 1960). This is particularly the case in the expanding sector of knowledge work where creativity and workers’ initiative are central to the success of the firm (Alvesson, 2004; Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007). In response to such views, others argue that the formal chain of command is a necessary means to maintain clarity and effectiveness in the organization (e.g., Abrahamsson, 2007; Weber, 1947), and while hierarchy may appear in a different shape today than it used to, most researchers agree that it is a persistent feature of contemporary organizations (e.g., Courpasson, 2000; Diefenbach & Sillince, 2011; Hales, 2002; Hopfl, 2006). With a certain size, hierarchy is almost impossible to avoid. We agree with those who claim the persistence of hierarchy in organizations, although we argue that the nature and dynamic of hierarchy in contemporary organizations and work are poorly understood. For example, we ‘‘know’’ that formal hierarchy – or at least a strong adherence to it – may damage creativity, but we know less about how hierarchy is achieved in situations where creativity plays a central role. Similarly, we ‘‘know’’ that expert authority may or even should take the place of formal authority in these contexts (Pearce & Conger, 2003), but if so, how does the relationship between formal and expert authority play out in practice? To answer these questions we need to go beyond either/or conceptions of hierarchy, and seek a more nuanced understanding. That is what we intend to do in this chapter. More specifically, we outline a conceptual framework that describes how hierarchy is accomplished in everyday work contexts, where vertical (formal authority) and horizontal (expert authority) aspects of organization meet. Our agenda, as specified above, requires that we abandon a reified and static understanding of hierarchy, and instead look at how hierarchy is constructed and negotiated in social interaction. The idea that hierarchy is constructed is not new to the field of organization studies (see McPhee & Poole, 2001). Nevertheless, its potential is yet to be unleashed by a fuller understanding of how this happens. In this text, we suggest that hierarchy is

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produced in the meeting between two seemingly contradictory practices that we shall call verticalization (the doing of formal hierarchy/authority) and horizontalization (the undoing of formal hierarchy). Hierarchy is thus seen as a dynamic that incorporates contradictory organizing principles, and so, we can conceptualize hierarchy by describing this dynamic. In this chapter we identify three versions of the vertical–horizontal dynamics that we term loose coupling, translation, and integration. Each of these categories – which make up our conceptual framework – displays a specific type of interface between the vertical and the horizontal. This interface, in turn, appears to follow from the manager’s ‘‘position.’’ Or to be more exact, it depends on the distance of the manager from the operative work process, both in a social and epistemic sense. The focus of this chapter lies consequently not on broader organizational arrangements – structural or cultural – associated with large-scale organizations as wholes, spanning over several hierarchical levels and incorporating the larger picture of vertical division of labor. Instead, focus is on the relations between managers and their (formal) subordinates. (Whether the ‘‘subordinates’’ really are subordinated, or when and how they become subordinated, are key questions.) Our view is very much a micro view, based on a close-up perspective of how people are doing – or undoing – hierarchy in local practices. To flesh out the categories of our conceptual framework, the chapter draws on empirical material from three ethnographically inspired studies of Swedish business firms: one bank, one IT consulting firm, and one high-tech/ engineering company. From these studies we extract different ‘‘episodes’’ that will serve as illustrations of our theoretical points, allowing us to make sense of loose coupling, translation, and integration. The chapter unfolds by first, briefly, reviewing the literature on hierarchy in organizations, arguing for a view of hierarchy as constructed in everyday practice. Following this, we present and discuss our conceptual framework, including the concepts of horizontalization and verticalization. After that, we account for the methodological aspects of our work, followed by some empirical examples that illustrate the categories of our conceptual framework. Finally, we discuss theoretical implications and how our findings help us to make sense of hierarchy in contemporary work.

ON HIERARCHY Hierarchy is a central theme in the classical debate between scientific management/Taylorism and the human relations movement. Under the

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paradigm of scientific management, hierarchy was seen as necessary for preventing ‘‘soldiering,’’ defining work tasks, and supervising workers’ performance. Taylor was very explicit about this, pointing out that the task of supervisors was to make sure that ‘‘every workman’’ knows ‘‘in detail the task which he is to accomplish’’ (Taylor, 1911/1998, p. 17). The human relations school thought quite differently of hierarchy. Not in the sense that there should not be any, but if displayed too explicitly, it was considered as a potential obstacle to informal communication between workers, which in turn was ‘‘a necessary prerequisite for effective collaboration’’ (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939, p. 559). So instead of directing the tasks of workers, supervisors were instructed to enable good teamwork and to invite employees into processes of decision-making, thus distancing management somewhat from the immediate work process. A skeptical attitude toward hierarchy is largely prevalent today, and if any of the classical paradigms has ‘‘won’’ the battle it is the human relations approach. Explicit advocacy of hierarchy is indeed rare these days – the argument being that hierarchy sits badly with current trends in contemporary society toward more complex forms of work, which are difficult to control by hierarchical means, such as direct supervision or formal rules. Firms today are instead claimed to be complex, contested social systems (Kuhn, 2008) characterized by distributed/collective leadership (Fairhurst, 2008; Gronn, 2002), increasingly intent on creating worker participation (Stohl & Cheney, 2001), teamwork (Cohen & Bailey, 1997), and empowerment (Styhre, 2001). This characterization is particularly relevant with respect to so-called ‘‘knowledge work,’’ which tends to be nonroutinized, thus relying heavily on the expertise and creativity of the employees (e.g., Alvesson, 2004; Starbuck, 1992). In this type of work, hierarchical management is seen as counter-productive, and new forms of management are suggested that acknowledge complex rather than hierarchical interaction with employees (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007). The manager, in turn, is seen as a coach, teacher, and servant (Senge, 2004), as a social integrator (Alvesson, 1995), and as a manager of meaning (Smircich & Morgan, 1982) rather than supervisor or ‘‘boss.’’ The literature discussed above seems to suggest that we are moving away from a vertical or bureaucratic organization. Nevertheless, as some commentators have pointed out, this postbureaucratic argument should not be exaggerated (Alvesson & Thompson, 2004). Rather, we are in need of a more nuanced understanding of the matter. In response to such calls for nuances, scholars have used terms such as ‘‘bureaucracy-lite’’ (Hales, 2002), and ‘‘soft bureaucracy’’ (Courpasson, 2000) to describe a more moderate

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version of the traditional bureaucratic ideal type. In this lite bureaucracy, there are on the one hand fewer vertical layers and employees are ‘‘empowered’’ in terms of increased discretion over tasks. But on the other hand, the formal hierarchy is maintained when it comes to traditional managerial privileges such as formulation of goals, strategies, reorganizations, and performance measurement principles (Sennett, 1998). Key decisions are thus still in the hands of top managers, although it is unclear how such decisions translate into the work of the ostensibly empowered employees. The concepts of ‘‘soft’’ and ‘‘lite’’ bureaucracy, then, suggest that hierarchy is an ambiguous phenomenon. It is seldom completely obvious or fixed, but rather, hierarchy is played out in various issue-specific ways, and a variety of circumstances tend to support, weaken, or bypass hierarchy, including competence and status-based (a) symmetries between people on different hierarchical levels. Accounts that reflect critically on the notion of postbureaucracy thus attempt to nuance the idea that the world of organizations has gone through a radical change, with new forms of organizing as a result. Instead they argue for the persistence of a moderated vertical order. However, it is not entirely clear what this moderated order looks like and there is presumably enormous empirical variation. The notions of ‘‘soft’’ and ‘‘lite’’ bureaucracy give you some idea of what postbureaucracy may be. However, such concepts are not very illuminating, in terms of their everyday implications. This is a blank that we intend to fill with this chapter, and more specifically we will describe hierarchy as a dynamic that occurs when vertical and horizontal ordering processes meet and interact. In particular, we will examine how a managerial order coexists and interacts in practice with a regime based on the initiatives of qualified individuals, often superior to their managers in terms of operational knowledge.

The Constructed Hierarchy The perspective of this chapter thus goes beyond the common idea of organizations as either hierarchies, where managers rule, or the opposite, with the organization being viewed as a flat, democratic collective (cf. Blaug, 2009; Lundholm, 2011; Rennstam, 2007). Instead we assume the coexistence of and interaction between managerial and knowledge-based authority, and we view hierarchy as an emergent phenomenon, constructed in organizational practice. The idea implies a focus on processes of organizing rather

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than organization (McPhee & Poole, 2001). In consequence, instead of taking the organization and its existence for granted, an emergent perspective on hierarchy commands us to examine how hierarchy is ‘‘done’’ – and sometimes ‘‘undone’’ or at least ‘‘softened’’ – in everyday practice. Our approach does not imply a chaotic understanding of hierarchy, however. Instead, we argue that hierarchy resides and emerges in practices, and by practices we mean everyday activities that display a certain regularity and that invoke certain interpretive patterns (Schatzki, 2001; The´venot, 2001). The term ‘‘interpretive patterns’’ indicates a connection between the notion of practice and that of culture. Practice theory is indeed a cultural theory in the sense that it pays attention to how social order is maintained and how shared meanings are located and stabilized, with particular attention to practices (Reckwitz, 2002). Cultural theory is frequently drawn upon in the study of organizations, and in relation to hierarchy, scholars have shown how artifacts, rituals, and other symbolic means are used to reinforce or balance the formal structure (e.g., Rosen, 1989). These are important aspects of hierarchy in organizations, but a symbolic/ritual focus tends to assume that meaning is external to practice. In contrast, following practice theory, we argue that formal structures should not be assigned an a priori meaning external to everyday organizational activity. Instead structure is enacted in practices, which are building blocks in which social order resides (Schatzki, 2001). At the core of this practice approach to organization is the contrasting of formal representations of organization with accounts of ‘‘actual activities’’ (Brown & Duguid, 1991, p. 41), because while formal definitions of work relations do exist on paper, the meaning and relevance of such definitions are always a matter of practice. More specifically, such understandings are negotiated in instances of ‘‘lived culture,’’ for example, when a subordinate discusses work solutions with her/his manager, or when this is done among peers.

Verticalization and Horizontalization While all organizations exhibit some degree of formal hierarchy, they also entail a ‘‘horizontal’’ dimension with people interacting as peers, based on the principle of equality. In these situations, employees still influence each other, but not on the basis of formal authority. Instead, influence is based on ideas and arguments, which reflect a knowledge or creativity that is not tightly associated with the person’s formal position in the organizational scheme. In organizations, this horizontal interaction almost always takes

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place in light of a formal hierarchy, and we may talk about horizontalization when the horizontal interaction involves bypassing or marginalizing the formal hierarchy. In short, horizontalization is about ‘‘undoing’’ the formal hierarchy. Horizontalization is likely to be more common when the work process displays a certain complexity and/or, for some other reason, subordinates are better equipped to control work. But the formal organization remains even under these conditions, and it is likely to be drawn upon to various degrees as a legitimate way of making sense of work relations. When people, explicitly or implicitly, call upon the formal organization to place themselves in a formally superior or subordinate position, thus doing the formal hierarchy, we refer to this as verticalization. Reasonably, all organizations entail both the doing and undoing of hierarchy in the sense that there is a collective ability to both verticalize (using formal hierarchy) and horizontalize (bracketing the formal hierarchy). The organization will then be able to maintain a sense of order and accountability without scarifying the knowledge, ideas, and initiatives of individuals. In this chapter we present a ‘‘framework’’ that details how this happens in practice and how the processes of verticalization and horizontalization interact and coexist in everyday work. The task is warranted, we believe, as the coexistence of verticalization and horizontalization cannot be taken for granted. Verticalization and horizontalization exist in a tense relationship, as contradictory modes of organizing, and their relationship needs to be explained. In particular, there is a need to explain how a regime that gives uncontested power to formally appointed managers coexists with one that grants authority to knowledgeable individuals (regardless of their formal position). Instead of considering organization as either hierarchical or not, we consider verticalization and horizontalization as coexisting modes of organizing in a contradictory dynamic, which, we believe, is a fruitful way of conceptualizing hierarchy in contemporary work.2

A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Dynamics of Hierarchy In the following we attempt to conceptualize the contradictory dynamic that occurs when processes of verticalization and horizontalization meet by constructing a framework. We shall present three hierarchical dynamics – loose coupling, translation, and integration – which each represent different relationships between verticalization and horizontalization. These relationships, in turn, are informed by what we term managerial distance, that is the

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social as well as epistemic distance of formal management from the operative work process. The first dynamic is loose coupling. As operative activities are increasingly in the hands of employees that enjoy a great deal of discretion on basis of their knowledge, managerial activities tend to transpire further away from the operative work process. When management cannot influence the operative work directly, which is especially the case in knowledge work, they will often try to influence it indirectly by articulating strategies, cultural messages, organizational identities, and overarching visions (e.g., Alvesson, 2004). Thus, managers attempt to impact employees by influencing other aspects of organizational life than the actual work, hoping to increase the likelihood of beneficiary actions on part of employees. The picture painted above implies that operative work, these days, is often managed horizontally among peers, on the basis of superior knowledge of the work process, and that these horizontal processes are touched only from a distance, indirectly, and occasionally by vertical interventions. For this reason, we may talk about a loose coupling between verticalization and horizontalization (cf. Weick, 1976). Loose coupling is generally an effect of complexity. The typical example would be a senior manager in a relatively complex workfield. The manager will then be distant from work, both socially and epistemically, because on the ‘‘higher’’ level where senior management acts, there is little concern or contact with the details of work (social distance). And if the work process is complex, the manager is likely to have only a shallow understanding of it (epistemic distance). Thus, when work gets complex, the distance between management and the work process increases – both in a physical and epistemic sense – and managers will try to target the work process through means that are only indirectly related to the work process. Translation is the second vertical–horizontal dynamic in our framework, and it is a category that describes how hierarchy may be constructed when management is somewhat engaged in (and thereby closer to) the operative work process. The typical case here is a middle manager that meets with the operative core of the workforce on a daily basis, though without being part of such operations him-/herself. The manager will then have some understanding of the technical aspects of work, as well as the goings-on at the operative level. We may characterize this as medium distance, both epistemically and socially. This means that the manager is able to ask questions about work, formulate goals, concerns, and directions, but in order for these directions to make sense in practice, they need to be translated into operative work by subordinates. The effect of managerial involvement is thus largely

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dependent on how it is made sense of and effectuated by employees who perform the actual work. In light of the above, we may say that the vertical process is translated into a horizontal process. In this process of undoing the formal hierarchy, employees’ practice-related and esoteric knowledge is important, because ultimately, this knowledge is what enables employee discretion to translate managerial interventions (the process of verticalization).3 Indeed, even if subordinates do not mean for it to happen, the managerial ‘‘intention’’ often gets lost as it travels through the process of translation, and there may not be much the manager can do about it. In many cases though, translation does not pose a true challenge to managerial agendas. Instead it seems as if employees, in the process of translation, step in and take on the role of managers, and their practical and esoteric knowledge then becomes a means to managerial ends. This last point is often made by critical management scholars who are skeptical of contemporary talk of employee discretion and empowerment. Our category of translation takes a middle road with regard to this question, allowing both for translations that complete and redirect managerial intentions. The third and final dynamic of our framework is termed integration. Integration happens when processes of verticalization and horizontalization merge and become intertwined to the extent that it becomes difficult to make a meaningful distinction between the two. In practice, this occurs when the manager is also the most or one of the most proficient experts in the operative work. An example could be a really small firm where those who work at the operative level also own and manage the firm. In such cases there is a lack of a salient formal structure, and consequently it will be hard to define people as either managers or subordinates. Yet another example is when the formal position of manager is directly linked with expert competence in a field of practice. For instance, in research, the title as professor is awarded to a person with a great academic track record, but as a professor one will often also act as manager for more junior researchers. When the professor directs the work of a junior researcher, for example as part of a coauthored paper, it may be hard to tell if this is because she/he enjoys a superior, formal position, or if it is because the professor has superior knowledge. Most likely it is both, and it is difficult to separate these two bases of authority. Consequently, we may talk about integration between the vertical and horizontal in an actual practice of work. In the context of integration, managerial distance is thus low or nonexistent, meaning that the manager is as engaged in and knowledgeable of the operative work as anyone else. She/he holds a similar understanding

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of the work process as subordinates, and is updated on recent events and details of daily operations. Taken together, these conditions enable the manager to hold an informed conversation with subordinates about work, and through such conversations she/he is able to control the operative process in detail. The manager may be seen as having dual memberships, in the vertical as well as horizontal regime, which enables her/him to move between the regimes and knowledgeably handle situations in both. Building a framework based on the notion of managerial distance is a means to accomplish an overall ambition with this chapter, that is, to mediate between deterministic and fluid conceptions of hierarchy. A focus on managerial distance constitutes an explicit recognition of formal structure, implying that it must be taken into account, by researchers and practitioners alike. However, in the vein of avoiding either/or as well as static conceptions of hierarchy, we likewise recognize the existence of different forms of horizontalization that undo the formal structure. What this undoing amounts to varies, and arguably, it varies with the managerial distance. In the case of loose coupling, horizontalization may take a variety of shapes – from ignorance and cynicism to individual reconstruction or the actual adoption of managerial initiatives – in light of general conditions of work provided by senior management. In the dynamic of translation, in turn, when managers are closer to work, undoing requires the ability to make sense of and translate a given instruction, goal, or concern into operative practice, which may to varying degrees lead to changes in the direction intended by management. Finally, when management is so close that it becomes integrated in the operative work, instructions to subordinates will be quite specific and thus hard to avoid or redirect. At the same time, because the horizontal–vertical order is intertwined here, such instructions can be interpreted as expert based, and thus, there is a space for the undoing of formal hierarchy.

METHOD The chapter draws on a number of ethnographic studies of organizations in the context of professional and knowledge intensive work: an IT consultancy firm, a bank, and an engineering firm. These organizations have been studied in depth, each study including a large number of interviews and observations of a variety of situations. The studies differ in scope and focus, but all include rich material for addressing issues of hierarchy, and how it is ‘‘(un)done’’ in practices. One study – of the IT consultancy firm – is broader and mainly

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addresses understandings and meanings on a general level: how the organization is structured and how claims to be nonhierarchical stands in an ambiguous relation to various forms of vertical differentiation. The other two studies focus more strongly on situated practices, observed and described in depth. The IT consultancy case involved the entire firm, with 500 employees, and addressed organizational culture, including issues around community and the role of managers in managing values and meanings and accomplishing social integration in a business with employees working at client sites, leading to a risk of organizational fragmentation and weak identification. The study included about 40 interviews and some observations of organized social events. The bank study was conducted at local branches in Sweden during a period of 18 months, focusing specifically on everyday interactions between formally superior managers and their subordinates. These interactions were sometimes audio recorded (if occurring in meetings), and on other occasions (mostly in everyday work) the researcher relied on detailed field notes (scribbled down on spot as the interaction was occurring). As a supplement to these observations, the researcher conducted around 30 interviews with managers and employees. The engineering study was done in a branch of a large global producer of telecommunication technology. The study focused on the operative work of the engineers, including ongoing production such as laboratory work as well as interactions between superiors and subordinates. Seventy-six interviews were conducted and interactions at 20 work meetings were recorded and transcribed, whereas data from every day, ad-hoc interactions was gathered though shadowing or general ‘‘hanging out’’ with the engineers, taking notes as interesting interactions occurred.4 These three studies arguably give a good empirical grounding for developing knowledge regarding the nature of hierarchy, at least in parts of contemporary economy and work life. Consequently, we will use these studies to illustrate and flesh out the content of our conceptual framework. The result that we intend is a less abstract way of understanding the ambiguous nature of hierarchy, previously described using terms such as ‘‘lite’’ and ‘‘soft.’’ Specifically, we conceptualize the (ambiguous) hierarchy as a dynamic that simultaneously incorporates vertical and horizontal modes of organizing. To make our point we will draw on a number of empirical episodes describing how superiors and subordinates interact in the course of daily work. These examples allow us to show in some detail the process whereby

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hierarchy is ‘‘done’’ and ‘‘undone.’’ Or in different words, they illustrate the intersection between the vertical and the horizontal. And although episodes may seem very specific, we think they can be used to capture and illustrate a phenomenon of broader interest. More specifically, they provide insights into the ambiguity of hierarchy, in that they qualify the character and components of this ambiguity.

UNPACKING THE ORGANIZATIONAL HIERARCHY In this section, we will illustrate empirically some of the complexities around hierarchy in contemporary organizations. We start by offering a brief description of our case companies, showing that, upon closer observation, it is often difficult to define organizations as either hierarchical or nonhierarchical. Rather, hierarchy is an ambiguous phenomenon. Following this, we attempt to bring some clarity to this ambiguity by elaborating on the character of the relationship between processes of verticalization and horizontalization.

Hierarchy in Three Organizations: An Ambiguous Construct The IT consultancy firm is in many ways an example of a flat, nonhierarchical organization, almost exemplary from the point of view of advocates of the postbureaucracy (and posthierarchy) thesis. Managers and employees often say that there are only three hierarchical levels: managing director of firm, subsidiary manager, and consultant. The firm is organized in terms of subsidiaries with a maximum of 50 employees in order to maintain a sense of small size and with minimal demand for hierarchy. Management makes a point of this in annual reports, interviews, and introductory courses for new employees, indicating that there is a desire to preserve a certain degree of equality and downplay formal structure (cf. Kanter, 1977). Some traditional forms of hierarchical symbolism are avoided. Top management is, for example, located at the first floor, close to the reception, and their offices have – like everybody else’s – glass doors. On the top floor, space is designated for recreational, community-building purposes, with jacuzzi, kitchen, piano bar, etc. At the same time, there are clear indications of hierarchy in practice, including activities for the manager group underscoring their significance compared to the rest. Managers state that informal hierarchy is unavoidable because new employees cannot take the same

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responsibility as more experienced ones. Also, although the subsidiaries only have one manager according to the formal organization chart, there is always a ‘‘second person’’ that in practice acts as deputy, and one or two additional persons who are included in a so-called management team. So in the end, it seems, subsidiaries do have additional hierarchical layers, although these are not ‘‘publicly’’ acknowledged. In the firm, there is much juggling between hierarchy-reinforcing and hierarchy-reducing/avoiding practices. In the engineering case there is a similar ambiguity in terms of how hierarchy is constructed. The engineering firm is a large multinational corporation, but the branch studied ‘‘only’’ has about 800 employees. At a first glance, the branch looks like a traditional hierarchical organization, with five formal levels of hierarchy. Some employees experience this hierarchy and complain about top management making ‘‘unrealistic’’ decisions, in particular in terms of time. But other statements, from managers and engineers alike, complicate the picture and indicate that the line of command is not always followed. For example, one lower level manager points out that ‘‘there’s nobody telling us what to do,’’ by which he means that his group not only has to find out new productive operative solutions for themselves, but also take initiative to long-term strategic changes. A project manager in the group also stresses this, stating that they have to construct their own goals, ‘‘since nobody gives any directives from above,’’ and an experienced engineer reveals how the content of deadlines is often manipulated when top management makes unrealistic decisions. Last, observations of work in the organization do indeed indicate that much of the work is organized based on collegial feedback rather than top-down directives. Finally, if we consider the bank case, perhaps quite surprisingly, it too displays hierarchical ambiguity. Banks are often thought of as ideal-type bureaucracies, with their vertical shape and the many policies/regulations that guide work. Nevertheless, with the deregulation of financial markets, banks have become market driven with emphasis on customization and decentralization. In practice, this means more decisional power to ordinary employees in their dealings with customers. Both employees and managers stress this discretion of employees, arguing that such autonomy begets motivation, but they also point at gains in terms of efficiency. The customer does not have to wait long for the promise of a loan, and in addition, the subordinate often has more in-depth knowledge of customers and the technicalities of work, at least when it comes to more complex cases. For this reason, it makes sense that it is them, and not managers, who make most decisions about work. At the same time, hierarchy is an inevitable aspect of

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banking. It is expected from the larger public, especially in times like these – of financial turbulence. Add to that, the many regulations monitored by financial authorities that demand clear lines of responsibility and authority. Thus, a bank cannot do away with a formal hierarchy, it seems, and in the end there will have to be a mix between verticality and horizontality. The nature of this dynamic though, cannot be settled once and for all. Instead there is an ongoing negotiation regarding the boundaries of managers’ command and employees’ discretion. And observations of work do confirm that this is the case. Thus, all cases discussed above display hierarchical ambiguity. The consultancy is formally relatively flat, and the organizational rhetoric underscores this, but there are signs of ‘‘neo-formal’’ hierarchies, whereas the engineering firm and the bank may look quite hierarchical on the surface, but trends of customization (in the Bank) and the complexity of the work push important decisions down to lower levels where specialized employees largely rely on horizontal interaction to decide what to do. Thus, the formal, overall organizational arrangements do not necessarily say much about specific manager–subordinate interactions. In the following we shall go beyond the statement that hierarchy is ambiguous, and instead look at the nature and components of this ambiguity. We achieve this by looking into how hierarchy is constructed in practice.

Illustrations: The Vertical–Horizontal Dynamics in Practice The above discussion centers on the notion of hierarchical ambiguity. Ambiguity indicates that something is ‘‘opaque’’ or hard to make sense of in clear and simple terms. In the case of hierarchy, this is because it appears as if contradictory principles organize work relations. One way to disentangle the notion of hierarchy and hierarchical ambiguity would thus be to elaborate on the dynamic between contradictory forces. This is what we will do next in trying to make further sense of the relationship between verticalization and horizontalization. In particular, we will discuss and illustrate the three dynamics that make up our conceptual framework: loose coupling, translation, and integration. Loose Coupling The consultancy firm provides a good starting point for a discussion that centers on the notion of loose coupling. In the consultancy firm, there are relatively few hierarchical layers, with each subsidiary manager ‘‘overseeing’’

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a quite large number of employees, who function autonomously in the course of daily operations. Because of the large number of employees under each manager, there will inevitably be little direct contact between subordinate and superior in matters that concern operative work. Management then becomes distant or detached from the core processes of work. However, management still maintains a loosely coupled link to this core through overarching decisions regarding assignments, wage setting, and the evaluation of performance. In addition, there is the careful work of trying to influence values and sense-making in the firm, and such attempts by management, to define and reproduce an organizational culture and identity, emerge from a clear hierarchical position. To give the reader a more concrete sense of how this ‘‘culture work’’ plays out, we can take the example of a manager that was observed in the morning serving coffee to his subordinates, a very symbolic act as it conveys the notion that ‘‘we are all equals here,’’ which, as the reader may recall, is one of the professed values of the firm. The activity of serving coffee then is a typical example of culture work, and in addition, it makes clear our argument here that there is a loose coupling between the vertical and the horizontal. Because when the manager serves coffee, he aims, not directly at the work behaviors of subordinates, but instead at their perception of work by providing value-laden and symbolic cues. Such cues, in turn, will arguably be taken into account by subordinates as they engage in operative work, implying an indirect effect of managerial interventions. So in this specific case, what could be the effect? One message here, as noted above, is obviously the notion of equality. Nevertheless, another message embedded in this activity can be found in how the manager described his practice. Because when asked about it, the manager said that his time, unlike that of the consultants, is nonbillable, and hence, it makes sense that he, not the consultants, provides this supportive service. Taking this comment into account, we may interpret the practice of serving coffee differently. More specifically, we may read it as a token of a performance-oriented culture, because the manager seems to be saying that there is nothing more important than billing your hours. In fact, it is so important that it makes more sense to have a manager serving coffee than to have a subordinate not producing billable time. Obviously, this message is not said out loud. Instead it is conveyed in and through symbolic behaviors that feed into subordinates’ conception of their work. And in the end, such symbolic practices will affect how subordinates perform their work; they may not be overly respectful toward their superiors, but they will make sure to bill their hours. Or will they?

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In the management-centered literature, that dominates contemporary thinking, it is often assumed that managerial interventions have their intended effect (Grey, 1999). To us though, as indicated in our framework, such an assumption seems problematic, given that managers’ presence in the work is becoming less salient, and as managers become more and more distant from operative processes, they also become more and more peripheral to the everyday existence of employees. Chances are then that subordinates will not be as susceptible to managers’ attempts to influence them, which may lead to a weakening of the already loose connection between the vertical and the horizontal. To add flesh to the idea that subordinates may ignore or counter managerial control attempts in the loosely coupled configuration, let us consider an episode from the bank case. Here a superior is observed in a meeting as he is trying to target subordinates and their autonomous work at a distance, by instructing the 35 people present to share their success stories from work with one another. Arguably, there is a symbolic aspect to this exercise in that the manager seeks to create a sense of success and competition among those present (in line with the new market orientation of banks). Subordinates, however, are not very responsive to the manager’s intervention. They insist on telling bad stories. As we enter the episode below, one employee has begun to follow the manager’s exercise, by telling something that resembles a success story. She then goes on to say: ‘‘Should I give you the bad stuff as well?’’ Albert (the manager) ignores this comment, and instead he asks if there is someone else who would like to share something. When the room goes quiet, Albert continues: ‘‘We haven’t had a meeting for a long time now, so there must be plenty of things to share.’’ A quite young man speaks up telling those present that one of their customers has sued the bank, and that he has been to court giving a testimony, and most likely the matter will be taken to the next legal instance. Albert does not comment on this piece of information. Instead he repeats the question, if anyone has anything to share. Once again the room goes quiet, and the next moment Albert gets started on the first item on his agenda, and from there the meeting continues for an hour without much interaction.

When a manager has 35 people under him/her, like in the example above, it is difficult to be close to the work that people do and engage in their everyday issues. Therefore, the manager must manage ‘‘at a distance.’’ In this case, the manager does so by trying to create an upbeat atmosphere, asking people for their success stories, stories that he hopes will spur competition and in the end branch performance. Employees resist participation in this practice, however, and the reason, perhaps, might be that the verticalization attempt clashes with their view of (horizontal) work.

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The example above shows how and why the connection between the vertical and the horizontal may be characterized as loose. This is not to say that there is no link between these processes at all, because although the manager’s attempt at creating an air of competition seems to fail, the meeting in itself can be seen as a verticalizing practice. To be sure, the fact that there is a meeting reminds employees that their work is subordinated to a vertical logic. Thus, through the recurring event, that is the meeting, the connection between the vertical and horizontal processes is in a way confirmed, even if the coupling can be characterized as loose. In sum, the above illustrates loose coupling as a way of describing an ongoing process where managers try to latch onto the horizontal from a distance, through indirect vertical interventions, and where subordinates may counter such attempts, thus weakening an already loose connection between the vertical and the horizontal. Translation The next vertical–horizontal dynamic to be discussed is translation. As noted, translation may or may not follow the managerial intention, and to illustrate this variation, we shall start with an episode from the engineering case that shows how the process of horizontalization may ‘‘complete’’ the vertical intervention. After that we discuss a case, where the horizontal seemingly ‘‘redirects’’ the vertical. As we enter the episode below, Christian, a project manager, is following up the work of a subordinate engineer. As the formally superior person, Christian is expected to make sure work is completed on time, and in practice this often means making sure that people commit to deadlines. As we shall see in the episode below though, the formal position as manager does not seem to help Christian much in this respect. Instead, the technical knowledge of an experienced engineer steps in, and it ‘‘translates’’ the vertical order into practical work. Christian (project manager) follows up Isac’s (engineer) work. Isac says he is ‘‘not done,’’ whereby Christian asks about his status and receives a very technical report. After a short technical discussion in which Alex (experienced engineer) is also involved, Christian asks: ‘‘When do you think...[you can be finished]?’’ Isac replies evasively, looking at Alex: ‘‘Well, I mean, I can do it on the blocks we have today, but now we added some extra stuff so y’’ Christian is about to say something when Alex chimes in: ‘‘I guess it’s rather little, at least it’s still the same interface.’’ Isac asks Alex a question about the power. Alex explains. Then Isac says: ‘‘Well, sure, I guess I’ll have to add those things.’’ Christian then asks again when this will happen. ‘‘Next week in that case,’’ says Isac. Alex chimes in again, suggesting a way of taking care of the issue so that Isac will be

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able to send off the document already on Monday morning. Isac seems to think that sounds ok: ‘‘I’ll try to do it tomorrow then,’’ he says. ‘‘Good,’’ says Alex.

This episode illustrates a manager’s attempt at verticalization – making an employee commit to a deadline – and how this intervention is subsequently translated into the horizontal practice of solving technical problems. Christian fails to make Isac commit to a deadline, whereas Alex, with his ‘‘esoteric expertise’’ (Starbuck, 1992) and practical understanding of the work process, intervenes and does precisely that which Christian is formally assigned to do, only by ‘‘horizontal’’ means. This type of episode, where an employee steps in for the manager, offers insights into the practical effectuation of what the literature refers to as empowerment and participation, something that is arguably necessary for complex work to be accomplished. Christian’s attempt to verticalize is undone by Alex’ intervention, translated, and turned into a horizontal practice. Thus, in this case, the translation functions ‘‘as it should’’ from a managerial perspective. The horizontal takes over from the vertical, but does not resist it. Instead the horizontal affirms the vertical order by assuming that its general requirements are legitimate. Or put differently, it completes the vertical flow of control by stepping in and performing that which is beyond the reach of the formally appointed manager. The above episode may thus be used to confirm the idea put forth by critical scholarship, that even if control in organizations is decentralized, this does not necessarily mean a shift in the overall ideology of control – it is still managerial control, only exerted by unobtrusive means that make employees act in the interest of the organization (e.g., Barker, 1999). Our next episode, however, indicates that translation does not necessarily lead to completion of the vertical flow, but may also redirect the manager’s agenda. As we enter the episode below, Robert, a bank manager, is asking the employees present at the meeting to come up with ideas that will turn the sales statistics that is the result of stock-market turbulence. Robert believes that customers get scared whenever there is a dip in the market, and he wonders how they can prevent them from selling off their portfolios when this happens in the future. ‘‘I leave the question completely open,’’ he says, and after this people start discussing the issue suggested by the manager. Quite soon though, subordinates have translated and redirected the manager’s initial contention that customers should be encouraged not to sell off their portfolios. Peter, the stock-market expert at the branch, suggests that they should tell people to have a long-term perspective on their investment, which would then prevent them from

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selling off in times of turbulence. People around the table seem to agree, when Ann all of a sudden says: ‘‘The scary thing isyI mean it’s very difficult, because you only know what’s happened historically. Sometimes you give the advice to ‘remove your money’ and it continues to go down. [y] [and] why be in for the whole down-turn, when you can step out and then you get back in.’’ Ann receives support from other employees around the table, with one person saying: ‘‘I would never say that to anyone, ‘Don’t do it [sell]’ yI had a guy with almost 900 000 in profit.’’ At this point, Robert steps in: ‘‘We must also consider what the bank recommends, and it always comes back to the fact that it is the bank’s view that should decide what advice we give out. It’s not really our own [view]’’ [y] ‘‘It was more one of those questions thrown out there,’’ he adds. Following this comment, Peter steps in and ends the discussion: ‘‘But to wrap things up, it’s very important really, this thing that Ann points out. That you shouldn’t just sit there through up and down turns. You should obviously sell if you feel that y but that means that the customer has to have, not just a certain flair, but a certain interest at least. So you don’t wake up six months later. It takes continuity on their part as well. We’re not the only ones who should be following the stock-market.’’

Due to his institutionalized position as chair of the meeting, the manager in the example above is able to set the agenda. This agenda is subsequently translated through a horizontal process that, at first, appears to ‘‘complete’’ the vertical process, because what Peter is suggesting initially would satisfy the manager’s aim of preventing people from selling. However, as Ann gets involved, the process of translation takes another turn; it redirects the agenda by making a point that runs counter to the manager’s. Ann is saying that people should get out if they can identify an upcoming dip in the market. This also seems to be the conclusion as the discussion closes with Peter’s final comment. The above example shows an interaction between the horizontal and the vertical that contests the common notion in the management literature, that the vertical somehow determines or controls the horizontal. Because even if the manager is referencing his position as a formal authority in the beginning and toward the end of the episode, he is not treated as such by those present. Instead, it is Peter that is placed in a position of (expert) authority, as he breaks in and summarizes the discussion, without being contested by anyone (not even the manager). Moreover, Peter concludes the discussion in a fashion that is contrary to the manager’s intention. Or in different words, Peter here steps in for the manger, but instead of completing his influence attempt, Peter redirects it. And he achieves this, by referencing his operative knowledge, and concrete experience of the practice of banking. Translation thus shows how vertical instructions from a manager who acts from a medium distance are made sense of and effectuated in practice on the basis of employees’, often superior, understanding of work. This

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horizontal process may complete or redirect the vertical, but either way there is an element of undoing hierarchy. Indeed, in both cases discussed above, an employee rather than a manager holds the initiative. In the case of completion though, the overall managerial agenda is not challenged, and in these cases it may therefore be suspected that there is an indirect form of control at play, as described through the dynamic of loose coupling.5 The point we wish to make here though is that when management is at a medium distance from the work process, being able to give general but not detailed instructions, the vertical relies on the horizontal for its translation. In much complex work, this is necessarily so, since managers are seldom involved in or comprehend the operative work to the extent that their subordinates do. It happens, however, that managers have profound knowledge of the operative work, which takes us to the next dynamic that we refer to as integration. Integration The two preceding examples show instances when managers are partly or almost fully distant from operative work processes. In certain contexts, however, it will be the case that a manager is also among the most proficient experts, acting very close to subordinates’ work. Another example from the engineering case will illustrate this. The episode that is depicted below plays out in a work meeting where Carl (manager) follows up on the work of an engineer (Eddie). The setting is thus similar to that presented earlier with Christian, Alex, and Isac. In this case though, the manager, Carl (in contrast to Christian), makes ample use of both his practical understanding of the work and his formally superior position. Carl asks Eddie how his work is proceeding. Eddie says that he checked the results after they made some modifications, but doesn’t seem quite satisfied with them. Carl asks: ‘‘Have you looked through this thing with [technical term]?’’ Eddie replies that he hasn’t, but he is going to measure it. ‘‘Have you started?,’’ asks Carl. Eddie says that he has started but he ‘‘can’t really make it work.’’ Carl then suggests that it could be ‘‘the classic that y’’ [he explains what ‘‘the classic’’ means]. ‘‘Mm y it could be y,’’ says Eddie. They discuss for a short while, then Carl says ‘‘I think this is a bit too slow,’’ and adds that ‘‘we have had this action since we got the test results [y] we have put what we call a C1 on this, so it is a stopper,’’

Here we have an example where it is difficult to separate the process of verticalization from that of horizontalization. Carl operates in the horizontal realm because he inserts himself in the horizontal interaction that is normally conducted among the engineers. He talks to Eddie in a similar way as Alex talked to Isac in the earlier example of engineering

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work, that is, he talks to him ‘‘as an engineer,’’ and more specifically as an experienced engineer. This is best illustrated by his use of the term ‘‘classic.’’ Classic does not only mean that something is old but that it is remarkable and typical of a certain problem. Talking about Eddie’s problem as a classic defines Carl as more experienced, and Eddie as a newcomer who lacks experience. Otherwise Eddie would know about the ‘‘classic’’ and already have checked if it is causing the problem. All this takes place by drawing on practical understanding of work, and not on the formal vertical order. Nevertheless, Carl also draws on vertical resources. When he labels the problem ‘‘what we call a C1,’’ and a ‘‘stopper,’’ he departs from the construction of Eddie as a peer in need of advice and shifts to emphasizing how Eddie is on the bottom of the flow of production: if he does not fix this, the whole project will come to a standstill, and Carl knows this because he has the overview that a manager has. Carl’s superior position in the chain of command is also underlined his reference to ‘‘action.’’ An action in this organization basically means ‘‘task’’ or ‘‘problem.’’ When you ‘‘have’’ an action, you are responsible for solving it, and although Carl is saying that ‘‘we’’ have had the action for a while, it is clear that Eddie is held accountable for the fact that it is still there. Carl thus translates the vertical into the horizontal by drawing on practical understanding of work. However, he also enacts the vertical in a more traditional chain of command fashion, showing that he masters the practice of engineering as well as management. Thus, he is able to both move close to the operative work and to back off and distance himself. This integration of practices tends to produce a rather influential force. Carl seems to have dual memberships and is both a manager and an engineer. His insights into the intricacies of engineering work, combined with the fact that he is indeed a manager, makes him into something more than a peer, a primus inter pares (Rennstam, 2007). As such, he has special abilities to translate the vertical into the horizontal and back again, by himself representing both aspects at once. The effect of integration may seem like the dream of every business leader, and it is true that the combination of formal and expert power is potentially much stronger than if you practice just one of the two. Nevertheless, the vertical and horizontal ingredients may also undermine each other. An example from the bank will testify to this. Here the researcher was able to observe the struggling of those that were promoted managers on the basis of their expert competence. In this new role, the expert-manager often used operative knowledge to promote his/her managerial agenda. But this did not always afford him/her a strengthened position. Instead, the mixing of logics

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resulted in drawn-out discussions, where neither the expert nor the formal authority of the manager was accepted. So instead of being both expert and manager, the formally superior person ended up being none of the two. It is easy to see how different forms of authority can undermine one another, because when a manager engages in technical talk, employees will come to think that they are participating in a horizontal process, where competence rules. Consequently, they may not accept or even be aware of the switch to a vertical order. This may happen if the manager is not successful in convincing subordinates of his/her expert authority. Likewise, the formal position as manager may undermine the establishment of a horizontal order. For example, a manager may try to engage subordinates in an open discussion, in order to promote multiple perspectives and rich input. But such a process will be hampered if subordinates are too aware of the formal order, because every attempt by the manager to exert influence will then be treated as an act of formal authority, killing the discussion. Thus, integration is not necessarily the most superior way of reconciling the ‘‘post’’dilemma of hierarchy and nonhierarchy. Balancing between the horizontal and the vertical is a sensitive and problematic act.

UNDERSTANDING HIERARCHY IN CONTEMPORARY WORK The present chapter has taken an approach to studying organizational hierarchy that helps us go beyond ‘‘either/or’’ conceptions that dominate the literature. That is, the tendency in the literature to claim either the persistence of a vertical hierarchy, or to deny its relevance completely (Lundholm, 2011). By looking at the dynamics between contrasting organizing principles, we have examined how hierarchy is constructed in and through social interaction. Instead of assuming ‘‘verticality’’ or ‘‘horizontality,’’ we have looked at how the vertical and the horizontal coexist and interact in the construction of work relations. The result is a view of hierarchy as a struggle between vertical and horizontal forces. On the basis of our approach, we are able to elaborate on previous attempts to describe moderate forms of hierarchy (Courpasson, 2000; Hales, 2002). Our framework proposes that the ‘‘lite’’ and ‘‘soft’’ versions of hierarchy – that are typical for the era we live in – are the result of practices that display a dynamic between verticalization and horizontalization. This dynamic, in turn, can be described using the terms loose coupling, translation, or

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integration, depending on how ‘‘distant’’ the manager is from operative work. Managerial distance is the greatest in the case of loose coupling, with managers limiting themselves to indirect and often sporadic attempts to influence work. In translation, the manager’s distance to the operative work process is smaller, but managers are still dependent here on knowledgeable employees, who translate managers’ attempts to influence the pace and content of work. Finally, in the case of integration, there is little distance between the manager and the operative, since managers here are participating as experts next to their role as managers. Thus, loose coupling, translation, and integration describe how hierarchy is made ‘‘soft’’: by either staying far away, relying on translation, or on actors that understand the language of both verticality and horizontality, the impression is produced that hierarchy is ‘‘soft.’’ Softness or liteness in hierarchy can be seen as an effect of unobtrusive vertical practices that to a large extent invite horizontal practices to participate. This idea is not entirely new to organization studies. However, most previous accounts in this field seem to assume that the softness, or unobtrusive control, emanates from managers, as indicated by the common focus in the literature on managers and their choices/personalities/styles that lead them to adopt a certain form of governance. The present account, in contrast, pays attention to everyday practices, where the softness comes across, not so much an effect of managers’ choices, as an outcome of everyday negotiations between managers and employees, where the latter party often has leverage, due to his/her superior understanding of work. The present account thus aligns with those who suggest the importance of soft bureaucracy and unobtrusive forms of control. However, we have slightly shifted the focus away from managers, distributing the agency, by trying to show how the origin of these new versions of control resides in dynamics between verticalization and horizontalization. Interestingly enough, refraining from an exclusive focus on managers enables us to reflect on the role of managers in contemporary knowledge work. If we start with the notion of loose coupling, it appears to confirm the common image of superiors in the literature, as managers of meaning, who control work indirectly, and at a distance, by engaging in cultural management and norm setting practices (e.g., Kunda, 1992; Ouchi, 1980). The dynamics that we term translation and integration, in contrast, depart from this view of managers, displaying them instead as actors that navigate operative work processes. We have shown, for instance, how managers may use their operative knowledge to set in motion productive processes of translation, or when really close to the operative process, they may ‘‘jump between’’

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vertical and horizontal positions. Our framework thus suggests a broader spectrum of managerial influence in knowledge work than what is common, a proposition that has been made possible by paying attention to managerial activity at varying distances from the work process. In light of the above, we can contend that studying hierarchy in contemporary organizations requires new tools, which we aim to provide here. Our framework enables a deeper study of hierarchy and hierarchization in organizational settings where the conception and execution of work have merged. They enable insight into what managers do as well as what employees do. Hierarchy has previously been understood as preceding practice, which is potentially why we have focused so much more on what managers do, without taking seriously the activities of employees. As a result, research has reproduced the idea that grandiose managerial activities – such as visionary leadership, culture management, and other ‘‘distant’’ initiatives – are the guiding forces in work. A focus on practice indicates that there are other activities, such as translation and integration, which enable hierarchy to persist despite its sometimes bad fit with knowledge work. Our illustrations paint a dynamic portrait of the relationship between the vertical and horizontal. They show how the managerial initiative (a) may be backgrounded despite the existence of organizational policy, (b) may be dependent on the translation of expert authority, or (c) may become intertwined with expert authority. It thus seems clear to us that the vertical order, as it is made present in and through everyday interaction, cannot stand on its own. This interdependency though, between the vertical and the horizontal, is rarely recognized, nor is it reflected in how organizations allocate status and pay. But if we can show that there is such a dependency, then, maybe, this calls into question the legitimacy of managerial prerogatives (see, e.g., Parker, 2002). In any event, we can contend that a practice approach to hierarchy allows us to see things differently, and to reflect on the managercentered ideology that dominates much of the existing literature. Our discussion is thus an attempt to theorize formal hierarchy while departing from the ideological understanding that assumes managerial agency as omnipresent. However, our case also aims to prevent falling trap to the other danger – the opposite – of assuming that managerial control is insignificant. Instead, we have tried an alternative route of looking at ‘‘both/ and’’ rather than ‘‘either/or,’’ and we have considered how both vertical and horizontal orders constantly struggle to institute their own precedence, in dynamics that we have labeled loose coupling, translation, and integration. Last, we should stress once again that we here are zooming in the interactional practices of managers and subordinates. There are also, of course,

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managerial practices that may operate hierarchically in a more fixed way, such as top-management decisions about strategies, the hiring, promotion, and firing of employees, new management control systems, etc.

CONCLUSION Looking at our study from a broader perspective, we are able to make some comments regarding the nature of ‘‘postbureaucracy’’ and contemporary knowledge work. Our study partly concurs – through the notion of loose coupling – with the often stated claim that traditional hierarchical processes of organizing fit badly with knowledge work. Instead, such work is often managed indirectly, and at a distance, that is, through efforts to lead by values and meanings and output control, rather than supervision of work. Nevertheless, we also go beyond this claim by showing that managers’ distance to work varies. In addition – by considering our three dynamics between verticalization and horizontalization in a historical light – we may posit that there has been a change in the nature of the managerial distance over time. In the bureaucratic era, social distance did not exclude epistemic proximity. On the contrary, it was quite typical that distant managers designed work tasks in detail. Today, in settings where work tasks have become more complex and require nonroutine problem solving, social distance tends to produce epistemic distance. This is arguably why the vertical has to interact with the horizontal through loosely coupled arrangements, processes of translation by knowledgeable workers, or primus inter pares who are able to navigate in both vertical and horizontal regimes. Our conceptual framework furthermore suggests that the boundary between the vertical and the horizontal often is blurred, especially in the case of translation and integration where it often takes careful observation and thoughtful interpretation to claim that organizational members participate in verticalization or horizontalization. So, to the extent then that we find it reasonable to take seriously a postbureaucratic turn, (Alvesson & Thompson, 2004), we may suggest that some of its key characteristics are: (a) demands for horizontalization and (b) flexible movement between vertical and horizontal practices. At the same time, the postbureaucratic turn also seems to be characterized by loosely coupled and often ambiguous verticalization practices (e.g., managers serving coffee to subordinates), through which the vertical approaches and interacts with the horizontal.

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The blurring of boundaries and increased unclarity also has consequences for practitioners of knowledge work. For example, skilful and meaningful participation in a vertical–horizontal dynamic requires ‘‘tolerance’’ for ambiguity and unclarity in work. This tolerance in turn may be achieved through identification, that is by picking up organizational or occupational identities, which then provide the individual with meaning, thereby functioning as a distraction from the ambiguities of work. But tolerance may also be achieved through knowledgeable engagement in translation processes, undoing the vertical, which we have seen examples of in the bank and the engineering firm. This involves being knowledgeable of the work process to an extent that enables disambiguation and clarification through a sense of craftsmanship, a sense of knowing what one is doing. The ‘‘good organization’’ thus demands people that are capable of producing shifting and situationally sensitive work relations, so that there can be a flexible interplay between contrasting organizing principles. An increasing number of organizational members are thus involved in horizontal as well as vertical practices. Future research will hopefully reveal more about the consequences of such demands, for organizations and for people.

NOTES 1. First authorship is shared between Lundholm and Rennstam. 2. This means that an organization can be said to be ‘‘hierarchical’’ because of the extent to which its members are engaged in verticalization. One could also talk about a high verticalization/horizontalization ratio. 3. It should be noted that translation may also work the other way around, when management makes sense of input from the operative core by translating it into their broader view of a situation. 4. For methodological and other details about the IT consultancy firm study, see Alvesson (1995); for the engineering study, see Rennstam (2007); and for the bank, see Lundholm (2011). 5. This also tells us that an empirical episode may bear traces of different hierarchy dynamics. That is, the dynamics we present here are not mutually exclusive in practice, although there is a point in separating them analytically.

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THE CULTURAL FANTASY OF HIERARCHY: SOVEREIGNTY AND THE DESIRE FOR SPIRITUAL PURITY Carl Rhodes and Peter Bloom ABSTRACT Bureaucratic hierarchy, as the hallmark of the modern organization, has been remarkably resilient in the face of increasingly pervasive attacks on its fundamental value and usefulness. We investigate the reasons for this from a cultural, particularly psychoanalytic, perspective – one that sees hierarchy’s perpetuation not in terms of the efficacy of its instrumental potential, but rather in the values that are culturally sedimented within it. We argue that hierarchy reflects longings for a pure heavenly order that can never be attained yet remains appealing as a cultural fantasy psychologically gripping individuals in its beatific vision. To tease out this cultural logic we examine two representations of it in popular culture – the U.S. television comedy The Office (2005–) and comedian Will Farrell’s impersonation of George W. Bush (2009). These examples illustrate the strength of bureaucratic hierarchy as an affective cultural ideal that retains its appeal even whilst being continually the subject of derision. We suggest that this cultural ideal is structured through a ‘fantasmatic

Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 141–169 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035008

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narrative’ revolving around the desire for a spiritualized sense of sovereignty; a desire that is always undermined yet reinforced by its failures to manifest itself concretely in practice. Our central contribution is in relating hierarchy to sovereignty, suggesting that hierarchy persists because of an unquenched and unquenchable desire for spiritual perfection not only amongst leaders, but also amongst those they lead. Keywords: bureaucracy; fantasy; hierarchy; parody; popular culture; sovereignty Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything Bruce Springsteen

INTRODUCTION 29 April 2011 marked the marriage of Britain’s Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton. Billed as the ‘royal wedding’ this event was celebrated the world over with an estimated 2 billion viewers watching it globally. At the centre of this was the prince – or as he was referred to formally – His Royal Highness Prince William. The usage of this traditional title of ‘highness’ says something about the continuing cultural resonance of hierarchy. Specifically, the structuring of society, even if only as part of a cherished history, that is hierarchically organized with the royal family located at the top and flowing all the way downwards to the ‘commoner’ masses. This was not just about the British class system – the wedding captivated viewers around the world. Extending beyond the specific example of royalty, the obsession with this form of vertical ordering can be seen in almost all spheres of cultural life. We fixate on celebrities and sports figures at the top of their field reigning over lesser lights. Professionally, we strive for promotion, to one day become a manager or even CEO. Academically, we are consumed by the need to publish in top journals. What makes this enduring embrace of hierarchy especially surprising is its existence in direct contrast to recent ideas challenging its effectiveness and desirability as a social and organizational structure. Traditional bureaucracy has been widely criticized as being counter-productive to performance and a hindrance to its originally designed purpose of efficiency due to the

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fast paced and unpredictable nature of the contemporary business environment (cf. Rhodes & Price, 2011). Organizations have been urged to adopt ‘post-bureaucratic’ structures characterized by the ‘‘reduction of formal levels of hierarchy, an emphasis on flexibility rather than rulefollowing and the creation of a more permeable boundary between the inside and outside of organizations’’ (Grey & Garsten, 2001, p. 230). Despite the attestations of anti-bureaucratic pundits, the rumoured death of hierarchy is, of course, greatly exaggerated. Bureaucratic hierarchy continues to stand as the hallmark of the modern organization, remarkably resilient in the face of increasingly pervasive attacks on its fundamental value and efficacy (Courpasson & Clegg, 2006). Further, as the progenitor of patriarchal and masculinist authority hierarchy continues to operate as the favoured mode for exercising institutional power (Acker, 1990). At stake is the question of not whether bureaucratic hierarchy persists in organizations (Walton, 2005), but rather why it persists as a dominant organizing and structuring principle. The celebration of sovereignty, highness and monarchy in Britain is found not only in the formal powers of state governance – the role of royalty being limited to ceremonial duties with the real authority residing with the House of Commons. Yet as the Royal Wedding demonstrated there is still overwhelming cultural cache and potency with royalty and its highness. It is not formal power or authority that is at stake, but the power of those values that are deeply entrenched in our (globalized) culture. Similarly within organizations, the authority of hierarchy is contained not only, or even perhaps principally, in the coercive power of a manager or executive. By contrast, it emerges from its existence as a form of culture that organizes expectations of how organizations should be structured and power wielded. With this paper we consider the meanings surrounding this culture as it relates to what we see as the affective character of the sustained commitment to bureaucratic hierarchy in organizations. Crucial to our argument is the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy such that a longing for hierarchy transcends mere rational considerations and touches upon a fundamental way in which we psychically organize our reality. Drawing on the insights of Jacques Lacan (2001), we argue that it is not the fulfilment of the romanticized hierarchical ideal that is essential but rather its eternal existence as just that, an ideal; one that tantalizes us with the always immanent possibility of an eternally good leader at the head of a rational and just order. We argue too that any perceived failures of bureaucratic hierarchy in practice serve ironically to reinforce it as a cultural ideal – the practical absence of the ideal serving to create a sense of

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‘lack’ that makes this desire all the more appealing and motivating. This failure thus serves as a ‘fantasmatic narrative’ regulating individual identity continually in the ongoing, yet necessarily always disappointing, strive for this ideal. We begin the paper by examining the relationship between bureaucracy, hierarchy and sovereignty. We consider in particular the existence of hierarchy as one of the main features of bureaucracy, along with how this has continued to be a malleable yet central aspect of contemporary organizations. We examine this dominance of bureaucracy in relation to sovereignty – the desire for increasingly supreme forms of power – as a fantasy of hierarchy, a culturally embedded desire for sovereign mastery over both oneself and others. We connect this fantasy to longings for an ideal bureaucracy whereby the sovereign asserts his or her mastery fairly, competently and magnanimously for the good of their subjects. In the second part of the paper we explore and seek to justify the approach that guides our cultural consideration of hierarchy’s persistence. Specifically, we explain how articulating theoretical questions with popular culture can be a powerful means through which to research and theorize the cultural dimensions of organizations. We especially attend to the possibilities of working with popular culture, and the carnivalesque practices of parody in particular, to offer a critical appraisal of organizations and their machinations. In the third and central part of the paper we turn to two examples of contemporary popular culture and the ways that they represent and ultimately reinforce a fantasy of hierarchy – these example being the U.S. version of the television comedy The Office (2005–) and Will Farrell’s critical impersonation of former U.S. president George W. Bush as it was presented in 2009’s Broadway play and HBO Special You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush. In each case, a sovereign figure is parodied – a popular characterization of a manger and the much maligned former president respectively. In lampooning these characters, we observe, these parodies draw critical attention to the cultural idealization of the perfect sovereign hierarchy. On the basis of the discussion of these two programmes we proceed to the fourth part of the paper where we address our central concern of providing a cultural explanation of the persistence of hierarchy in organizations – an explanation that focuses on hierarchy as a pervasive ‘fantasmic narrative’ fuelled by a culturally sedimented, yet essentially unmet, desire for sovereignty and spiritual perfection. We end by summing up our main argument and assessing some of its implications for being in organizations.

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THE TROUBLING PERSISTENCE OF BUREAUCRATIC HIERARCHY Long Live Bureaucracy Starting in the 1980s there has been a wave of feeling in management that a sea change was occurring – nothing less than an epochal shift sweeping away the old hierarchical bureaucracies and replacing them with networked organizations guided by an ethos of entrepreneurship and enterprise. What was witnessed was a ‘crisis of bureaucracy in the age of enterprise’ (Courpasson & Reed, 2004, p. 7). Widely criticized for its rigidity and repression, bureaucratic hierarchy came to symbolize a destructive worship of order and reliance upon impersonalized forms of coercion, ineptitude and formality – all tied up in a mess of red tape. The crisis of bureaucracy promised the near collapse of traditional rule and hierarchy-based modes of organizational authority in favour of greater levels of employee autonomy and responsibility (Johnson, Wood, Brewster, & Brookes, 2009) and organizational structures that would enable speed, agility and competitiveness (Salaman & Storey, 2008; Starkey, 1998). These post-bureaucratic organizations were intended to be ‘‘structured to increase flexibility, with less formalization and more decentralization than in the traditional bureaucratic organization’’ (Contu, Grey, & O¨rtenblad, 2003, p. 935), representing a definite rebuke to established past idealizations of bureaucracy and hierarchy. This rise of post-bureaucratic ideas directly challenged the ideals of hierarchy so central to bureaucracy. These new approaches put into question the ‘universal value’ of hierarchy within institutions, extolling instead a fresh vision of how organizations should be ordered (see Alvesson & Thompson, 2005; Josserand, Teo, & Clegg, 2006). Specifically the ‘post-bureaucracy thesis’ (McSweeney, 2006) criticized the ‘top down’ nature explicit within hierarchy, castigating it as inefficient, overly rigid and even more damningly unjust. What was advocated in its place was a new ‘horizontal’ and ‘personal’ organization, trumpeting principles of cultural management, consensus and the so-called ‘human factor’. The undeniable attractiveness of this novel post-bureaucratic organization has not, perhaps unsurprisingly, spelt the end for hierarchy and bureaucracy within contemporary work organizations. Indeed, despite popular managerial attestations, it has been widely argued that the practice of contemporary organization remains fundamentally bureaucratic. As Kallinikos (2004, p. 11)

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puts it ‘‘the claim concerning the demise of bureaucracy has not been supported by the systematic investigation of the organizational and occupational order of modernity’’. So while it might be the case that within managerial rhetoric bureaucracy is regarded as ‘‘a dysfunctional, outdated and inefficient form of organization’’ (du Gay, 2003, p. 44) any claims to a wholesale change against bureaucracy have been grossly exaggerated. Moreover, such exaggeration ‘‘has been framed within a highly simplistic, optimistic and deterministic reading of the ‘fate of bureaucracy’ under the cumulative impact of economic, social, political and cultural changes that ‘the bureaucratic dinosaur’ cannot understand, much less control’’ (Courpasson & Reed, 2004, p. 11). This is not to say that nothing has changed, but rather that bureaucracy, and its attendant hierarchical model of control, continues to persist through its capacity for adaptation. As part of this, contemporary innovations in the organization of work such as the flattening of hierarchies, network organizations and flexible work practices ‘‘coexist with a model of bureaucratic control [yandy] may largely enhance the adaptability of the model of bureaucratic control, rather than herald its impending demise’’ (Walton, 2005, p. 588). Concurring, Courpasson and Clegg (2006) argue that while the advent of cultural entrepreneurialism promised the demise of bureaucracies, these promises have not been fulfilled. They claim that ‘‘bureaucracy, far from being superseded, is rejuvenating, through complex processes of hybridism in which supposedly opposite political structures and principles, the democratic and oligarchic, intermingle and propagate in such a way that most criticisms of bureaucracy are misplaced and misleading’’ (p. 319). What we are seeing, they go one to articulate, are new forms of organization – ones in which ‘‘the hallmarks of entrepreneurial organization, is facilitating the refurbishment of bureaucratic systems’’ (p. 320). This refurbishment is said to occur through a process of hybridization and adaptation. In what Courpasson (2000) calls ‘soft bureaucracies’ traditional centralization and entrepreneurial forms of organizing combine in a hybrid organizational form. Challenging the idea that ‘soft’ forms of management circulating around culture and identity have replaced structured and hierarchical control, Courpasson contends that such soft practices are incorporated within bureaucratic forms, with the latter remaining dominant. What this suggests is that the distinction between entrepreneurial/ post-bureaucratic and bureaucratic forms of governance is a false dichotomy, and that in contemporary organizations domination is exercised through more sophisticated, subtle and pervasive practices than the direct supervision and punitive action that characterized organizations of the past.

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Crucially, however, in such hybrid bureaucracies hierarchy is still alive and well, and in many instances it is the persistence of hierarchy itself that has enabled more flexible forms of organizing to be successfully adopted (Rhodes & Price, 2011). Accepting ‘‘the continued, and extremely ambivalent, relevance of bureaucracy to our understanding of the contemporary organizational world and our role within it’’ (Courpasson & Reed, 2004, p. 11) what needs to be asked is why bureaucracy persists given the trenchant critiques that it has received. A straightforward explanation of this would be to simply echo the Weberian position that bureaucracy, despite its alienating effects, is the most efficient system (Weber, 1968). It is tempting consequently to view hierarchy as merely a rational and inevitable component for the structuring of any organization. Importantly, however, hierarchy cannot be seen solely in pragmatic terms but as an underlying and contingent cultural and institutional ideology, as Weber also argued. In explaining this, Braverman (1974) for instance links the early transformation of the workplace to reflect values of hierarchy with the advancement of an emerging managerial ideology intended to break up the guild system within nineteenth century industrial factories. More sanguine, Taylor (1911) framed the promotion of hierarchy, understood in terms of the separation of the design and execution of work tasks, as a ‘universal principle’ necessary for organizational success (for discussions of Taylorism as an ideology see Boje & Winsor, 1993; Littler, 1978; Maier, 1970; Waring, 1994). Even more extremely hierarchy has also been positioned as a ‘natural’ form of organizing that would emerge organically, as if like a flower growing in a field, even if it were not rationally imposed – if rationality is at play it is to succumb to this nature by forming the ‘requisite organizational hierarchy’ (Jacques, 1998).

The Fantasmic Bureaucratic Ideal In considering how bureaucracy continues to shape organizational culture, operations and the identity of its members (Thompson & Alvesson, 2005) it is significant to emphasize that hierarchy was always as much an underlying ideal for comprehending organizations as it was a rational or unavoidable reality determining their functioning – in Weber’s terms as ‘ideal type’ (1949). Most famously Weber saw hierarchy in terms of the broader ‘bureaucraticization of society’ (see Harris & Hopfl, 2006; Weber, 1968). To his view, the arrangement of power bureaucratically represented its deeper elevation as a desirable and unquestioned model for ordering society. The

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implementation of bureaucracy within the workplace was symbolic of and came to reproduce this belief in the necessity of hierarchy for configuring organizations as such. Present consequently was the strong socio-cultural component of bureaucracy, and its formative principles of bureaucracy. It both reflected and constituted how individual’s made sense of and sought to experience their surrounding world. Extending from these considerations it is thus important to investigate what, if any, shared social longings underlie and sustain this ideal even up to the present. Such idealized values represent a seemingly unrelenting yearning for the achievement of an unblemished order, unmarred by social conflict or confusion over one’s social place. Within the context of the organization bureaucracy symbolizes a desire for a perfect institution contra the fearful appearance of the ‘disorganized’ other threatening in its wake anarchy and uncertainty (Cooper, 1990). Crucially, this wish for stability, and with it harmony, reflects a spiritual, in particular eschatological, dimension to these desires. It should perhaps come as little surprise that the etymological root of hierarchy is the late Greek word hierarkhia, the rule of the high priest. Its early usage was also intricately related to the presence of a divine order, exemplified in Dionysius the Areopagite’s fifteenth century Hierarchy of Angels which organized celestial beings according to their proximity to God and the world respectively. These divinely inspired beginnings resonate with the current association of those in power, those at the apex of bureaucracies, as having ‘god-like power’ (Kornberger, Rhodes, & ten Bos, 2006, p. 64; see also Parker, 2009). Contemporary managerial forms of organizing are deeply implicated in this theological legacy, and its sustained and still present cultural embeddedness (Parker, 2009). Put into a secular context, this ideal of hierarchy as symbolic of the divine is itself representative of a modern preoccupation with an idealized patriarchal conception of sovereign power. Sovereignty transcends the mere practice of leadership and epitomizes the longed for ‘‘power to decide, to be decisive, to prevail [y] and to give the force of law’’ akin to a mythical father in full charge of his household and its inhabitants (Derrida, 2005, p. 13). This craving for mastery, equally of oneself and others, is moreover essential to defining Western myths of freedom and autonomy so much so that it is a commonly accepted truth that ‘‘there is no freedom without [y] a certain sovereignty’’ (ibid, p. 23). This suggests that hierarchy, even as it is criticized for its failures, remains wedded to an idyllic vision of a perfect order where our bureaucratic superiors embody this divinity personified in the presence of a decisive and just sovereign. Returning to the confines of the contemporary organization, our boss may be a fool however this just puts into greater relief our desire

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for him or her not to be. Moreover, such an order connects directly to the desire for freedom – the sovereign being that person who achieves the ultimate freedom of the ‘‘faculty of power to do as one pleases, to decide, to choose, to determine one-self, to have self-determination, to be a master, and first of all master of one-self’’ (Derrida, 2005, p. 22). The definitive manifestation of freedom would be sovereignty – being on top of the hierarchy and beholden to no one. The highest of high, the purest of the pure, to be achieved by being on top. Nearest to god. The utopianism attached to sovereignty, filtered through to hierarchy (and concretely bureaucracy) points to its cultural, affective and psychological, ‘grip’. Lacan’s (2001) concept of fantasy is particular useful for theoretically teasing out this relation. With this concept we can understand identity as an attempt by individuals to achieve psychic ‘wholeness’ in the face of their fundamentally lacking and fragmentary nature. In particular this drive for completeness is connected to what Lacan calls the ‘big Other’ – that which is symbolized as whole and unassailable, having achieved the beatific possibility of having all desires fulfilled without resistance, or encumbrance to freedom. In this way fantasy provides subjects an always precarious subjective unity that works by attempting to fill one’s own ‘lack’ of completeness by engaging with a fantasy about a mythical completeness elsewhere. Lacan views fantasy as the ‘‘finely donned armour of an alienating identity that will mark [a person’s] entire mental development within its rigid structures’’ (Lacan, 2001, p. 6). At the level of the social this permits a more sophisticated understanding of how ideals such as sovereignty and freedom can seize us psychologically. In this vein Glynos (2001) provides a ‘fantasmatic approach to ideology’ concentrating on the ability of prevailing beliefs to affectively ‘transfix subjects’. What emerges is what Lacanian scholars such as Glynos and Zˇizˇek refer to as a ‘subject of desire’ whereby individual identity is anchored to a larger fantasy. Here a subject’s sense of self is discovered and maintained solely in ‘‘being included in a fantasy scene – which gives consistency to the subject’s desire’’ (Zˇizˇek, 1989, p. 119). The power of these shared fantasies lie in their power to ‘‘grip and transfix subjects’’ (Glynos, 2001, p. 192) affectively. These fantasies are not merely a rhetoric deliberately developed to persuade someone of a particular argument or point of view, but rather are deeply internalized desires that drive both action and the sense we have of who we are. Neither are such fantasies to be understood as an ‘ideology’ – at least if the term ideology is used to refer to a system of thinking that purports to present knowledge and truth in a particular way. Instead we are referring to what Zˇizˇek (1989) calls an ‘ideological fantasy’ – a set of beliefs that serve to structure our sense of reality.

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Focussing on fantasy attends to the psychological investment people commit to a ‘subjectively objective’ world where fantasy is less of a ‘‘dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality’’ and instead it is that which serves as a ‘‘support for our ‘reality’ itself’’ (Zˇizˇek, 1989, p. 45). Fantasy is accordingly ‘‘the element which holds together a given community’’ one which ‘‘cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification’’ as ‘‘the bonds linking together its members always implies a shared relationship to the Thing, toward enjoyment incarnated’’ (Zˇizˇek, 1993, p. 201). Specifically this constructed ‘reality’ centres upon and is made possible by a ‘vanishing desire’ associated with a beatific image of the future promising psychic wholeness. In this way ‘‘not only does it not matter that the object is unattainable. This lack is central to maintaining desiring. And, as Lacan indicates, if we ever achieve the object of desire, it collapses – it falls apart and is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit’’ (Jones & Spicer, 2005, p. 237). What sustains us instead is the ‘fantasmatic narrative’ derived from this desire – one located in the continual ‘love and strife’ in our constant but necessarily failed attempts to realize these ingrained cultural ideals (Bloom & Cederstrom, 2009). This leads us to question how values of hierarchy, and their existence organizationally in the form of persistent bureaucracies, might entail individuals attaching themselves to a utopian desire for a harmonious order led by a just sovereign. Specifically, this would embody a number of established modern liberal and capitalist ideals including but not limited to themes of rationality, freedom, democracy, fairness and meritocracy. Also arising is the question of whether people actually long for a situation where power is organized according to merit and superiors are chosen according to their competence and overall rationality. In this sense it might be possible that bureaucratic hierarchy continues to serve as an ‘ideal type’ – not just an organizational ideal, but rather as a fantasy of righteousness. While this may be understood to be an impossible dream in practice it is this very idealism that might just be that which drives action and consciousness. It is the presence, character and potency of such an idealized fantasy that we seek to investigate at a cultural level.

HIERARCHY ON TV: PARODY, CULTURE, AND POWER Where might we look in seeking to appreciate the cultural meaning of hierarchy that we are committed to investigating? Organizational scholars within a critical tradition increasingly recognize that ‘‘an understanding of

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‘organization’ can be drawn from a wide range of cultural sources’’ (Parker, 2009). More specifically it has been claimed that ‘‘popular culture provides insightful elucidations of the cultural meanings of work in contemporary society [ythaty] are often consonant with the critical study of management and organizations’’ (Rhodes & Westwood, 2008, p. 51). This suggests that cultural mediums such as TV, the internet, radio and newspapers are of value to research because they give expression to, and are instrumental in shaping, individuals’ views and expectations of their work. Especially relevant to this approach is the function of culture for challenging prevailing organizational and cultural norms. In particular, humour and comedy have been highlighted for their ability to be ‘‘deployed as resistance, challenge and subversion’’ (Westwood & Rhodes, 2007, p. 4). A prevalent form of such subversion comes by way of making fun of those who hold positions of hierarchical authority – whether it be social, political or organizational. Politicians, celebrities, and business leaders are routinely skewered within popular culture ranging from viral videos posted on the internet to late night comedic television programmes. Such forms of parody serve to ‘‘expose those in power through forms of self aware ridicule’’ (Critchley, 2008, p. 124) as well undermining and subverting such power by challenging its status as a naturalized component of the social order. The example of the royal wedding used at the outset of this paper exemplifies the perceived danger of this subversive capability of cultural humour. As part of their telecast of the wedding The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) contracted the award winning comedy team The Chaser, known for confronting politicians and business leaders in live settings such as press conferences and parliament in order to embarrass and provoke them or play practical jokes, to provide live commentary for the event. These plans however were thwarted as two days before the programme, facetiously billed as being ‘‘uninformed and unconstitutional’’, was to be aired the Associated Press Television News, at the behest of the private office of the Prince of Wales and the BBC, issued a new condition. This condition stated that the footage of the wedding could not be used ‘‘in any drama, comedy, satirical or similar entertainment program or content’’. This prohibition was selectively enforced – Australian comedian Dame Edna Everidge was allowed to participate while the team from the The Chaser was banned. Perhaps getting the last laugh after all, a representative of the cast parodied this seemingly anachronistic state of affairs saying: ‘‘For a monarchy to be issuing decrees about how the media should cover them seems quite out of keeping with modern democratic times y but I suppose that’s exactly what the monarchy is’’ (ABC News, 2007).

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Significantly, this was not the case of The Chaser being affected by an impersonal rule – the new conditions were issued by Clarence House, the office of the Prince of Wales and Prince William, in direct response to them becoming aware of The Chaser’s plans (Idato, 2011). An immediate question which comes to mind is why the Royal Family would be so afraid of an Australian comedy team, so much so that they would forcibly prevent them from broadcasting a commentary on the wedding? At very least this acknowledges a recognition of the power of comedy – not just a matter of a few harmless laughs it appears that there was a well founded concern of the potential harm that those laughs might create. Indeed the practice of mocking, satirizing and parodying the monarchy and the hierarchy that it embodies and represents is by no means new. As Bakhtin (1984) explains in great detail, within medieval Europe it was the tradition of the carnival that served such a function. Here the ritual of the carnival provided a formal life outside of the religious, political and monarchical restrictions that were in place for the rest of the year. Thus the ‘‘carnival celebrated a temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions’’ (p. 10). Central to this cultural expression of humour and resistance was the creation of an ‘upside-down’ world involving ‘‘the suspension of all hierarchical precedence’’ (p. 10) through a parody and degradation; a ‘‘lowering of all that is high’’ (p. 19). These practices expanded into a socially widespread carnivalesque form of humour. Tellingly such humour, in medieval times, was focussed on turning hierarchy ‘‘inside-out’’ through various forms of ‘‘uncrownings and debasements’’ (p. 270) of authority figures. This is no doubt the type of treatment that The Chaser had in mind for the Royal newlyweds. Moreover this also attests that carnivalesque humour did not die with the medieval carnival, and it remains today a significant part of popular culture. As Docker (1994) explains: ‘‘Carnivalesque as a cultural mode still strongly influences twentieth century mass culture, in Hollywood film, popular literary genres, television, music: a culture that in its exuberance, range, excess, internationalism, and irrepressible vigour and inventiveness perhaps represents another summit in the history of popular culture, comparable to that of early modern Europe’’ (p. 185). In relation to this popular culture remains a social force of critique in its capacity to ‘‘question and problematize different aspects of everyday life by both representing a form of social reality and being open to playing with the possibilities of that reality in a variety of ways’’ (Rhodes, 2001, p. 377). It may well be the case that it was these types of questions that the Royal Family did not want The Chaser to ask or, even worse, address. What is at

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stake is how ‘television culture’ has the potential to ‘‘evade, resist, or scandalize ideology and social control’’ (Fiske, 1987, p. 240) by going ‘‘beyond dogmatism, beyond Puritanism, beyond economism, and beyond cultural defeatism’’ (Stam, 1989, p. 25). The value of studying (and taking seriously) carnivalesque culture for the purpose of understanding organizational culture and working life has not gone unnoticed (e.g. Beyes & Steyaert, 2006; Boje, 2001; Rhodes, 2001, 2002; Slutskaya & de Cock, 2008). The parody and over-turning that is central to carnivalesque humour is an especially valuable avenue for cultural and theoretical articulation (Rhodes & Westwood, 2008), in that the mainstay of its practice is the development of a representation of shared cultural experience in a manner that exaggerates it with critical and ironic distance so as to point to its failings and inadequacies (Dentith, 2000). Parody is, however, by no means universally hailed as an effective instance of social critique and resistance. A dominant objection in this regard is that such cultural expressions of humour offer merely the facsimile of resistance rather than the actual constituting of struggles for change. Further, within our daily working experiences the deployment of humour as a form opposition can actually assist in the reproduction of dominant organizational and practices through acting as a ‘safety valve’ for engaging in resistance (Collinson, 2002; Kenny, 2009). Indeed, such a ‘safety valve’ thesis is well established. As far back as 1931 Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, the Soviet People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, argued that ‘‘carnival is a safety valve for passions that otherwise might erupt in revolution; the lower orders would let off steam in a harmless, temporary event’’ (quoted in Docker, 1994, p. 171). Approaching humour from the perspective of carnival does, however, offer more affirmative possibilities than the simple mechanical metaphor of the safety valve. This was a point of direct importance to Bakhtin himself, who, on hearing Lunacharsky’s views felt that they ‘‘flew directly in the face of evidence [he] was then compiling’’ (Holquist, 1984, p. xviii). In one sense this demonstrates Bakhtin’s appreciation for the subversive dimensions of folk culture, but it is also suggestive of the deeply ambivalent nature of carnival humour – and moreover that this ambivalence is its strength. The humour of carnival is not one of providing utopian alternatives but of opening up opportunities for critique (Rhodes, 2001). It is precisely in this ‘opening’ up that carnival offers its subversive potential. Our connection with popular culture in this paper is thus one that seeks to draw insight from how carnivalesque parody opens possibilities for the subversion of dominant understandings of hierarchy through a dynamic ‘‘critique in culture’’ that ‘‘enables a dramatic and productive engagement

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with the possible meanings of the experience of working’’ (Rhodes, 2007, p. 24). For us this engagement is directed at developing new ways of conceiving hierarchy that exceed both that are culturally meaningful and that are theoretically established. In order to tease out the peculiar cultural logic of hierarchy as connected to spiritual fantasies of sovereignty, the subsequent and central part of the paper examines two representations of its occurrence within mass mediated popular culture. The first is comedian Will Farrell’s critical impersonation of former U.S. president George W. Bush, especially as it was presented in 2009’s Broadway play and HBO Special You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush. The second example is the U.S. version of the television comedy The Office (2005–) as it relates to activities of Michael Scott, a branch manager of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. Despite differences in power – one is a low level manager while the other is the head of the world’s most powerful political organization – we show how the portrayal of each of these characters parodies modern hierarchy through their carnivalesque representation of contemporary leaders as narcissistic, foolish and incompetent. Our intention consequently is to examine the carnivalesque parody that these programmes employ as a means through which to appreciate the cultural knowledge they seek to over-turn, critique, make fun of and perhaps most importantly render visible in the nakedness of its ‘reality’. Such an examination in turn offers the possibility for assessing the potential of these cultural expressions of critique for providing, following BernardDonals (1998, p. 197), ‘‘a radical transformation of the ways that a culture sees and understands the relations amongst its subjects that is the central contribution of a Bakhtinian notion of carnival to cultural studies’’. Analytically therefore what these cases offer is the opportunity to make the rules and norms of culture more visible through a mockery of their exaggeration, in turn allowing them to be interrogated and questioned (Rhodes, 2001). It is on this basis that we now turn on the television to try to learn more about the persistence of hierarchy.

LAUGHING AT HIERARCHY Will Ferrell’s’ George W. Bush To continue to draw out the cultural logic of hierarchy we turn to an example that represents the very apex of global hierarchical power – the

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presidential office of the United States of America. Given this power it is not surprising that U.S. presidents have long been material for comedy. George Walker Bush, the 43rd president who held the presidential office between 2001 and 2009, is by no means an exception. During his presidency Bush was widely satirized as being somewhat stupid and prone to bizarre abuses of the English language. On programmes such as David Letterman’s The Late Show, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show what was most often caricatured or ridiculed was Bush’s intelligence, his use of malapropisms and his knowledgeability (especially of foreign affairs). It was even remarked that he was ‘‘God’s gift to comedy’’ (Cavendish, 2008). The U.S. presidency exemplifies a sovereignty located at the very top of the hierarchy of American institutions – but with comedy this sovereignty is not lauded, but mocked, satirized, parodied and carnivalized. In respect to the latter, what these comedies do is to represent power in a mode standing in opposition to official culture – a ‘‘second life, organized on the basis of laughter’’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 8) that brings those on high down to earth through mockery and exaggeration. If, as Bakhtin states ‘‘every act of world history [is] accompanied by a laughing chorus’’ (p. 474) then the history of George W. Bush is the rule rather than the exception. One of the most successful parodies of Bush was performed by comedian Will Ferrell initially in the U.S. comedy television programme Saturday Night Live. On 20 January 2009, Bush’s final day in office, Ferrell reprised his impersonation on Broadway with the show You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush. The show was also broadcast live on the cable television channel HBO, a 90-minute recording which was released in March of 2009. The premise of Ferrell’s show is that Bush is delivering a farewell speech to mark the end of his presidency. As he puts it in the opening scene: ‘‘We’re here to remember, and celebrate and cherish my last eight years of service to you.’’ With Bush’s narcissism already made explicit the show proceeds as Bush tells stories and recounts episodes from his time as president. The parody works as Ferrell’s Bush seeks to aggrandize his power and position, while at the same time undermining it – he does after all announce himself as ‘‘king shit on turd mountain’’. Bush comes across as an extraordinarily over-confident man who self-assuredness overshadows his incompetence and lack of intelligence. This confidence, significantly, is very much associated with the assumption of male sexual power. As he begins his celebrations, and following leading the audience in a prayer he says, ‘‘I’m feeling so wild tonight I might

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even show a picture of my penis’’. Then projected on the screen behind him is a close-up shot of a man’s penis, hanging flaccidly and sexlessly from a bush of pubic hair. This is not powerful iconography of the phallus as much as the mundane reality of male sex. And, if carnival humour is orchestrated by bringing down to earth of all that is high, most especially through degradation of the ‘bodily lower stratum’ (Bakhtin, 1984) then again we see here already a humorous critique of hierarchical power in the figure of Bush’s unimpressive member. Bush is unaware of this unimpressiveness – ‘that’s shock and awe right there’ he exclaims, ‘that’s my stimulus package’. The rest of the show is dedicated to Bush recounting his autobiography, starting from his birth in 1946 until the present. He recalls a childhood of mischief, his sexual exploits as a young man, his lost youth, his business interests and the beginning of his political career. At all stages Bush reveals his naivete´ and stupidity coupled with his ivy league privilege and sense of entitlement. Self-confident to the end he says, ‘‘when I look in the mirror, I like what I see’’. But this is also the Bush who gets lock jaw from cutting himself on barbed wire at his ranch, who has the CIA investigate whether Freddy Krueger is a real threat to U.S. security and who was playing with baseball cards when it was announced to him that he had been elected as president. This is the Bush who never expected to be elected, and after it happened he recalls sitting in the White House thinking ‘‘shit, I actually have to do this now’’. Faced with the cacophony of voices demanding things of him he screams ‘‘Arrgghh y you see how annoying that could be. Especially when you have no idea of what you’re doing?’’ But he still has no qualms about his power. When heckled by a member of the audience he becomes angry screaming ‘‘fuck you asshole y I was the leader of the free world dipshit [y] take him out there and water board him’’. His power is, in his mind, just manifest; and he has a mobile phone with the secret telephone numbers of every world leader (the actual phone being a replacement for the original one that he dropped in the toilet at the Beijing Olympics)! It is not just Bush who is the target of the humour. His whole senior cabinet – who he refers to as his ‘road dogs’ – come under fire. At the top layer of the hierarchy, it would seem, resides no one worthy of admiration. Bush recounts how he ran into Dick Cheney, his vice president, in the basement of the White House and with carnival panache ‘‘he was being fucked by a giant goat devil in a room full of pentagrams. He looked up at me with solid silver orb like eyes and his breath had a strong ammonia scent to it’’. Donald Rumsfeld is a violent opportunist, Colin Powell is weak and prepared to do things he doesn’t believe in, Tommy Thompson the Secretary

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of Health is best known for ‘having funny jokes about Jews’ and senior advisor Karl Rove is nicknamed ‘turd blossom’ (apparently a real nickname used by Bush rather than one made up by Ferrell). If there is a political character who is portrayed with more respect – at least dubious respect – it is Barack Obama, the president elect who was then about to take up the office of the president. In commenting on Obama’s election Bush says, ‘‘I’ve gotta be honest with you, I’m a fan of the Tiger Woods guy.’’ Of course here we have commentary on race relations, as successful AfroAmericans get cast in the same generalized net of identification. But Bush recognizes too that the power, authority and responsibility granted by hierarchy is fleeting – sovereignty requires hierarchy. When discussing an imagined political problem involving escaped military monkeys he says, ‘‘well you know I could give a shit, it’s the Tiger Woods guy’s problem now’’. Ferrell’s parody of Bush is not unaware of the spiritual connections between earthy hierarchy and religion. Bush frequently refers to God – a God who is on his side and the only figure he vaguely defers to as being more powerful than him. But Bush’s god, as the ultimate sovereign is also not free from being the subject of humour. In one segment Bush holds his hands together in prayer like a choir boy: Dear blonde, almost Swiss looking Jesus we ask you to allow us to accept everyone in this theatre tonight regardless of their religious beliefs, whether it be Muslim or Hindu or Jewish or Witchcraft. [y] Once again we thank you for everything you do and want you to remind everyone in this theatre that by participating in this prayer they have automatically accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and saviour, regardless of their religious beliefs and they cannot get out of it no matter what retroactive as soon as I say Amen. Amen.

This resonates with Bush’s apparent belief that the pursuit and enforcement of freedom on a global scale that characterized his presidency is indeed God’s gift and God’s will. Moreover it is his duty to impose that will on others – in the case of the theatre by him trying to trick the audience into converting to Christianity. The association of Jesus as being of European appearance seals the relationship between America, religion and Bush’s hierarchical power. At the top of the heavenly hierarchy the only authority to obey is that of the Swiss looking Jesus. Ferrell’s comedy may make this look stupid and ludicrous, but in exaggerating and carnivalizing the figure of Bush, it draws attention to the way in which such power can be captivating. Bush’s fantasy is that of complete sovereignty achieved through hierarchy, To repeat: ‘‘fuck you asshole y I was the leader of the free world’’. Indeed, by inference, the God blessed leader.

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Steve Carell’s Office While Will Ferrell offers a parody showing deep cultural disdain for hierarchy at the highest political level, such modes of parody are not limited to such lofty heights. To consider this we next turn to a parody of a much more mundane figure of hierarchical authority – that of the middle manager as portrayed in the television comedy The Office. The Office is a workplace comedy originating in the United Kingdom and which has spawned remakes across the globe. Undoubtedly the most famous of these is the American version which began in 2005. The show proposes to be a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary covering the daily experiences of employees at a paper company in a small city. Central to the programme is the character of the boss Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell. Through this character The Office provides a direct comic reflection of the social ideals of hierarchy and bureaucracy. To explore this, in this section we focus on a particular episode that concerns the public insubordination of a long serving employee named Stanley and how this plays out in relation to the authority structures of the office (episode 12, season 4, ‘Did I Stutter?’, first aired 1 May 2008). The central part of this episode occurs when Michael asks Stanley to stop working on his crossword puzzle during a meeting where Michael is asking staff for suggestions as to ‘‘how to energize our office’’. Michael Scott: Earth to Stanley! Stanley: Not me. Michael Scott: Yes you. Come on. Stanley. Put your little game down and join the group. Stanley: No. Michael Scott: Stanley we’re havin’ a little brainstorm session Stanley: Did I stutter!? Michael Scott: Good. This is good. I’m going to grab a glass of water

Michael ends the meeting. Following this opening event, the plot focuses on Michael’s attempt to regain his ‘rightful’ authority in the face of this public embarrassment. He does not succeed. When an apology is demanded of Staley he responds: ‘‘It’s like I used to tell my wife. I do not apologize unless I think I’m wrong.’’ Undoubtedly this episode stands as a biting parody of contemporary workplace relations that also serves, at least in part, as a carnivalized exaggeration of managerialism as overturned by the act of unrepentant insubordination – a ‘‘lowering of all that is high, spiritual, abstract’’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 19). In this case it is management itself that is ‘on high’ – the expectation, as expressed by Michael himself, that as a hierarchical functionary he should expect and be granted respect. The

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humour derives from the accepted desire for the presence of an idealized strong boss – we laugh at his lack only because we are aware of the ideal of the sovereign who deserves his employees’ admiration and loyalty. As the episode proceeds, what develops amongst the other staff is an increasing condemnation of Michael as unworthy of his managerial position. Toby, the beleaguered HR representative, tells Michael privately that he must address the ‘Stanley situation’. When Michael instead tries to simply pass it off as a joke and then pretend to be sick to avoid confronting Stanley, Toby replies: ‘‘You know Michael sometimes my daughter’s stomach hurts when she doesn’t want to go to school.’’ Contained within this appeal is Toby’s unaffected belief that superiors, even those as flawed as Michael, must be respected if the branch is to remain functioning and further must take responsibility for maintaining this necessary sense of respect. The onus thus is on Michael to play the role of the ideal sovereign and restore the sanctity of the hierarchical order for the company’s imminent survival. Michael responds by engaging in progressively foolish and undignified attempts to alleviate the problem. His first encounters with Stanley are sadly comical at best and downright pathetic at worst. Michael appeals to Stanley: Well you know that thing you said earlier that you didn’t meanyum that I forgive you for. The whole things silly isn’t it? Friends don’t need to apologize to friends as far as I’m concerned. So we’re cool.

In this case Michael seeks to take up, albeit in a parodied way, the figure of the merciful sovereign, the leader who has been wronged by his underlings yet remains magnanimous and forgiving. Stanley, perhaps not surprisingly, refuses to kowtow to such an insincere and weak response. He states simply but with authority, ‘‘I am not going to apologize to you.’’ This reveals in turn not only the need for Michael to be more forceful in his response to Stanley but also the paucity of the ‘post-bureaucratic’ human centred approach. Later after Michael’s botched attempt to remedy the situation by ‘fakefiring Stanley’ Stanley reveals in his immediate anger what most bothers him about Michael: Do you have any idea of how to run an office? Every day you do something stupider than before and I think there’s not possible way he can top that and what do you do? You find a way damnit to top it! You are a professional idiot!

After telling the entire office to leave so that he could talk to Stanley alone what follows is comedic tragedy, with the emphasis squarely on the latter. The other employees naturally anticipate that finally Stanley will be punished, that Michael will take firm action against the defiance of his underling. Instead in

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private he reverts back to a pitiable figure who craves only Stanley’s love and acceptance. He asks, feebly holding back tears, ‘‘I don’t understand why you keep picking on me.’’ The fact that this longing to be liked is portrayed as a sign of weakness rather than one of deep humanity speaks volumes in this instance. What is sad is that Michael, despite all his suffered ignominies and Stanley’s refusal to apologize at any point, continues to want his tormenter’s personal approval rather than fear. This bears witness to the ingrained expectation that a boss should take charge and treat transgressions as an effrontery as opposed to an opportunity to establish a common human bond between equals. Stanley for his part shares in this disdain. When Michael pleads with him to ‘‘please help me understand’’ why he is being mean to him, Stanley proclaims ‘‘Fine, here it is. You are a person I do not respect. The things you say, your methods, your actions, your style, everything you do I would do it the opposite way.’’ Michael responds in turn: ‘‘Well Stanley maybe you are feeling you don’t respect me because you don’t know me very well.’’ Not ceding any territory for the sake of nicety or his job, Stanley maintains: ‘‘Michael I’ve been here a very long time, and the more I’ve known you the less I’ve come to respect you.’’ Of particular relevance is that Stanley’s attack is not meant for comedy or even cathartic derision. It is rather done in a manner that reveals a profound sorrow – regret that Michael cannot be the boss that would demand his respect, remorse that his boss is so undeserving of his praise and obedience. The problem with this hierarchy is that it is not hierarchical enough. Exerting authority for the first real time, Michael declares to his wayward employee: ‘‘Alright you don’t respect me. I accept that. But listen to me. You can’t talk to me in that manner in this office. You just can’t. I am your boss. I can’t allow it.’’ Tellingly, it is only now that Stanley shows Michael any due respect. He responds by accepting this condition without question, exhibiting not defeat but poignant relief. He says simply ‘‘Fair enough’’ and the two men shake hands. All once again is right with the world, the boss has regained his power and his underling can at last return to his position of accepted and dutiful inferiority to a worthwhile sovereign. In that moment there is glimpsed, fleetingly, a perfect order where superiors appear to receive the reverence of those they lead – even if it has to be faked for the fantasy to remain intact.

THE REALITY OF HIERARCHY What we have seen with both The Office and You’re Welcome America may initially appear to be simple cultural critiques of hierarchical

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authority – making fun of leaders for the sake of a few laughs. There is, however, much more going on than a mere denunciation of authoritarian idiocy. Instead, they each alert us to a cultural commitment to a vision of bureaucratic power affiliated with desires for god-like ability on the one hand and the sanctity of divine justice on the other. This is manifested in the ‘manhood acts’ that Scott and Bush engage in so as to try to signify (falsely or not) ‘‘a capacity to exert control over one’s self, the environment, and others’’ (Schrock & Schwalbe, 2009, p. 286) – in other words to practice sovereignty. Such acts, however, fail and it is in this failure that the comedy emerges – in between the reality of authoritarian practice and the fantasy of spiritualized sovereignty. The carnivalized exaggeration and over-turning of idealized expectations serves also to highlight the cultural desirability and correctness of these idealized traits while denigrating power holders in their failure to live up to such daunting expectations. In other words we laugh at them precisely because they are not hierarchical and sovereign enough – because they do not make real the idealized image of sovereignty that hierarchy promises. As discussed earlier sovereignty is a value that derives ultimately from a spiritual basis – with God as the ultimate sovereign. It is this idealized figure, free from all superordinate authority and at liberty to exercise his will without any encumbrance of resistance or weakness, that is ultimately desired. Further, it is this desire for God that becomes translated into our desire for idealized leaders seated at the top of our hierarchy and characterized by pure spiritual perfection. No human being could live up to this – and with the comedies we have been discussing just how much they cannot do so is put on show. In You’re Welcome America we have a parody of hierarchy in its highest order, in The Office the parody of hierarchy is at the more mundane level of middle management, but the butt of the joke is the same. What is shared by these cultural representations is that they use dimensions of carnival humour to highlight an awareness of the troubling nature of hierarchy and its assumption of sovereignty. In the case of The Office the dysfunction of the corporation as a whole, personified by the antics of Michael Scott, represent not merely a trenchant critique on the absurdities of modern day corporate culture, but also reveal much about the daily cultural realities of hierarchy. In this sense the programme directly challenges any idealization of bureaucracy as being rational and fair in its operation and whose leaders are just and wise. Present is a carnivalesque parodying of sovereignty, and as such bureaucratic hierarchy, found in the figure of the workplace leader. Yet just as importantly, the anger and casual disdain directed towards management in the programme demonstrates not a dis-identification with

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such ideals, but rather a dissatisfaction that the current situation does not live up to these ideals. Similarly with George W. Bush, as we have seen, the source of the humour arises by drawing a comparison between his caricatured antics as a narcissistic idiot and the expectation that someone in his position should bear out more virtuous characteristics. Ferrell’s Bush is funny precisely because he departs from the expectation we might have of what constitutes a just sovereign. The humour thus, does not contravene the valour of those ideals but rather draws attention to their existence as a cultural reality. It is in this sense that these parodies can help us better understand these realities as revealed through the vividness of the humour that they are placed against. In both cases, despite differences of focus, the source of the humour rests on a skewering of hierarchy. Paradoxically, however, what this shows is the sustained desire for hierarchy in the abstract. Both make visible an attitude whereby the ‘perfect world’ is to be found in an idyllic vision of a ‘perfect’ organizational bureaucracy and hierarchical organization. Such an idyll is presented not as reality, far from it, it is a fantasy which reality does not live up to. Without such a fantasy the shows would simply not be funny. Each in their own way thus illuminates, in quite strong mockery and carnivalization, not just the deficiencies of this ‘ideal type’ in practice but also its continuing appeal to a deeper cultural fantasy. This is not a fantasy in the sense that we might imagine people daydreaming of hierarchy, but a fantasy in relation to a cultural imaginary that drives action through an often implicit and unmet desire for its realization. This conceptualization suggests that fantasy serves as a means to overcome an inherent lack in the meaningfulness of real organizational experience. This fantasy, inexorably linked to a fetishized desire, covers ‘‘over the lack in the Other’’ consequently ‘‘filling the lack in the subject’’ (Stavrakakis, 1999, p. 46). As we have been discussing, this lack of realized sovereignty on the part of hierarchy’s office holders (as demonstrated in our examples) fuels the need to maintain the fantasy of that sovereignty by those who participate in and are affected by bureaucracy’s machinations. What follows is that the lack of sovereignty’s realization, rather than being a reason to give up in believing in it, actually sustains the subject ‘‘as a being of desire, a desiring being’’ (Fink, 1996, p. 61) – especially one desiring of the self-security that sovereignty proffers. This fantasy is ‘‘the means by which [the subject] maintains himself at the level of his vanishing desire’’ (Lacan, 2001, p. 259) – it grants a tenuous consistency linked to an idealized yet forever elusive socially constructed desire. It is the functioning of the fetishized desire for sovereignty that thus explains the persistence of hierarchy on a cultural level.

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As we have been arguing, the persistence of bureaucratic hierarchy is structured through a ‘fantasmatic narrative’ revolving around the spiritualized cultural ideal of sovereignty. At play here is ‘‘the larger struggle between a stabilizing fantasy, promising wholeness, and a de-stabilizing fantasy, threatening to prevent this beatific possibility from occurring’’ (Bloom & Cederstrom, 2009) – the comedies draw attention to this threat. This illustrates the paradoxical function of fantasy in so much as ‘‘desire’s very existence relies on its being forever dis-satisfied’’ (Glynos, 2001, p. 201) – again a matter demonstrated clearly in both of our cultural examples. In this way hierarchy ‘‘appears only as a model of possibility that at once is attractive in its organization, and at once is fearful in the impossibility of ever being organized enough’’ (Pullen & Rhodes, 2008, p. 250). The implication of this is that sovereignty and hierarchy, as interdependent affective ideals, must ultimately fail in order that we remain subjects of desire in thrall of their affective promise. Ironically this means that the failure of hierarchy in practice is what ensures its persistence as a fantasmic ideal and concomitantly as a driving force in real organizations. It is exactly here that we can see so vividly the paradoxical role of parody for sustaining this fantasy. In rendering leaders and managers as fools, as unworthy of respect, what is being preserved is the desire for this ideal. Put differently, what is being lampooned is not the romanticized vision of an ideal hierarchy led by a just sovereign but the utter failure of existing leaders and systems to live up to such lofty ideals. Underpinning the parody therefore are feelings equally of hope and lament. Hope, most notably found in the George W. Bush example, that new leaders will more closely fulfil these dreams. Lament, that it seems all figures of authority seem so incapable of ever doing so. Crucially, it is this lack, this constant disappointment, which ironically organizes and reproduces us as subjects of desire to this cultural fantasy of hierarchy. It preserves us in a narrative of constantly pursuing, seeking out, indeed in its most literal sense fantasizing, about the possibility of this ideal coming into fruition. In doing so, we are spared the more traumatic realization that this romantic longing, like all fantasies, can never give us the psychic wholeness we so fervently desire. In this respect, it is easier to parody our most cherished values as impossible yet nevertheless desirable rather than admit that they are incapable of ever granting us the completeness we cling to for our psychic survival. It is thus the cultural centrality of the unrealized desire for sovereignty that ensures hierarchy’s persistence. Put differently, hierarchy persists because it does not exist other than in an unfulfilled fantasy. With this fantasy desires for sovereignty are channelled into a constant pursuit of the

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cultural ideal associated with hierarchy – an ideal that lives in a ‘fantasmatic narrative’ at once inescapable and without denouement. On this basis our central point relates hierarchy to sovereignty, suggesting that hierarchy persists because of an unquenched and unquenchable desire for spiritual perfection not only amongst leaders, but also amongst those they lead. The force of carnival humour in this respect is found in its simultaneous revealing of the failure of this desire to be met in practice and perpetuation of it as a cultural and organizational ideal. Of primary import to our reading of The Office and You’re Welcome America is not the individual leader’s capturing of power but their location in a fantasmatic narrative attached to beatific understandings of sovereignty and concretely organizational hierarchy. This psychological narrative illustrates the paradoxical function of fantasy as requiring its own non-achievement for its very sustenance. Thus in questioning the very instantiation of hierarchy sustained ironically is the attractiveness of this sovereignty as an affective ideal, offering the prospect for their potential realization always just on the horizon. More so, it is the fact that it is always on the horizon that is central to the sovereign fantasy – that is that sovereignty while ultimately desirable is never fully realized other than in an imagined future. Particularly what we see present in the two leaders, Michael Scott and George Bush, is an unmet desire for a masculine form of sovereign mastery and an ongoing project of self-delusion into the belief that they have, or at least can, achieve such mastery. Through the exaggeration and over-turning of the carnivalesque, hierarchy is shown as a symbol and promise for the actualization, acquisition and exercise of a personal power over oneself and others, yet as a promise that is never actually realized. Equally significant, it is this appealing vision of sovereignty that maintains bureaucratic hierarchy culturally as an ideal, affectively gripping us in its romantic visions of just rule and a justly ordered society even whilst being perpetually mocked for failing to ever live to these ideals in reality. What is also interesting is that the fantasy of hierarchy to which we are referring is presented in a way that suggests that this is shared between people at different hierarchical levels – especially superiors and subordinates. As we have been discussing, both Bush and Scott while clearly not living up to the fantastic ideals, do in their own ways reinforce them as well as desire them. Through various processes of self-delusion they each work to maintain the illusion that they are the sovereign masters of their own domains. What we see especially in The Office, however, is that this desire is not just that of the ego-centric leader, but also of the followers. While his

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staff members quite easily acknowledge his comic incompetence, what this reveals is a desire for a different type of boss – one deserving of the sovereign title. By implication we can say that the persistence of hierarchy is bolstered not just by the deliberate actions and beliefs of some kind of power elite or managerial class, but rather by a fantasy that can be equally shared by people up and down the hierarchical ladder. King, boss and subordinate alike can be gripped by the fantasy.

CONCLUSION In this paper we have been investigating the perpetuation of hierarchy from a cultural perspective, especially in terms of how its persistence is fuelled by an unfulfilled desire for its realization as a cultural ideal – the very ideal reflected in and bolstered by the royal wedding discussed in the opening of the paper. We have argued that hierarchy reflects longings for a pure heavenly order that can never be attained yet nonetheless can psychologically seize individuals in its beatific vision. We have proposed also that people at all hierarchical levels can be so seized – whether it be royal and commoner, president and citizen, or boss and subordinate. This desire for ordered perfectibility lives on precisely because it remains unfulfilled as a type of ‘governing’ psychoanalytic fantasy (Zˇizˇek, 2001) such that what persists is not so much hierarchy itself but the desire for its idealized realization as manifest organizationally. The fantasy ideal of hierarchy is not just a ‘‘unified analytical construct’’ convenient through which to conduct sociological inquiry with ‘‘heuristic’’ or ‘‘expository’’ intentions. Instead this ideal is the instantiation of a shared cultural fantasy to which people socially aspire – the ‘‘utopian’’ rather than ‘‘real’’ nature of bureaucracy having already been identified by Weber (1949, p. 90). Crucial to this utopianism, we contend, is the desirability and ultimately reification of the sovereignty embedded in hierarchy. Indeed, the idea of sovereignty is essential for maintaining the Western myths of freedom and autonomy found in the mastery equally of oneself and others. Sovereignty thus holds out a continual promise of autonomous perfection, despite its practical failures, and in doing so holds also the promise of psychic fulfilment both personally and collectively. Yet if left here it would be all too easy fall into a perhaps comfortable political nihilism regarding both the ability of parody to inform the transformation of cultural as well as organizational relations and the inevitability of bureaucratic hierarchy as a hegemonic ideal. Indeed, the invoking

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of fantasy represents exactly this threat as often its seeming cultural permanence can create a defeated response of cynicism whereby parody is identified with as an exasperated response to a perceived unchanging social reality (Zˇizˇek, 1989). It has thus been suggested that parodying of the workplace and its values by employees (e.g. wearing a ‘McShit’ underneath your McDonald’s uniform) may in fact be a necessary support to a suturing organizational fantasy, allowing individuals to dissent despite conforming to such demands in their everyday behaviour (Fleming & Spicer, 2003). Despite the possibility of ideology being psychologically sustained via explicit processes of dis-identification linked to fantasy, we have sought to reveal a different aspect of this phenomenon. More precisely, we have shown through our examples how this cynicism operates in relation to the more general dimensions of culture. But unlike the fantasy of hierarchy that it subverts, with its ambivalence carnival laughter, fortunately, is without the moralizing force of that to which it is opposed. The comic subversion of the ideological fantasy does not leave in its place just another dominating fantasy: ‘‘instead of offering ideological answers that close down possibilities and options, the carnivalesque form is successful in opening up an arena for critique that does not seek ultimate resolutions’’ (Rhodes, 2001, p. 378). In response to the realizations that parody offers, it is thus necessary to avoid a dogmatic reaffirmation or replacement of beliefs, instead using them as a means to facilitate this opening up of critical potential. This suggests that the space to be opened is one in which it is the fantasy itself that needs to be subject to critique so as to re-orient desire in a way that might escape from the much deeper affective grip of the fantasy.

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CROSSING OF BOUNDARIES – SUBORDINATES’ CHALLENGES TO ORGANISATIONAL HIERARCHY Thomas Diefenbach and John A. A. Sillince ABSTRACT Within hierarchical relationships, subordinates are expected to obey the existing order and to function well. Their deviance or organisational misbehaviour is usually regarded negatively and as a threat to the system. However, there seems to be a paradox: Subordinates’ deviance and (occasional) misbehaviour does not threaten organisational hierarchy but often re-establishes or even strengthens hierarchical order even though it challenges it. In itself, this phenomenon is quite self-evident. What is less clear is when exactly subordinates’ deviance might contribute to the (further) stabilisation, continuation and persistence of the hierarchical social order and when it might be indeed system threatening. For interrogating the specific conditions and consequences of subordinates’ deviance within organisational settings, the concept of crossing of boundaries will be introduced and differentiated into weak, medium and strong crossings. The concept will then be applied to subordinates’ deviance in the realms of social action, interests, identity and norms and values. Keywords: Hierarchy; subordinates; organisational misbehaviour; deviance Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 171–201 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035009

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INTRODUCTION In organisations, opposition to, and deviance from hierarchical order is regarded not only as a threat to other members or subunits of the organisation but to the survival of the whole system (e.g. Bennett & Robinson, 2000; Kittrie, 1995; Robinson & Bennett, 1995, 1997). Subordinates, therefore, are expected to behave, that is to obey the existing order and to function well. Usually, subordinates do exactly that – because they have to and even want to. Cases when people do not behave as expected are portrayed as ‘dysfunctional’ behaviour or ‘workplace deviance’ (e.g. Biron, 2010; Boye & Slora, 1993; Bryant & Higgins, 2010; Lehman & Ramanujam, 2009; Prasad & Prasad, 1998; Spector & Fox, 2010; Wahrman, 2010). Following Robinson and Bennett (1997, p. 6), deviant workplace behaviour can be defined ‘as those behaviors that violate norms that are perceived by organizational members to be pivotal or significant norms to the dominant administrative coalition of the organization’. Terms such as ‘organisational misbehaviour’ (Vardi & Weitz, 2004), ‘workplace aggression’ (Bryant & Cox, 2003), ‘hostile workplace behaviour’ or ‘bad behaviour in organizations’ (Griffin & Lopez, 2005) make it even clearer that most (intentional) deviation from organisational norms and expectations is regarded negatively and as a threat to the larger entity, ‘the system’ (Griffin, O’Leary-Kelly, & Collins, 1998, p. 67). However, there seems to be a paradox: Subordinates’ ‘negative’ deviance and (occasional) misbehaviour does not only threaten organisational hierarchy but often re-establishes or even strengthens hierarchical order because it challenges it. In itself, this phenomenon is quite self-evident; individuals’ (potential) deviance regularly triggers control activities and punitive sanctions by the system as well as by their immediate superiors, that is it reconfirms the priority of the system and those who represent it. Moreover, misbehaviour and deviance serve as justifications for precautionary measures and the implementation of increasingly elaborated control and punishment systems. Therefore, the alleged or factual threats of deviance and related reactions strengthen the positions of superiors as well as the whole system. What is less clear is when exactly subordinates’ deviance might contribute to the (further) stabilisation, continuation and persistence of the hierarchical social order and when it, indeed, might be system threatening. This chapter shall contribute to the theoretical analysis of this problem. For this:

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1. A model of superiors’ and subordinates dynamic hierarchical relationship will be developed which addresses subordinates’ possible deviances within organisational settings via the concept of boundary crossings in different intensities. 2. On the basis of this model, the impact of weak, medium and strong crossing of boundaries on the hierarchical order will be analysed in the realms of social action, interests, identity and norms and values. 3. The analysis will lead to propositions stating the specific conditions under which subordinates’ deviance either strengthens or threatens the system of hierarchical order and its future existence. The overall argumentation is based on Scott’s (1990) sociological/ anthropological concept of public and hidden transcripts, sociological approaches, such as Mousnier’s (1973) social hierarchies, socio-psychological approaches, such as Sidanius and Pratto (1999) and Sidanius, Pratto, van Laar, and Levin’s (2004) Social Dominance Theory, and key concepts of social action, interests, identity and ideology (Abercrombie, Hill, & Turner, 1980; Clegg, Courpasson, & Phillips, 2006; Diefenbach, 2009; Lukes, 1974; Weber, 1921/1980). In this chapter only the nucleus of the concept of boundary crossings will be discussed and applied. Only single crossings of clearly demarcated boundaries and their more direct consequences for the system will be interrogated and superiors and subordinates are seen as quite homogenous groups in a dichotomic relationship. However, social dynamics are often more complex und unfold over longer periods of time. The concept of crossing of boundaries can be used for more differentiated, multidimensional, multi-methodological and interdisciplinary investigations, specifically: vaguely defined or changing boundaries or thresholds, multiple crossings with reciprocal and mutually reinforcing behaviours (e.g. ‘tit-fortat strategies’ or ‘vicious circles’), material, political, social, physical, sociopsychological and/or psychological consequences for the parties involved as well as division within the groups of superiors (struggles between power elites) or subordinates (‘divide et impera’).

A MODEL OF SUPERIORS’ AND SUBORDINATES’ DYNAMIC HIERARCHICAL RELATIONSHIP When one says ‘organisation’, one means ‘hierarchy’. Accordingly, social relationships within organisations shall be institutionalised and legitimised

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as hierarchical relations between managers and employees, between superiors and subordinates (Spierenburg, 2004, p. 627; Zeitlin, 1974, p. 1090). In a hierarchy, the roles and positions of all actors and parties involved are clearly defined and demarcated from each other (Finkelstein, 1992, p. 508; Willmott, 1987, p. 253). That social order is organised hierarchically is immediately clear for orthodox organisations (in the tradition of Chandler, 1962; Drucker, 1954; Fayol, 1949; Taylor, 1911/ 1967). However, in the past decades completely new types of organisation have emerged and have widened the spectrum from orthodox and bureaucratic to professional, hybrid and post-modern organisations (Clegg et al., 2006; Courpasson & Dany, 2003). Most, if not all of these new types promise far-reaching changes, less organisational structures and processes, cross-departmental collaboration and knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical relationships between managers and employees, and the empowerment of subordinates. Nevertheless, empirical evidence shows that modern or post-modern organisations can be still very hierarchical and top-down, with power and control mechanisms often more comprehensive than ever before (Akella, 2003; Clegg et al., 2006; Courpasson, 2000; Courpasson & Clegg, 2006). During strategic change initiatives many companies merely reinvent hierarchical structures (Schwarz, 2006). In particular, formal hierarchy (person-independent rules creating a stratified system of social positions) is increasingly accompanied by informal hierarchy. This term describes persondependent social relationships of dominance and subordination which emerge from social interaction and become persistent over time through repeated communication processes or routine behaviour. There is increasing evidence for informal hierarchy in post-modern and network organisations (Ahuja & Carley, 1999; Casey, 1999; Collinson, 2003; Ekbia & Kling, 2005; Nelson, 2001; Oberg & Walgenbach, 2008), public sector or professional organisations (Ackroyd & Munzio, 2007; Kirkpatrick, Ackroyd, & Walker, 2005; Sehested, 2002). In this sense, hierarchy is an issue for (almost) any form of organisation.

Crossing of Boundaries Superiors’ and subordinates’ positions and responsibilities within the hierarchy are defined and protected by boundaries. A ‘boundary’ within the social realm can be seen as an informal or formal social rule defining what is, or is not, ‘allowed’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘acceptable’ (e.g. Andersson & Pearson, 1999, p. 452). It is a standard or rule which regulates people’s

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behaviour in a social setting (Jary & Jary, 2005, p. 424). In this sense, the term is very similar to ‘norm’. In some contrast to ‘norm’, ‘boundary’ stresses more the fact that it primarily divides people, their actions and worldviews – whereas norms are more meant as ‘shared beliefs’ and, at least officially, unite people. In the context of hierarchical systems, boundaries represent ‘social and cultural barriers between dominant elites and subordinates’ (Scott, 1990, p. 132). People ought to act in circumscribed ways that uphold the specific expectations for social action which are attached to their positions (Biggart & Hamilton, 1984, p. 543). A boundary is, so to speak, the line drawn into the sand one must not cross! But this is what people do in the social sphere; they cross boundaries. ‘Crossing of boundaries’ can be understood as any non-compliance with prevailing social expectations in a specific social situation. Non-compliance represents a challenge not only to prevailing norms or values of people but sometimes even to the order and very foundations of the whole social system. This is nothing unusual, on the contrary; whether daily battles at an individual level, groups of people trying to pursue their specific goals within a certain social context or class struggles at a historic scale; boundaries are being challenged, shifted and crossed almost constantly. Events of crossing of boundaries become clearer when one follows Scott’s (1990) concept of ‘public and hidden transcripts’. According to this model, crossing of boundaries means that hidden phenomena such as actions or beliefs (‘transcripts’) come into the public domain, that is become known to other parties. Scott defined the hidden transcript as ‘discourse that takes place ‘‘offstage,’’ beyond direct observation by powerholders’ (ibid., p. 4) and the public transcript as ‘the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate’ (ibid., p. 2). Hidden and public aspects can be also identified concerning superiors’ and subordinates’ relationship within organisational hierarchies. Although stable and comprehensive, the system of organisational hierarchy can only last because of a range of norms and boundaries all parties involved accept, obey and reconfirm via their actions and non-actions – at least officially. It is about what one can do and what one cannot – or must not! – do in public. At the same time, beside their public face, superiors and subordinates nurture beliefs, self-images and activities which are hidden from the other side – and must be kept hidden since they would otherwise disturb, if not to say upset the fragile order. In this sense, superiors’ and subordinates’ hierarchical relationship is not only a one-dimensional and static one but a multi-dimensional and dynamic relationship of social roles separated and held together by boundaries between public and hidden transcripts (Scott, 1990).

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Weak, Medium and Strong Crossings of Boundaries Boundaries can be challenged and crossed with different intensity. The intensity of a boundary crossing is a result of objective factors (such as the actual event, people’s actions and factual consequences) as well as their subjective interpretations of the parties involved over time. At a general level, intensity might be operationalised as follows. A crossing of boundaries is: 1. ‘Weak’ when the factual boundary crossing, its perception and immediate consequences following it are all within the range of ‘typical daily life experiences’. Besides coping with the crossing of boundaries itself, no further adjustments beyond the actual situation are needed by the actors involved (e.g. an employee comes late to work once and has not informed his or her supervisor about it. The supervisor has a conversation with the employee in which they discuss and solve the issue). 2. ‘Medium’ when the factual crossing of boundaries is (perceived as) so severe that further adjustments and additional resources are required from the parties involved in order to cope with the consequences (e.g. senior management expects all staff to become ‘customer-oriented’. For this, employees have to change some of their attitudes, behaviour, even rhetoric and ways of thinking in order to comply (convincingly) with this demand – or to pretend doing so). 3. ‘Strong’ when the crossing of boundaries and/or its perceived relevance has got fundamental consequences not only for some of the actors involved but it means severe and lasting consequences for the further existence of the whole social system (e.g. a group, an organisation or a whole nation are at the fringe of disappearance because core values, principles or mechanisms are not being accepted anymore and might be superseded by others). Since in this chapter the focus is on the persistence of hierarchical order, that is the whole social system, the three different grades of intensity are seen primarily with regard to the stability of the social system. This is not to deny that most boundary crossings usually have more important and severe consequences for (some of) the actors involved than the social system they are part of. Yet, this investigation is about how a crossing of boundaries may or may not constitute a challenge, even threat primarily for the continuation and persistence of the superior/subordinate relationship, that is the social structure, not the actors involved.

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Social Actions, Interests, Identities and Ideologies Crossing of boundaries can happen in different realms of social life. The perhaps most obvious processes can happen in the realm of social action. According to Max Weber (1921/1980) social action can be understood as people’s behaviour, attitudes and actions in the presence of others. In order to cover more phenomena, social action is here also understood as communication. Moreover, it does not necessarily need to happen in the presence of others. Much social action nowadays happen via media (such as e-mails or other information and communication technologies, personal and mass media), that is not in the presence of, but with relevance for others. Hence, the crucial aspect is that someone’s action (or in-action) has got consequences, whether intended or unintended, for others. Social action means one’s being and acting (or not acting) in the world. When people do or don’t do something consciously, this happens for a reason. In this sense, behind people’s conscious (social) actions are interests (e.g. Darke & Chaiken, 2005; Force, 2006; Hendry, 2005; Meglino & Korsgaard, 2004; Miller, 1999; Moore & Loewenstein, 2004; Suttle, 1987). Interests represent a crucial explanatory link between context, people, their decisions and actions (Hindess, 1986; Meglino & Korsgaard, 2004). They shape how people see and interpret the world; they form people’s ideas and intentions, decisions, attitudes and actions. In this sense ‘interest’ is meant, and shall be defined here, as a real person’s or group of people’s attraction towards a certain object or objective. This can either mean a (noninstrumental) curiosity in something or an (instrumental) desire to achieve something whereby the understanding of the object or the realisation of the objective is deemed by the person or group of people as useful or advantageous after due consideration. Which interests people have depends to quite some extent on how they see themselves (as such and amongst others), that is it is about their identities (e.g. Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Elstak & Van Riel, 2005; Gabriel, 1999; Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Within the social sphere a person’s identity might be called ‘social identity’. According to Tajfel (1978, p. 63), social identity can be understood as that part of an individual’s self-concept ‘which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership’. It is the self-image of an individual which stems from its roles and positions, rights and duties, privileges and prerogatives in a given social system. In this sense, identities are relative to the social context (Sluss & Ashforth, 2007). For example, subordinates’ identity is shaped by the positions and roles, responsibilities and duties they have not only as

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such but also in relation to others, that is their peers and particularly their superiors. Finally, people’s actions, interests and identities are largely shaped, if not driven by norms and values (Hamilton, 1987, p. 38). Although every individual has its own views and opinions, convictions and beliefs, key parts of these can be traced back to general, even collectively held norms and values. These norms and values provide explanations and justifications of the natural and social world as well as of the positions of groups and individuals within it. In this sense, they are a ‘normal’ part of our construction and sense-making of the world, of the social construction of reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). If values and beliefs are particularly exclusive in a certain war (e.g. they claim to provide the only possible view on things and/or portray one state or conduct of social affairs as preferential to others), they might be called ideology. Most value and belief systems are ideologies. In any given social system there is usually one dominant belief system (Abercrombie et al., 1980; Brookfield, 2005). Overall, superiors’ and subordinates hierarchical relationship is a dynamic one which is almost permanently re-established and challenged via processes in the realms of social action, interests, identity and norms and values. Many of these events (potentially) are crossing of boundaries with different intensities. Fig. 1 provides a visual idea of this model of hierarchical social order. In the following sections we analyse what consequences subordinates’ weak, medium or strong crossing of boundaries within the four realms can have for the system of hierarchical order.

ANALYSIS Subordinates’ Crossing of Boundaries in the Realm of Social Action The public transcript, that is role and image of the subordinate is one of ‘the good subordinate’. Subordinates are expected to behave, that is to obey the existing order and to function well. And usually subordinates do exactly that – because they have to and even want to. Subordinates are keen to demonstrate conformism to the expectations of their superiors and follow ‘rituals of subordination’ in countless little acts on a daily basis (Scott, 1990, pp. 2, 66; Thompson, 1961, p. 493). Sidanius and Pratto (1999, p. 260) went even so far to say that ‘self-destructive and selfdebilitating behaviours are the primary means by which subordinates

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hidden

public

norms and values identity

superior(s)

formal

power and control

informal

subordinate(s)

interests

social action

crossing of boundaries

interests identity norms and values

Fig. 1.

Superiors’ and Subordinates’ Dynamic Hierarchical Relationship.

actively participate in and contribute to their own continued subordination’. Obedience, submissiveness and well functioning are the public face of the subordinate. However, the societal as well as organisational realities are different – of course, one might say. Subordinates often don’t behave and function smoothly. Weak or low-level dysfunctionality of subordinates is recognised mostly in relation to behavioural tasks or responsibilities, for example as absenteeism, lateness, ‘work-to-rule’, disengagement, minimal compliance or ‘playing the system’. While investigating workers’ ‘resistance through distance’ at a heavy vehicle manufacturing company in the early 1980s, Collinson (1994) found a whole range of such low-key strategies of resistance. When Anderson (2008) investigated academics’ resistance and tactical behaviour in the managerial university, she also found that minor deviance from expectations and minimal compliance were used as a resistance strategy. Very often, such oppositional practices are being accompanied by cynicism, scepticism, irony or other forms of ‘coping-strategies’ (Courpasson & Dany, 2003; Fleming & Spicer, 2003) and ‘short-term escape attempts’

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(Collinson, 1994, p. 39). Such ‘routine resistance’ (Prasad & Prasad, 1998) is seen by many subordinates as a safer way for showing their dislike of organisational arrangements than overt acts of protest or refusal. It is difficult to detect, difficult to identify as deliberate resistance and therefore more difficult to punish. Most of subordinates’ social actions, even the deviating ones, are meant to be small cunning acts of manoeuvring within the system. They largely observe the rules – even if they are intended to undermine them (Scott, 1990, p. 93). Subordinates seek ‘tactical advantages’ with their social actions – but they do not challenge the foundations and principles of the system. For example, Collinson (1994, p. 40) concluded the analysis of his empirical research: ‘workers’ resistance through distance reinforced the legitimacy of hierarchical control, left managerial prerogative unchallenged, and increased their vulnerability to disciplinary practices’. Common organisational misbehaviour does not challenge superiors’ position or the hierarchical structure. Eventually, it even contributes to the further strengthening and stabilisation of hierarchical order; it reiterates the importance of hierarchical order, managerial responsibilities and comprehensive systems of surveillance and control. As Burawoy (1981, quoted in Prasad & Prasad, 1998, p. 242) puts it so poignantly: ‘one cannot play a game and question the rules at the same time; consent to rules becomes consent to capitalist production’. A weak crossing, thus, even strengthens the system. Nevertheless, there can be more severe forms of deviance from subordinates in the realm of social action. These can be either lawful or unlawful. For example, unlawful acts could be property deviance (theft, sabotage, vandalism) or serious personal aggression (bullying, sexual harassment or physical assault). If such unlawful challenges become public, they need to be sanctioned and stopped. Elaborated social systems usually have the legal and practical means at hand to do so. By handling unlawful acts of deviance, the legitimacy of hierarchical order is reconfirmed. And even if those acts were not detected, they would cause harm only to individuals and/or specific assets and resources, but not the whole system. The system of hierarchical social order will remain intact. There might be also lawful medium-intense deviance in form of legitimate open (organised) workplace resistance and confrontations between workers and management (Prasad & Prasad, 1998; Robinson & Bennett, 1997). These acts are deliberately designed to remain within the legal framework of labour and civil law (Spicer & Bo¨hm, 2005, p. 3). Hence, although lawful resistance can be quite challenging indeed, it does not really threaten the hierarchical order. This is so because usually its goals are limited to ‘tactical’

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gains within the system (e.g. pay increase, job security or the like). Also, the means to achieve these goals are equally system conform (e.g. strike, negotiations and bargaining). One therefore might say that in the realm of social action any medium-intense boundary crossing, whether lawful or unlawful, does not threaten the hierarchical order. It is a different story when it is about strong crossings of boundaries, which can severely disrupt and upset the order of whole organisations or even societies. There are a few examples of strong boundary crossings by individuals in the realm of social action. One of the most prominent examples is the unknown ‘tank man’ who stopped a column of tanks near by Tiananmen Square in 1989 by simply standing (unarmed) and remaining in front of them. Socrates drinking hemlock or Martin Luther posting his 95 theses (against the Catholic Church and is questionable practices) at a church door in Wittenberg are also famous examples. And there are many more examples of ‘unsung heroes’ who have seriously challenged hierarchical social order by mere social action – but often their stories are not told. What these examples show is that such strong social actions by individuals are rarely successful in the immediate situation. Such actions carried out by a single person (or a few individuals) are mainly of ‘symbolic’ value – whereby it is even not clear whether or not in that particular moment the actors were aware of the great meaning and implications of their action. Although exactly because of their symbolic value such social actions can be (potentially) system threatening, it usually requires large numbers of people so that social actions and their consequences can seriously challenge the existing order. The talk is about collective open resistance, general strikes, coordinated output restrictions, collectively organised sabotage of production, revolt, ousting of management, company owners or ruling elites – lastly revolution. If such widespread collective actions happen over a longer period of time it, indeed, constitutes a very serious threat to the existing order. Comprehensive, intense and longer lasting social actions of subordinates test the system’s mechanisms and its abilities to respond to the limit – or might even overcome them, which means the end of the current social order and its replacement by a new one, that is revolutionary change. All in all, within the realm of social action subordinates’ weak and medium-intense crossings of boundaries (in form of deviance or organisational misbehaviour) do not really constitute a challenge to the system of hierarchical order, on the contrary; such deviating social actions simply justify the existence of control and punishment systems in place or the need for new ones. Moreover, they leave the underlying rationales of hierarchical order intact and, in so doing, reiterate subordinates’ consent to, and

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compliance with the hierarchical order. Only subordinates’ strong crossing of boundaries (individual action with strong symbolic meaning, but mostly longer lasting collective social action) would constitute a serious threat to the system since it challenges the existing order and its systems to their limits – or even beyond. In this sense, a first proposition might be formulated as follows: Proposition 1: Within the realm of social action subordinates’ weak and medium-intense crossings of boundaries are system stabilising. Only a strong crossing of boundaries in form of widespread, intense and longer lasting collective action constitutes a serious threat to the hierarchical order.

Subordinates’ Crossing of Boundaries in the Realm of Interests Contemporary ideologies such as neo-liberalism and managerialism provide subordinates with sufficient reasons and ‘explanations’ that it is in their interest to function smoothly and to behave well within hierarchical organisations, that is to fit into the very societal and organisational conditions which make them subordinates. Since the public transcript of subordinates’ interests is one of functioning and performing, obeying and following, one could assume that subordinates’ hidden interests are largely in opposition to the public ones. However, it is a widely identifiable phenomenon that subordinates do not only regularly and actively contribute to the persistence of the very social system which makes them subordinates but that they have vested interests in its continuation. Traditionally, such interests of subordinates have been often interpreted as ‘irrational’. For example, from a more psychological perspective they might be explained as fear of change, risk adversity or an interest in avoiding punishment. From a Marxian perspective they have been explained as ‘false consciousness’, that is as the result of (lifelong) conditioning by societal institutions (e.g. school, universities, religion, media, the state, business organisations). There might be quite some truth in both strands of explanations. Nonetheless, it is perhaps more appropriate to assume that most compliance and smooth functioning of the majority of employees and other subordinates is not (only) due to fear or conditioning but happens because of very rational and understandable interests. In most social systems there is a whole range of factual advantages on offer to those who function properly – and in hierarchical systems usually even more because such systems need to provide

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reasons and incentives for people why they should pursue careers or at least accept the system. Such incentives can be physical advantages (better health and safety), functional advantages (more elaborated responsibilities, doing better jobs with less input required), material advantages (privileges and prerogatives, access to valuable resources, higher wages, wealth), personal advantages (better opportunities for using ones’ skills and knowledge, learning and personal development) or psychological advantages (belonging to a greater, strong and successful entity, positive self-image, subjective feelings of security and importance or the like). For most employees, the hierarchical organisation offers them advantages and opportunities they could not get easily somewhere else – and the higher the position within the system, the more advantages exist. Employees will benefit from these advantages as long as they function within the boundaries of the system. For example, Musson and Duberley (2007, p. 158) referred to Collinson’s ideas about conformist selves, ‘where individuals are preoccupied with themselves as valued objects in the eyes of those in authority and for whom the pursuit of a ‘successful’ career is a powerful motivator’. Subordinates, therefore, do not only function within the boundaries of a hierarchical, unjust and oppressive social system such as the managerial organisation because they are not ‘conscious’ or ‘reflective’ enough, on the contrary; they are very aware of what is on offer (for them) and they are therefore very interested in functioning. To function makes considerable sense for the individual and is rational from its perspective. The pursuit of one’s own individual interests and personal ways of sense-making, often reduced to sheer egoism and egocentrism, form constituting elements of the zeitgeist. The basic rationale is a kind of ‘calculative selfishness’ through which people compare the opportunities certain institutions and situations provide against the downsides. Most people have very explicit and conscious interests in functioning smoothly within the parameters set by their superiors and the system because overall it is advantageous for them. It is the socially dominating value of calculative selfishness, that is the strange combination of instrumental individualism, goal-oriented pragmatism and narrowly defined functional rationalism, which not only represents subordinates’ public, but also large parts of their hidden interests. Nonetheless, the concept of calculative selfishness does not necessarily mean that one has to have an interest in functioning ‘perfectly’, on the contrary; it is enough to give the impression. In many cases, giving the impression can be sufficiently enough and more efficient than ‘delivering the whole lot’. It is an interest in little cunning acts of gaining personal advantages while pretending to function according to the official rules.

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Hence, while having an interest in functioning, at the same time one can have an interest in breaching or bypassing rules and regulations (without being found out) – which would constitute a weak crossing of boundaries. Such interest does not threaten the hierarchical order since it aims at gaining advantages within existing power and control relationships. In contrast, medium-intense crossings of boundaries in the realm of interests go against the immediate situation subordinates operate in. In such cases, subordinates would be interested in changing the direct power and control relationships they are part of, policies and procedures, key indicators of performance measurement and management systems or being more involved in the organisation of their work. Such an interest in farreaching participation goes well beyond the traditional understanding of what constitutes the ‘legitimate’ interests of subordinates. Nonetheless, in most organisations (i.e. non-totalitarian ones) even such expectations or demands do not constitute a serious threat for the system. Contemporary discourses of change management, organisational learning and personal development easily incorporate, if not to say hijack themes of participation, empowerment and equal opportunities (Diefenbach, 2005, 2007). In this sense, subordinates’ possible interests in far-reaching participation can cross boundaries while at the same time disappear in the no man’s land of managerial rhetoric and functional ‘necessities’. They challenge the system without challenging it. This could be different if subordinates would develop a strong interest in changing the system of hierarchical order fundamentally, that is if they would demonstrate and air a serious interest in overcoming the prevailing social order and replacing it by another system. Of course, in itself, such an interest is not sufficient to achieve its ends. In addition, it needs to be based on a comprehensive and compelling alternative ideology, be supported by determined people with a non-obedient identity and needs to lead to corresponding social actions over a longer period of time (e.g. collective open resistance, general strikes, ousting of management, company owners or ruling elites, lastly revolution – or any other means which could contribute to overthrow the current system). Nonetheless, if subordinates’ would develop an interest in overcoming the hierarchical system then this constitutes a serious threat to the system because then subordinates would look for ways to overcome the system and would attempt to overcome it. And whether they at first fail or not, if the interest is alive, one day it will happen. All in all, it can be proposed: Proposition 2: Within the realm of interests subordinates’ weak and medium-intense crossings of boundaries are system stabilising. Only a

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strong crossing of boundaries in form of a developed interest in changing the existing system fundamentally constitutes a serious threat to the hierarchical order.

Subordinates’ Crossing of Boundaries in the Realm of Identity As is the case with social actions, people’s identity has to be compatible with the social system they are part of. Within a system of hierarchical order, people’s social identity, hence, is first and foremost a position- and statusrelated identity. For example, subordinates’ identity is largely shaped by what the logic of hierarchical order strongly suggests for people lower down the hierarchical ladder; it ought to be the identity of ‘the’ subordinate, that is of the submissive servant who defines him- or herself via the requirements to function, to conform, to perform, to obey and to follow orders (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002, p. 619; Merton, 1961, p. 52). Subordinates shall see themselves as function- and performance-oriented automatons strictly adhering to rules and procedures, willingly complying with authority and reliably following the orders given by their superiors/managers (Ashforth, 1994, p. 759; Zaleznik, 1989, p. 49). Moreover, the psyche of subordinates shall reflect primarily their inferiority with regard to their superiors and the system (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, p. 229). In this sense, one might say that the public identity of the subordinate is quite simple, one-dimensional and infantile; it represents a deeply internalised ‘learned helplessness’ (Bassman & London, 1993, p. 22) and submissiveness. On the other hand, particularly in Western cultures individualism forms a very strong, if not to say dominant part of many people’s identities. Most Western people have been socialised that way in various institutions well before they become superiors and subordinates in organisations (e.g. at kindergarten, school, in further and higher education institutions). Because of this, contemporary organisations have to provide environments which give people at least the impression that they can use the system and what it offers to their own advantage, that they can pursue their career interests and can develop their professional skills and identities (Fournier, 1998). In many organisations concepts of ‘empowerment’, ‘teamwork’, ‘projects’, ‘organisational learning’, ‘career’ and even ‘intrapreneurship’ seemingly indicate such opportunities of self-development. Although such concepts often are not really meant the way their labels or the rhetoric about them might suggest, they nonetheless go quite well together with many people’s personal aspirations, professional aims and career goals. Using the space and opportunities

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organisations provided to show one’s ‘personality’ and to develop one’s (professional) identity in the sense of individualism constitutes a weak crossing of boundaries because it represents some deviation from the ideal identity of the submissive and infantile subordinate. Obviously, such deviance from the ideal of the solely submissive subordinate doesn’t challenge the hierarchical order, on the contrary; especially modern and post-modern organisations can easily live with, even accept and require some non-conformism in the realm of people’s identity. Minor deviance from the ‘classical’ image of the subordinate is tolerated, even required. Subordinates are expected to ‘express themselves’ and to show their ‘personality’ and ‘creativity’ (Prasad & Prasad, 1998, p. 251) – of course, within the limits and parameters set by their superiors and the system. Slightly paradoxically, it is a kind of ‘rule-based non-conformism’ which has become one of the system-constituting principles of contemporary organisations and societies; non-conformism is the norm both superiors and subordinates have to conform to (though in different intensity). As long as one does his or her job, functions well and shows the always required symbolic gestures of obedience, weak deviation in the realm of identity is acceptable. Most people are fully aware of this and accept it; to a great extent, people’s professional identity greatly depends on access to roles and positions, privileges and responsibilities, material and immaterial resources. And hierarchical order provides exactly those assets, the higher up, the more. Hence, if people want to develop their identities and personalities within a system of hierarchical order, they nonetheless will ‘play by the rules’. Well functioning and weak deviance, learned helplessness and calculative selfishness, conformism and individualism, as contradictory as they might be, can easily be part of the same identity of the modern subordinate. In this sense, minor crossings in the realm of identity even have a ‘safety-valve function’ because they give individuals the impression and feeling that they are still the masters of their own destiny – while at the same time their identity has been adapted to the requirements of a hierarchical system. Even their attempts to show some deviance in the realm of social identity does not challenge the system. There is another paradox related to subordinates’ identity – but this time it means a greater challenge for the hierarchical order. It is the very idea of hierarchical organisations to make sure that only subordinates’ ‘professional’, that is status-related identity is at work (Selznick, 1961, p. 21) and that all other parts of their identities are being excluded, contained or at least domesticated into functional channels. Accordingly, realising individualism

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by showing ‘little signs of individual identity’ is acceptable. But it would be a different matter if subordinates dared to take the idea of individualism (too) seriously, that is to bring in their whole identity to the workplace! This would challenge the hierarchical order and its control and management systems beyond their normal functioning and, thus, can be seen as a medium-intense crossing of boundaries. The problem is that we know little about subordinates’ whole identities. In contrast to the, in every epoch, comprehensively developed and disseminated public image and identity of ‘the good subordinate’ we have very few information about the hidden identities of subordinates. One might get a first idea about them when one looks at how subordinates actually see themselves and behave off work, that is in their private lives and spare time. Most people are very different to their public role-playing when they are on their own, amongst their family and friends, pursuing their hobbies and maintaining all what makes up their private lives; in their backyards subordinates reveal all what is oppressed at the workplace. This ‘private-life identity’ is much about people seeing themselves as capable to manage their own affairs; being able to gain information, analyse and use them, capable of making operational and strategic decisions, highly motivated to put them into action and to manage the multi-dimensional consequences. In their private lives people cover the whole range of activities what is at work only their superiors’ prerogatives. In their private lives subordinates are superiors (provided they do not have yet another superior in form of their partner, family members or amongst their friends or peers). In this sense, large parts of people’s hidden identity are diametrically opposed to the public image and the factual situation of the organisational context they are in. It would have far-reaching consequences if subordinates began to realise their whole identities at the workplace. People would start to understand that hierarchical order and their thoroughly defined roles as subordinates within that system are quite in some opposition to their identity and interests. It would mean the beginning of individualisation, that is a disentanglement from system conformity and expectations of well functioning and a focus on seeing oneself and others as individuals and ends in themselves. If subordinates became fully aware of how much organisational context on the one hand, and their personal interests and identities on the other hand actually differ they would start to think about ways to change the situation they are in. The concept of individualisation goes directly against the very idea of superiors and subordinates, of hierarchical systems per se. Subordinates’ medium-intense crossing of boundaries in the realm of identity therefore means a serious threat to the hierarchical order.

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Interestingly, solidarisation representing a kind of collective identity, which is sometimes portrayed as the opposite of individualisation, produces similar outcomes like individualisation. If subordinates developed (again) a strong collective sense of themselves, a collective identity of subordinates, it would become much more difficult to handle them. For example, in their case study on clashes between proponents of new managerialistic methods (JIT, TQM) and opponents in an engineering company, Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington (2001) provided evidence for how workers’ identity (and resistance) became stronger by a renewed ‘them-and-us philosophy’ which seriously challenged the company’s management. Generally speaking, subordinates’ collective identity goes directly against the position of superiors and their interests. And what goes against superiors, goes against the very idea of hierarchical order. Thus, solidarisation, understood as subordinates’ development of a collective identity, also constitutes a serious threat to the system. With regard to the idea (or threat) of individualisation one might say: superiors can only work with subordinates, not with individuals! And if we add the idea (or threat) of solidarisation, one can say: superiors can only work with isolated subordinates, not with individuals who have also a collective identity! Hence, any attempt of subordinates to either bring in their whole identity (individualisation) or to develop a strong collective identity (solidarisation) constitutes already at a medium-intense level a serious threat to any hierarchical system. Individualisation or solidarisation could even mean a strong crossing of boundaries if they did not only challenge the prevailing ideas of people’s identity within the existing system of hierarchical order but if they provided a convincing and elaborated alternative identity for subordinates as well as an outline of the social order in which it could exist. With such an alternative concept available, people would then be able to develop truly alternative identities and lifestyles. Obviously, the alternative identity would be in open resistance and revolt against the hierarchical order. If individualisation and solidarisation come together, they mean the end of any hierarchical system. Overall, concerning subordinates’ crossing of boundaries with regard to their (organisational) identities one can propose: Proposition 3: Within the realm of social identities already subordinates’ medium-intense crossing of boundaries in form of individualisation or solidarisation represents a serious threat to any hierarchical order. The additional development of an elaborated alternative identity based on the

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ideas of individualisation and solidarisation would mean the beginning of the end of hierarchical order. Subordinates’ Crossing of Boundaries in the Realm of Norms and Values Amongst other things, norms and values explain and justify the different roles and positions, privileges and duties of individuals and groups within a social system as well as the goodness and rightness of the whole system (Beetham, 1991). Challenges of such underlying principles, thus, make people aware of fundamental aspects of their lives which usually remain quite un-reflected. And whenever people start to think about fundamental issues it gets dangerous! Then, established worldviews as well as the prevailing order is challenged. One therefore could assume that any crossing of boundaries in the realm of norms and values, whether weak, medium or strong, could constitute a serious threat to the system. However, in the following a more differentiated picture will emerge. Throughout history, at least when groups, organisations, or societies were based on the principles of stratification and hierarchical order, the public ideology of subordinates has been one of functioning within the limits and parameters set by their superiors and the system. These ‘virtues’ have been further operationalised into a variety of belief systems such as: religion, nationalism or more contemporary ones like neo-liberalism, individualism and managerialism. Such ideologies hold the subordinate accountable and provide him or her with nagging doubts if they do not fit, function and perform as the various catechisms suggest. Quite cynically, at the same time subordinates also ought to have a strong sense of belonging, that is being happy to be part of the very hierarchically structured group, organisation or nation which makes them subordinates. For this, they are provided with specially designed moral ideas of obedience and serfdom so that they do not only know how, but also why they shall function well (Courpasson & Dany, 2003, p. 1232; Scott, 1990, p. 58). As a consequence, subordinates usually do not only function well because they have to, but because they want to since this is what constitutes ‘the good subordinate’ – the (vicious) circle is closed! On the other hand, most people would portray themselves as independent individuals who have their own minds and do not buy into ‘official party lines’. Indeed, employees very often do not believe the official rhetoric, mission and vision statements of the companies they work for – but they comply with them enthusiastically or unimpressed, cynically and grumblingly. This is quite typical for hegemonic non-totalitarian ideologies such as

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managerialism; people can continue to be of the opinion that they have kept a fair distance between themselves and all official ‘gobbledygook’ – while at the same time communicating and practicing it as if they believed in the official principles (Fleming & Spicer, 2003, p. 169). Brookfield (2005, p. 140) explained that ‘in both hegemony and disciplinary power, the consent of people to these processes is paramount. They take pride in the efficiency with which they learn appropriate boundaries, avoid ‘‘inappropriate’’ critique, and keep themselves in line’. A cynical distance combined with a factual calculative compliance is one of the cornerstones of modern, nontotalitarian norm and value systems. One might therefore say that currently there is no weak crossing of boundaries by subordinates in the realm of norms and values because there are no hidden transcripts which could provide a basis for this. And even if there was some slight deviance it nonetheless would not constitute a threat to the system. It is the very ideological foundation of hierarchical order that subordinates are less capable and that they therefore need ‘guidance’ and ‘support’ from their superiors. Subordinates’ possible weak ideological deviance would simply reiterate these claims, trigger corresponding initiatives (e.g. tighter supervision, ‘training’) and, hence, strengthen the dominant ideology (Abercrombie et al., 1980). But subordinates may cross boundaries in the realm of norms and values in a more challenging manner even without having an elaborated hidden transcript as a basis for doing so. One, quite realistic possibility is to take the prevailing ideology seriously. For example, while investigating prisoners’ daily struggles to cope with the regime of imprisonment, Scott (1990, p. 94) found surprisingly cunning tactics not only amongst the inmates themselves but also towards staff who are in a much stronger position concerning almost every aspect of prison-life: ‘Deprived of realistic revolutionary options and having few political resources by definition, inmates nevertheless manage to conduct an effective struggle against the institution’s authorities, by using hegemonic ideology to good advantage y. This consists in stressing the established norms of the rulers of their small kingdom and claiming that these rulers have violated the norms by which they justify their own authority y. Their behaviour in this respect is moralistic; it is the staff who are deviating from legitimate norms, not they’. Such tactics can be also found in an organisational context. Many company visions and strategic change initiatives are based on a ‘people-are-our-greatestvalue’ rhetoric and concepts of empowerment and participation. Subordinates can explicitly refer to these statements and can hold their superiors and the organisation accountable (Fleming & Spicer, 2003, p. 172) – which

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would mean quite a challenge since the organisational reality usually does not live up to the claims made in the official rhetoric. For example, in his empirical study of forms of resistance amongst workers in a car factory in Turkey, Yu¨cesan-O¨zdemir (2003) found that the ideological discourse of empowerment constituted the regime’s Achilles’ heel. Workers’ resistance against managerialistic work regime and control methods was successful by taking the new discourses and methods seriously and, in doing so, revealing their mendacity. Taking the prevailing ideology literally can be regarded as a medium-intense challenge of the system of hierarchical order since (a) it refers to the very basic values, foundations and justification the system is built on, (b) it challenges them and (c) it cannot be downplayed or handled as ‘irrelevant’, ‘exceptions’ or ‘personal opinions’. However, although it might constitute some temporary difficulties for superiors to handle it, it nonetheless is no serious challenge to the system since it remains within prevailing discourses and does not ask for the termination of the current system and the constitution of a new one. There is another medium-intense boundary crossing within the realm of ideology which is quite the opposite of taking the prevailing ideology literally – the talk is about its open and straightforward challenge. For example, this can be the case when subordinates openly refuse to comply with what is publicly expected from them. Scott (1990, p. 203) described this idea quite fittingly: ‘Any public refusal, in the teeth of power, to produce the words, gestures, and other signs of normative compliance is typically construed – and typically intended – as an act of defiance. Here the crucial distinction is between a practical failure to comply and a declared refusal to comply. The former does not necessarily breach the normative order of domination; the latter almost always does’. Subordinates’ open resistance in the realm of norms and values is heresy. How serious this challenge is for the system depends on whether or not heresy (i.e. members of a social system question the leading principles of the social order) is at the same time deviance (i.e. members of a social system deviate either positively or negatively from normatively sanctioned patterns of behaviour). For example, Harshbarger (1973) found that, if deviance and heresy are both present, the proponents of the system can deal with this sort of ‘problem’ usually comparatively easy. Sooner or later, the renegades can be punished for their obvious or alleged non-compliance with technical rules of the system and, in doing so, can be isolated, silenced or forced to go. In contrast, in case of heresy without deviance the system and its proponents face a far more serious problem. Then, heretics air their nonconformist views and fundamental disagreements (or what are perceived or portrayed

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as such by parts of the ruling elite), but comply otherwise with the ‘technical’ rules and regulations of the system. Especially because the criticism happens from, and remains within the prevailing system and its logics, heretics can reveal the weaknesses of the system in quite a thorough and convincing manner. Moreover, in the case of heresy without deviance direct forms of punishment, as well as other actions which usually are used against deviants and rebels, are not applicable anymore – or only with quite some difficulties. It then takes more cunning, often only partly legal or even criminal twists by the ruling elite, its proponents and/or the authorities to ‘manage’ and finally silence the heretic one way or the other (e.g. labelling opposing views as political dissidents, finding or making up ‘serious’ reasons to punish the heretic and taking drastic measures). Nonetheless, even when the system has finally coped ‘successfully’ with the heresy (and the heretics!) the intellectual/ideological challenges they have formulated will not go away. This is so because of several reasons. One is that the dissidents voiced and disseminated their ideas when they were still members of the system. Although people are probably not allowed anymore to refer to the dissident (he or she is now a ‘persona non-grata’), intellectually, and often emotionally, they can still do so because the dissident was ‘one of them’. They understand what the heretic meant. Moreover, especially since the criticism happens from within the prevailing system and its logics, heretics can reveal the weaknesses of the system in quite a knowledgeable, thorough and compelling manner. Even if the heretics are gone and might have been discredited personally, their ideas will be still convincing. Finally, the possibly more or less questionable ways in which the heretics might have been treated by the establishment will even more strengthen their arguments. Over time, this will contribute to the evaporation of the prevailing order from within. Heresy without deviance is probably one of the sharpest swords in the arsenal of system critics. It therefore can be argued that it can constitute a serious threat to the system. Yet, the sword of heresy is only sharp on one side. Heresy as such ‘merely’ criticises and challenges existing hierarchical order – but it doesn’t say what could or should be in place instead. Heresy, as important as it is for challenging prevailing ideology, is only a necessary but not sufficient precondition for system change. To be sufficient, it must be accompanied by an alternative ideology (very) different to the prevailing value system, an anti-hierarchical utopia, so to speak (in which case it can, even must come together with deviance). Moreover, the alternative ideas and values need to be seen by an increasing number of people as more convincing and attractive than the prevailing ones as well as realistic and feasible. The development

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and dissemination of such a comprehensive and elaborated, realistic and attractive alternative ideology would mean a strong crossing of boundaries and would constitute a serious challenge to the prevailing hierarchical social order. Currently, there is no such comprehensively developed ideology around which could provide a strong and convincing alternative to neo-liberalism, consumerism and managerialism. Of course, in market economies as well as socialist economies, in developed as well as developing countries one can find many examples of NGOs (non-governmental organisations), cooperatives, network organisations or not-for-profit organisations in which people try to realise and practice less hierarchical or even hierarchy-free forms of work organisation, collaboration and social relationships. But the theories and institutions supporting such alternative ideas are by no means as strong and as developed as the theories and institutions supporting and protecting, developing and disseminating the ideas of hierarchical organisations and stratified societies – at least not at present. We therefore might say: Proposition 4: Within the realm of norms and values subordinates’ medium-intense crossings of boundaries in form of heresy without deviance can constitute a serious threat to hierarchical social systems when it is accompanied by a thoroughly developed and fundamentally different alternative to the dominant ideology.

CONCLUSION The chapter began with the paradox that some of subordinates’ deliberate or coincidental challenges of hierarchical order might not threaten, but stabilise, even strengthen the system. The question was how and when exactly a crossing of boundaries might have either such system-stabilising or systemthreatening consequences. A closer analysis focusing on four different realms (social action, interests, identity, norms and values) and three different intensities of subordinates’ crossing of boundaries (weak, medium and strong) produced some possible answers. Table 1 summarises the analysis. The cases when subordinates’ deviance and misbehaviour actually contributes to the further continuation of the system of hierarchical order are relatively straightforward. In all four realms a weak crossing of boundaries (e.g. minimal compliance, rule-based non-conformism) never challenges hierarchical social order at all, on the contrary; it further strengthens the

Breaching or bypassing ‘technical’ rules in order to pursue one’s own interests

Work-to-rule, minimal compliance

Rejection, active resistance within existing rules and regulations

Open (collective) resistance; revolt, revolution

(a) and (b) will be dealt with by and within the system and, hence, strengthen the system (c) is system threatening, particularly when it develops into widespread collective action

(a) Weak crossing of boundaries

(b) Medium crossing of boundaries

(c) Strong crossing of boundaries

Consequences for (a) weak, (b) medium, (c) strong crossing of boundaries

(a) and (b) are system conform, can be dealt with by and within the system and, hence, strengthen the system (c) is system threatening

Changing the system fundamentally

Changing existing immediate social situation and practices in one’s favour

Personal interests; ‘calculative selfishness’

Cynicism, scepticism, deviance, resistance, illegal action, sabotage, conspiracy

Hidden transcript

Functioning, conforming, performing, obeying and following not complying, deviating, misbehaving

Interests

Demonstration of obedience, submissiveness, and conformism well functioning

Social Action

(a) has safety valve function, is system stabilising (b) and (c) are system threatening

Alternative identity to the one superiors want subordinates to have

Individualisation, solidarisation

Rule-based non-conformism (‘orderly rebel’)

Non-conformism, breaking out of routines, ‘private lifeidentity’

Publicly portrayed and showed identity of ‘the’ subordinate/submissive servant, learned helplessness

Identity

(a) none currently (b) is system threatening when it is heresy without deviance and (c) is a serious challenge for the system since it provides alternative ideas which can be more attractive

Alternative ideology/value system: anti-hierarchical utopia

Taking the prevailing ideology seriously declared refusal to comply, heresy

Criticism of the ‘technical’ implications and consequences

No explicit one because of dominant ideology residuals of a ‘working class’ or ‘normal people’ ideology

Ideology of functioning and performance; obedience, serfdom work ethos, nationalism, individualism, consumerism, hedonism

Norms and Values

Subordinates’ Crossing of Boundaries in the Realms of Social Action, Interests, Identity, and Norms and Values.

Public transcript

Table 1.

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hierarchical system. Also medium-intense crossings in the realms of social action and interests do the same. This is so because all of these weak and medium-intense crossings happen within the system – and within the logic of the system of hierarchical social order. Stemming from a strong rationale of ‘calculative selfishness’ (which is quite understandable in social systems such as hierarchical order), these deviances represent ‘little cunning attempts and acts to achieve and secure little advantages for oneself’. This is all expected and does not come as a surprise at all. Hierarchical systems are built on the assumption that (lower) members do not function completely – and do not want to function perfectly. If subordinates’ hidden deviance comes to the attention of superiors or ‘the system’, it will trigger ‘appropriate’ responses. According to the logic of hierarchy, any deviance from prevailing official norms and policies must be sanctioned – mostly in form of control and punishment, pressure and retaliation. In contemporary organisations such measures might not seem to be that crude anymore, they come more under the heading of ‘feedback’, ‘support’, ‘guidance’, ‘help’, ‘training’ or ‘skills development’. Whatever the actual label is, it means managing people top-down, that is in hierarchical ways. All weak organisational misbehaviour is manageable in such ways. And if the direct intervention through superiors is not enough, special units allocated with the task to cope with subordinates’ deviance will join in. In developed hierarchical structures various layers of elaborated control and punishment systems, policies, procedures and measures are readily in place which can and will cope with those forms of deviance. Even if new forms of deviant behaviour took the system by surprise, they will not last long in the ‘no man’s land of unmanaged deviance’; such incidents will either trigger a further development of existing power and control systems or the introduction and implementation of new measures. In this sense, all weak and the mentioned medium-intense forms of deviance simply reiterate the importance and legitimacy of superiors’ responsibilities as well as the hierarchical order and its comprehensive systems of surveillance and control, punishment and betterment. There are even more surprising findings when it comes to cases which really challenge the hierarchical order. Obviously, strong crossings of boundaries (e.g. collective open resistance, strong interest in system change, alternative identity and/or an alternative ideology) always constitute a serious threat to the hierarchical system. Most hierarchical structures and processes have been created and exist that it never comes to this point; they

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are designed as precautionary and pre-emptive measures to keep subordinates at their place and within the boundaries of the system. However, – and this is crucial! – serious threats to the prevailing system might not necessarily start with strong crossings of boundaries in the realm of social action such as open (collective) resistance, revolt or revolution. What the analysis has revealed is that particularly subordinates’ mediumintense crossings of boundaries can mean a serious challenge to any hierarchical system. During the analysis carried out in this chapter three of them could be identified and discussed briefly. Two were found in the realm of identity. The concepts of individualisation and solidarisation represent powerful (and threatening) ideas, probably the most powerful ones against hierarchy – at least when subordinates start to appreciate those ideas. Superiors and ruling elites have always enjoyed individualisation and solidarisation to quite some extent; they have all means to pursue their lives according to the idea of individualisation while at the same time they are very keen to achieve and maintain strong solidarisation with their peers in order to protect their privileges and the means of their dominance. In the hands of subordinates, however, individualisation and solidarisation transform into serious threats to the system of hierarchical order – because they are in direct opposition to the idea of the isolated, thus manageable subordinate. Subordinates who have internalised the ideas of individualisation and solidarisation will not obey to hierarchical power anymore, on the contrary; they will begin to ‘take things into their own hands’. They will start to develop and live the ideas of individualisation and solidarisation.1 And they will become determined to change things and social practices accordingly. They might even develop a strong interest to overcome the prevailing social order and to replace it by another system. Such an alternative system would mean workplaces and organisations where there are no superiors and subordinates, private owners and employees anymore – and many more changes to the ways previous and contemporary organisations have been designed and managed. Obviously, the alternative identity is in open resistance and revolt against hierarchical order. The third case of a medium-intense crossing of boundaries representing a very powerful challenge for the system was heresy without deviance. When subordinates start to challenge the system from within, that is to criticise it on ideological grounds without officially opposing it, it gets really dangerous. Sooner or later, every social system will face opposition from within. It depends on the legal foundations of the system as well as the moral character of its proponents how such opposition is handled. But if

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heretics criticise the system from within and avoid to being ‘found out’ as long as possible, that is the longer the heretics can play ‘cat-and-mouse’ with it, the longer it will take the system to punish or even silence them and the higher, thus, are the chances that followers will emerge and join the heretic. Of course, the system is always stronger than the individual. And some of its proponents do not shy away from using a broad range of questionable means to fight its enemies. They might even use sheer physical force, other primitive means or quite sophisticated and mendacious rhetoric and slander. Usually they try a combination of different means. Therefore, the chances are high that sooner or later the non-deviating heretic will suffer punishment. However, the ideas will live on and continue to oppose the system till it finally will be terminated and replaced by another system. The proponents of hierarchical order might have a whole arsenal of measures against heretics, but against heresy without deviance they have not found a recipe yet – because there is none.

NOTE 1. In this sense, it is quite a misinterpretation (or deliberate misrepresentation!) if individualisation and solidarisation are portrayed as exclusive opposites. Both challenge significantly the publicly portrayed image of the good, that is domesticated and isolated subordinate. Both make subordinates ‘unmanageable’ – the former because of its strong sense of a sovereign and autonomous individual, the latter because of its ‘together-we-are-strong’ notion. And both threaten the very order which implies the necessity of superiors and subordinates. If individualisation and solidarisation come together, they mean the end of any hierarchical system and the constitution of a new order.

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SECTION III ALTERNATIVE VIEWS ON, AND ALTERNATIVES TO HIERARCHY

THE BIRTH OF BIOCRACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS AT WORK Peter Fleming ABSTRACT Drawing on the idea of bio-power from wider social theory, this paper will demonstrate how life itself (bios) is now a crucial resource enlisted by capitalism. To explain this, the concept of biocracy is introduced to demonstrate how the informal subcultures, social intelligence and personal attributes of workers are currently being put to work. All that Fordism once feared is now the medium of a new form of exploitation. But as life itself is colonized in ever more expansive ways, resistance appears once again. A new political landscape has crystallized transforming the old tension between capital and labour into one between capital and life. Its manifesto is defined not by the demand for more, less or fairer work, but the end of work. Keywords: bio-politics; conflict; hierarchy; managerialism; power; resistance

INTRODUCTION If Max Weber was to enter the offices and service outlets that make up a large majority of workplaces in the West today, there would be, of course, Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 205–227 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035010

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much that he would recognize. The filing systems might have been computerized and the old-fashion dark oak de´cor replaced by the sharp glare of eco-friendly florescent lights, but the cubicles and background hum of rationality would be familiar. Some features, however, would completely dumfound our German time-traveller. Rather than the office holder and the office, the worker and their role being separated, rendering each employee indistinguishable from each other, Weber would be shocked by the sheer personality seemingly expressed in the modern corporation. Rather than being banished from the workplace, individual emotion is now a key source of value. Instead of eradicating play and fun, a whole consulting industry (self-named ‘fun-sultants’) aim to transform work into a personable and enjoyable experience. Whereas in Weber’s time bureaucracy was defined by expunging all nonofficial and non-work associatives from the job, today many employees are exhorted by ‘liberation management’ to express their individuality, unique personalities and all that is different about them, including their sexual orientation and hobbies. Personal preferences of the employee of the month – choice of music, favourite food, and historical heroes – might be presented on a monitor in the office’s foyer. And workers are encouraged to bring small objects to work reminding them of their true life. Pictures of beloved children and dogs, a banner of the favourite football team and souvenirs bought from that distant trip to Italy are intermingled with piles of paper in the cubicles. Weber might still see vestiges of the sober, lifeless archetypical bureaucratic milieu, but he would also observe a strange emphasis on play, creativity, liberation and the personal: in other words, life. This effort to bring life back to work – a space traditionally defined by self-abnegation and formalism – is closely linked to shifts in workforce regulation. Of course, many management enthusiasts represent this as a relaxation of workplace hierarchies. We only have to wander into any airport bookstore to find titles that proclaim the ‘Seven Day Weekend’ or the ‘Play Ethic’ to see this. Ricardo Semler, the author of the best selling pop-management book Maverick! goes so far as to say that ‘control is now per se y now, you are free’ (Semler, 1993, p. xiii). Indeed, he argues that work and life are today indistinguishable. The blurb on the back cover of The Seven Day Weekend (2004) is telling: Imagine a company where employees set their own hours; where there are no offices, no job titles, no business plans; where employees get to endorse or veto any new venture; where kids are encouraged to run the halls; and where the CEO lets other people make nearly all the decisions y if you have the freedom to get your job done on your own terms and to blend your work life and personal life with enthusiasm and creative energy.

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Smart bosses will eventually realize that you might be most productive if you work on Sunday afternoon, play golf on Monday morning, go to a movie on Tuesday afternoon, and watch your child play soccer on Thursday.

So does this mean that work and life might now be somehow reconciled, that a ‘frictionless capitalism’ has finally arrived, that the perennial contradiction between work and life, labour and free-time is over? This paper will suggest not. Traditional controls around time and bureaucratic regulation still abound (see Fleming & Sturdy, 2011). But they have been augmented by biocracy in which life itself (or bios) becomes an essential ‘human resource’ to be exploited. What Fleming and Sturdy (2011) term (in our study of a call centre) the ‘just be yourself’ management philosophy attempts to manufacture ‘a life’ at work in order to tap the personal and social qualities of workers. These aspects of employee behaviour are now viewed as a tool to enhance performance. Further more, this not only entails the transposition of life into work as a regulative principle, but also its converse, the spread of work into everyday life beyond the office. This is vividly captured in a recent biographical essay by Lucas (2010) called ‘Dreaming in Code’. The computer programmer described how his life was so integrated into the moment of production that sleep was even involved, dreaming up solutions to problematic code conundrums (what he called ‘sleep-working’) in the middle of the night. Introducing the concept of biocracy hopefully makes three contributions to employment studies. First, it seeks to help us understand the emergence of novel modes of domination that are currently augmenting conventional workplace controls (such as bureaucracy, culture management, technocracy and market forces). Second, the paper aims to unsettle the widespread assumption that ‘liberation management’ and its celebration of life at work might signal the relaxation of hierarchies on the job. In the context of capitalism and the capital/labour divide, biocracy represents a deepening of corporate power. And finally, when the key tension is not just between capital and labour but also between capital and life, we require a different set of concepts to understand how resistance is enacted by the workforce.

BIO-POWER AND BIOCRACY I develop the concept of biocracy from the broader notion of bio-power. According to the discussion initiated by Michel Foucault (1979, 2010), biopower concerns a change in modern forms of government in the West whereby populations – their hygiene, their medical status, their life and

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death – are administered from afar. In the recently published lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics (2010), Foucault links this to the emergence of liberalism and, more recently, neo-liberalism. Here it is not only the state that begins to manage life itself but also market forces. American economists like Gary Becker begin to speak of ‘human capital’ and ‘human resources’ in which the very life abilities of an individual can be indexed as an economic utility, extending the logic of the market into society as a whole. A weakness in Foucault’s analysis, I would suggest, is the downplaying of conflict in the emergence of neo-liberalism (indeed, it is remarkable that Foucault theorized the ideological birth of neo-liberalism without any mention of the industrial violence and strife that accompanied it – Thatcherism, for example). This is where the Italian Autonomist’s including Hardt and Negri (2009) and Virno (2004, 2008) among others are useful since they view bio-power as a new contestable terrain between capital/ labour. For them, bio-power emerges from the crisis of Fordism. From the 1970s and 1980s Western capitalism was rocked by a number of crises that were internal (debt and stagnation) and external (the oil embargo). It could no longer organize itself and generate the rate of profits required. Two important developments followed. First, the deindustrialization of the West and the concomitant growth of service work, and more importantly for us, the displacement of the management function onto labour itself. Indeed, capital realized it could no longer organize itself. Best to enlist the workforce to do this instead, and by doing so insert the logic of exploitation into the conduct of life more generally, our bodies, social interactions and so forth. Selfexploitation now becomes a central aspect of contemporary employment. This probably explains the weakening of the formal employment boundaries – between work and non-work, labour and management, free time and work time, societal production and reproduction – that were once so important under Fordism. From now on work is no longer something we only do (consigned to a limited space and time) but also something we are, becoming a way of life or lifestyle. Following the Fordist crisis, evermore aspects of corporate strategy was about capturing and putting to work the things it could not provide on its own accord (creativity, self-management, initiative, social competencies and life itself); thus the contemporary importance of what Marx called living labour as opposed to the hypostatic and ossified formal enterprise: or dead labour. Because it is our very personhood that makes up the job (rather than just being one role we can separate among others), the template of work inevitably spreads throughout the social body. This also occurs too as capitalism desperately

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seeks evermore autonomous (open, unprivatized, reciprocal) social moments to ride upon and commercialize. Understanding this parasitical facet of corporate capitalism today is central for grasping the concept of biocracy.

The Common and Its Bio-Regulation Why use the words ‘capture’, ‘enclose’ or ‘objectify’? What comes before the wealth ostensibly created by the formal enterprise? Well, we often think of the corporation or the state or the market in deeply Hobbesian terms. They somehow guarantee life, save us from ourselves and without which there would simply be violent mayhem (as Thomas Hobbes himself said, ‘life would be brutish and short’). But an alternative non-Hobbsian tradition of social theory challenges this line of thought. It runs from Spinoza to Marx, through Deleuze to the current observations of the Italian Autonomist movement. This approach basically turns Hobbes on his head, which for all intents and purposes is simply a radical version of the labour theory of value. For Tronti tells us: ‘Remember: the existence of a class of capitalists is based on the productive power of labour’ (Tronti, 1971, italics added). In other words, we ought to never concede to capitalism the wealth that it exploits since a whole underlabour of unrecognized social co-operation is required that it cannot bring into existence on its own accord. This is what some call ‘the common’ that persists despite the formal corporate enterprise. This transforms our vision of capitalism from something that creates value to something that encloses value. It opportunistically and parasitically rides upon and feeds off what Hardt and Negri (1994) ironically call the ‘communism of capitalism’. An illustrative example of what this means at work can be found in Peter Blau’s (1955) classic study of bureaucracy. As tensions mounted in the office he studied, employees conveyed their discontent in a very strange manner: doing exactly what they were told to do, following the rules to the letter. As a result, the invisible wealth of openness, knowledge sharing and discretion was withdrawn and the enterprise came to a halt. The implications of Blau’s study is clear: the formal organization persists and continues despite itself. It is significantly reliant on an undercurrent of non-commercialized social co-operation to function and expand (see a similar point in Merton’s (1942) classic argument regarding the ‘communism of science’). This hidden yet vital abode of informal labour has long been well understood even in functionalist sociology (see Orr, 1996; Wadel, 1979). But today, this commonwealth is not shunned or feared by management but is the explicit target of a new set of regulative principles.

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Putting Life to Work Biocracy emerged when corporate capitalism could no longer organize itself. It thus enlisted workers to do this job instead. At the same time, the informal and social qualities of the labor process – especially those based upon autonomous principles – were transformed into a prime reservoir of value. Indeed, extending workplace regulation into life itself is typical of a kind of capitalism that is super-reliant on human qualities like social intelligence, reciprocity, communication and collective improvisation. And, as we noted above, since these aspects of social labour often lie outside or beyond the logic of economic formalism, we see the importance of non-work in a wide range of industries, from the call centre (Fleming, 2010), to the management consultancy (Costas & Fleming, 2009) and the textile factory (Land & Taylor, 2010). Paulo Virno explains the rationale succinctly: the productive cooperation in which labour-power participates is always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labour process. It includes also the world of nonlabour, the experiences and knowledge matured outside of the factory and the office. Labour-power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its qualities of non-labour. (2004, p. 203)

This biocratic enclosure of non-work can take a number of forms. We might see the managerialization of the informal organization that was always present but previously distrusted under Fordism. As the classic studies of workplace behaviour including Roy (1952, 1958) and Burawoy (1979) demonstrated, employees have always found ways to relieve boredom, reject authority and inject an element of humanity back into work in order to get the job done (via play, games, sexuality, humour and even sabotage). But things are different today. Recent studies (see Fleming, 2005; Liu, 2004; Ross, 2004) have shown how this organic informality is now actively encouraged and utilized by a more ‘holistic’ kind of human resource management. Some corporations even promote what was once deemed ‘organizational misbehaviour’ (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999) under the Fordist model. Hence the recent importance of authenticity. The rise of what Kuhn (2006) calls the ‘lifestyle firm’ aims to engage workers by allowing them to just be themselves (‘warts and all’). The idea is that employees might be more motivated if they feel comfortable expressing, say, their gay identities or alternative political views at work, rather than hiding them from view for fear of chastisement (but it must be noted that ‘unionism’ is conspicuously left off the list of desirable expressions of identity).

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At the same time we see attempts to mimic or replicate this rich texture of life in formalized work contexts by evoking social codes conventionally associated with non-work. The author (see Fleming, 2009) has previously reported on how a call centre created a whole simulated discourse pertaining to non-work. The firm in question encouraged expressions of sexuality, condoned drinking alcohol on the job (on Fridays), orchestrated ‘pajama days’, placed a strong emphasis on ‘partying’ and ironically enough, even celebrated moments of anti-capitalism.

THE COMING BIOCRATIC WORKPLACE? We have now posited the idea of biocracy based upon the broader notion of bio-power and linked it to a parasitical phase of capitalism whereby the common, the sociality of workers and ‘life itself’ is regulated. We can now enumerate several features that are definitive of biocracy to arrive at a more precise conceptualization.

The Internalization of Power As opposed to the traditional office or factory that was built upon a keen distinction between the boss and employee, manager and the managed, the ‘internalization of power’ functions to enlist the worker as management’s prime bearer. Of course, we all still have a boss above us telling us what to do – but this prototypical power relation has become a lifestyle so that employees internalize the ‘boss function’. Commentators have understood this from a number of perspectives. Some have evoked the Foucauldian notion of self- and peer-surveillance (see Barker, 1993; Deetz, 1992). Others have utilized a neo-Weberian framework to show how post-bureaucratic hierarchies have ensured ‘we are all managers now’ (Grey, 1999). And Kunda and Ailon-Souday (2005) cite the hyper individualization of modern management practices as a driving factor. My take on this internalization of power links it to the way our living sensibilities, our bodies, cognitive abilities and social aptitudes are central to economic value today. Since living people are now the ‘means of production’, power inserts itself into the conduct of life more generally with self-exploitation as its key signature. Following Cederstrom and Fleming (2012), one only has to turn to academic work to see how this involves a substantial change in power relations. The academic today dutifully writes her lectures on a Sunday

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night, explores new ideas while half asleep, arrives at lectures punctually, and trains herself in the art of writing, reading and communicating. As a result the corporatized university makes grotesque surpluses out of a selffashioned craft. Whereas under Fordism workers mentally told the boss to ‘fuck off’ as they left the factory (Beynon, 1975), now they take it home with them. Turning off becomes difficult (also see Gregg, 2011). Might this not be capitalism’s ultimate Frankensteinian moment (recall the curse Dr. Frankenstein received from his jilted monster: I shall be with you on your wedding night!)? Another way of explaining this is to see it from the perspective of resistance, or more precisely, how difficult conventional forms of conflict are when we become the bearers of our own domination. This is nicely explained in Lucas’s (2010) autobiographical narrative about work as a computer programmer and his inability to resist, since he himself was the vehicle of distributed control systems. He explains with reference to some classic methods of escaping managerial control: given the individually allocated and project centered character of the job, absenteeism only amounts to self-punishment, as work that is not done will have to be done later under increased stress. Given the collaborative nature of the work, heel dragging necessarily involves a sense of guilt towards other workers. On the production line, sabotage might be a rational tactic, but when your work resembles that of an artisan, sabotage would only make life harder y It is only when sickness comes and I am involuntary incapable of work that I really gain extra time for myself. It is a strange thing to rejoice in the onset of a flu. Lucas (2010, p. 128)

Here we see traditional modes of contestation being outflanked by a new set of control functions that have inserted themselves into everyday life. Only illness provides any respite. This is what Boltanski and Chiapello (2004) observe in another context as ‘effective management’ because it has employees ‘control themselves which involves transferring external organizational mechanisms to people’s internal dispositions’ (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2004, p. 75).

Horizontalization of Power Relations The internalization of power is linked to another related development in the nature of regulation under biocracy: the horizontalization of power. The exercise of control not only comes from above, but now also from the side, from our co-workers, our tasks and the immediate environment that concentrates our time and attention. Again, this does not mean that the

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conventional boss ‘above’ us is obsolete. It does signal, however, that biocapitalism places a good deal of managerial responsibility onto employees themselves. While the internalization of power relates to the way the working person is constituted as a ‘subject’ (their demeanor, for example) so they exert control over themselves, the horizontalization of power is more ‘external’ in nature, pertaining to the unrelenting and all-encompassing pressure to meet a deadline, finish a project and enhance one’s performance. A good example of this aspect of biocracy can be found in Gregg’s (2011) study Work’s Intimacy, demonstrating how work literally took over the lives of post-industrial employees in Australia. In a number of case studies, she investigates the way computer technology in particular created an environment of self-entrapment. With the use of mobile technology, workers could (and often did) work at home, in the cafe´, in bed, on the weekend, on their day’s off, at a child’s football game, and in one extreme case, on an accident and emergency hospital table (well, someone had to inform the team that they would not make the meeting!). Developing a mentality that expects to work like this represents the internalization of power we discussed above. But the never-ending overstimulation outlined by Gregg also represents the horizontalization of power. And it begins with teams, since like a magnifying glass they concentrate work into an urgent, ever-pressing ‘problem’ requiring immediate attention. Gregg (2011) writes, ‘the team becomes hegemonic in the office culture due to its effectiveness in erasing the power hierarchies and differential entitlements that clearly remain in large organizations’ (Gregg, 2011, p. 74). And more to the point, ‘loyalty to the team has the effect of making extra work seem courteous and common sense’ (Gregg, 2011, p. 85). With the aid of mobile technology, the quest to ‘keep up’, ‘keep on top’ and not let your team down overwhelms employees with a perception of endless labour. This is what Gregg calls ‘presence bleed’ (always being mentally on the job) and ‘function creep’ (increased time being given up to work). Regarding ‘presence bleed’ she writes: Communication platforms and devices allow work to invade spaces and times that were only susceptible to its presence. This is a process we might describe the presence belled of contemporary office culture, where firm boundaries between personal and professional identities no longer apply. Presence belled explains the familiar experience whereby location and time of work become secondary considerations faced with the ‘to do list’ that seems forever out of control. It not only explains the sense of responsibility workers feel in making themselves ready and willing to work beyond paid hours but also captures the feeling of anxiety that arises in jobs that involve a never-ending schedule of tasks that must be fulfilled. Gregg (2011, p. 2)

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This horizontalization of regulation positions the worker as a crucial node in the circuit of management power relations. However, employees themselves do not have any say over what the overall task might be – more conventional forms of upper management do not disappear in this sense. Gregg’s workers might self-manage but they do not self-direct or choose organizational goals. And most importantly, they still have to report to a boss at the end of each performance cycle to assess their success as agents of self-exploitation.

Formalized Informality When the biosphere of the workforce becomes the target of power, two processes occur. Pre-existing undercurrents of informality are exploited to redirect enthusiasm, creativity, naturalness and social richness towards productive ends. If bureaucratic formalization stultifies the living worker and thus becomes an impediment to productivity and cognitive-led value creation, then a new brand of management has found ways to capture these currents of wealth. Liu (2004) noted this in his book The Laws of Cool, an analysis of contemporary knowledge and service work. Whereas the deskilling typical of Fordism sought to eradicate the informal underworld that workers themselves controlled, today’s managerial ethos attempts to utilize it. Playing, joking and even sleeping on the job is now encouraged if it leads to more innovative and motivated work performances (also see Cremlin, 2011). We might call this the formalization of informality because it seeks to render the informal congruent with formal economic rationality. The second part of this formalization of informality leads to some more peculiar management practices. Despite the managerial claims to the contrary, work is still experienced by many as the antithesis of real play, fun and life as such (Fisher, 2009). It still represents an imposition or coercive injunction. Therefore, in order to bring life into the workplace, corporations seek to stage, manufacture, script and ultimately imitate it in the office. This is where we see teaming-building exercises, away days, on-job massages and other forms of forced sociality become central. These two aspects of formalized informality can be found in the author’s study of work in a new-wave call-centre called ‘Sunray Customer Service’ (see Fleming, 2009). The management at Sunray was well informed about the alienating effects of contemporary employment, especially when it came to the mind numbing, depressing and frequently humiliating job of a callcentre employee. It seemed only when its employees had checked out (either literally or mentally) that they started to feel human again and buzz with

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life. Moreover, while call-centre work might seem bereft of skill or aptitude, it actually requires high-levels of social intelligence, innovation and emotional initiative. So Sunray had to find a way to both (a) tap preexisting social competence (which was frequently hidden from management) and (b) replicate that buzz of life on the job. It did this by inviting workers to ‘just be themselves’ around sexuality, informal banter, display of tattoos, goofing around and so forth. Management’s motto was ‘Remember the 3F’s: Fun, Focus and Fulfillment’. The aim was to create a more natural customer experience by drawing on the pre-corporate authenticity of employees. Moreover, the firm simulated moments of ‘play’. The most embarrassing of these was a team-building exercise in which workers formed a circle and sung Kermit the Frog’s (from ‘The Muppet Show’) Rainbow Connection.

The Social Factory The theme of non-work or non-labour is central to the biocratic workplace. We have already touched on the reasons why. Traditionally it was only once we had left the office or factory that we could begin to live again, and reconnect with our humanity and pleasures. But now the workplace seeks those qualities too and invents mechanisms for tapping them. For example, airlines train their workers to act as if the aircraft cabin is their living room (Hochschild, 1983). We now speak of the ‘lifestyle firm’ (Kuhn, 2006). Enterprises like Google portray themselves more as social movements rather than big business. Moreover, as Virno (2008) pointed out earlier, the lifeaffirming qualities of non-work are usually indexed to social realms outside of economic rationality which firms seek to harness to instrumental goals. But if non-work signifiers flow into the corporation from the outside, then the converse must occur too. The logic of work flows out into society, defining evermore facets of the employees’ life. This might be one reading of Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) classic essay on ‘societies of control’. Whereas Foucault argued that the template of the prison had permeated all of society including the factory, Deleuze premised that the factory – not an actual factory, but the factory in its virtual form, as a way of life, a gaseous ethos – today defines our biosphere. When we breathe in the molecules of the social foundry, we always ‘owe the man’, are indebted to the boss, the master who is now a universal presence: in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas y In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is

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never finished with anything – the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. Deleuze (1992, p. 5)

Under Fordism, weekends, leisure, making love and home-life certainly functioned to indirectly support the world of work (especially in the case of unpaid feminine work). But now, according to Deleuze, the logic of the factory has come to define more moments of what was once non-production. Both the time and space of working is now increasingly totalized because the means of production is us. The traditional point of production – say the factory assembly line – is scatted to every corner of our lives since it is our social attributes that create value. We are always poised for work. Andrew Ross (2004) nicely describes the infectious ‘gas’ of production in his case study of an IT firm. He found the usual non-work signifiers continuously evoked as the firm imported ‘lifestyle components back into the workplace’ (Ross, 2004, p. 139). But the process flowed the other way too. Management knew that ‘ideas and creativity were just as likely to surface at home or in other locations, and so employees were encouraged to work elsewhere y the goal was to extract every waking moment of an employee’s day’ (Ross, 2004, p. 52). It is not only the waking hours of the bio-proletariat that are exploited. Strikingly, we may even be working when asleep. This is vividly captured in the aforementioned essay by Rob Lucas, ‘Dreaming in Code’ (2010). The computer programmer described how his life was so integrated with his job that sleep was even a moment of labour, dreaming up solutions to problematic code conundrums in the middle of the night. He writes, ‘dreaming about your work is one thing, but dreaming inside the logic of your work is another y in the kind of dream I have been having the very movement of my mind is transformed: it has become that of my job. This is unnerving’ (Lucas, 2010, p. 125). Such ‘sleep working’ was not experienced as an amplification of life. On the contrary, it represented a subtraction, a vampire-like negation of his vital existence for the benefit of an impersonal and repellent institutional imposition: a job. Surplus Regulation The final notable feature of biocracy relates to the multiplication of regulation as work becomes what we are rather than something we just do. The well-worn notion of ‘liberation management’ makes it look as if the biocratic worker is less regulated than her Fordist predecessor. The euphemisms

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of ‘self-management’ and ‘flexibility’ are often deployed for this purpose. But I would suggest that the bio-political worker is more regulated now than ever. Following Herbert Marcuse’s notion of surplus repression (showing how there is more control than functionally necessary for productivity), I use the term surplus regulation to make sense of this aspect of biocracy. This refers to the manufactured necessity to labour. In a society of control one is never done with work and we therefore never know when one is free from it. This might be a dismal state of affairs for workers, but a strategic problem for capital since it never really knows when and if life has been exploited enough. This is because the old metrics that allowed us to gauge differences between fixed capital and variable capital, productive and non-productive labour, socially necessarily labour time vs. surplus labour time, production and reproduction have been significantly displaced. This immeasurability of labour power is not entirely new. For example, in his classic study of bureaucracy (or what he called non-production labour), Edwards (1979) argued that the immaterial nature of office work posed big problems for management regarding performance metrics. He writes, ‘the distinct nature of each separate task meant that it was not possible to compare it directly with the performance of other workers or even the same worker at other times’ (Edwards, 1979, p. 88). But when the very life qualities and vitalism of individual workers’ are instrumentalized as with biocracy, the difficulty of measurement is amplified exponentially. How can you measure affect, sentiment and resourcefulness without inadvertently standardizing what is supposed to remain unstandardized? And this uncertainty flows into the very nature of work itself. If initiative, improvisation and resourcefulness are the basis of value, quantification becomes impracticable. As Gregg (2011) observes in the study cited above among mobile workers, ‘no formal policies existed for them to manage online obligations; nor were there guidelines for appropriate response times. Employees operated on the basis of some vague and self-imposed ideas about what management would or wouldn’t expect’ (Gregg, 2011, p. 52). From capital’s perspective the problem of immeasurability is met not by less but an over-abundance of regulation y just to make sure. As Fleming and Mandarini (2009) also argue, this represents a permanent instanciation of the potential to labour, a total and in many cases needless reduction of the body, its faculties and relations to the template of work. This is why most management techniques in the biocratic firm are perceived by employees to be rather pointless, exerted for their own sake rather than for achieving organizational goals. As Orr (1996) nicely puts it in his ethnographic study of technicians, employees often get the job done despite the formal

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regulations imposed around the task, controls that were more often than not deemed obstructive to the job. Whereas Orr viewed this operative ‘despite’ as a moment of hard won worker’s autonomy, it is also a defining feature of biocracy, of a new kind of regulation.

TOWARDS A GENERAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE ANALYSIS OF BIOCRACY We now have surveyed five components that make up what I have called biocracy: the internalization of power, the horizontalization of power, formalized informality, the society of control and finally, surplus regulation. As a loose grouping of sub-themes, they provide an exploratory framework for observing some novel and quite insidious permutations in how work is organized today. Two questions must be addressed, however, if we are to hone the framework to aid future empirical analysis. How does biocracy relate or interact with other modes of regulation like bureaucracy, culture management, technical control and so-forth? And who exactly (jobs, occupations, industries, etc.) does this form of power affect and target in contemporary workplaces? An important part of this paper is to argue that while biocracy is often described as a positive movement toward freedom, autonomy and selfdirection (as espoused in the ‘liberation management’ credo for example), the opposite might be closer to the truth. It is a more insidious mode of regulation posing as freedom, as life as such. Biocracy represents two important facets in this respect. First, it widens the net of managerialism to include the very social intelligence, life skills and aptitudes of workers, putting them to work for the firm. Second, this partially reseats the managerial function onto workers themselves. But again, none of this should be equated with autonomy or selfdirection. The ends of biocracy are still alien to the worker, dictated not by them but the company. There is no democracy or free participation here, and all of the studies mentioned above are clear on this point. For this reason, biocracy does not dispense with bureaucracy, technical control, cultural controls or direct supervision. I would propose, from the above analysis, that biocratic control exists beside and in tandem with conventional forms of managerialism. It represents a moment of augmentation, enrolling workers into practices of self-management that may be formally surveyed, repealed or met with punishment at anytime. All of the studies I have mentioned above are unanimous here: under biocracy

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management does not disappear, but actually extends its range and prerogatives. But biocracy managed by and against whom? This question is more tricky. Across industries one would obviously expect knowledge work to be more susceptible to this kind of re-organization of power. This would include management consultants, IT workers and call-centre service workers among others. But the service sector more broadly is now heavily reliant on the social qualities of workers, their emotional labour, which again has a strong biocratic nature. University workers, state service workers and even traditional occupations such as healthcare provision and defence have transformed work into something we are as much as do. Nursing is a good example. But this distributional question needs further testing. And what about within firms such as the advertising agency, the service centre or the large corporation? Is there a divide between those subjected to biocracy and those who exercise it? While the capital/labour, employer/employee and the manager/managed dichotomy is still very relevant, biocracy is powerful precisely because it partially cuts across these divides affecting the lowly call centre worker as well as the senior manager (resulting in different life chances and material benefits of course). For the bio-political worker, the real struggle is not simply between capital and labour as it was under Fordism but between capital and life. And in this sense, we can all be included under the rubric of ‘the worker’. Indeed, a number of leading employment activists in Western Europe have duly noted this, with one group stating: Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes – the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and the dominated, managers and workers – among which one could differentiate. The font line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through the middle of each of us. Tiqqun (2011, p. 12)

In a sense, then, we are all in it together, from the overworked banker to the precarious janitor. But not in a liberalist sense that views everyone as potential benefactors in waiting. No, more in a radical sense, that views all as victims of work, sharing the common need to overcome the indentured subordination to the market and corporation. Perhaps, then, we might even be witnessing the emergence of a new ‘universal class’ like the proletariat of yesteryear (see Luka´cs, 1971). However, this is not the place to speculate on such matters. But what makes this aspect of biocracy very interesting is that it precipitates forms of conflict that often scramble the traditional co-ordinates of industrial antagonism. For there doesn’t seem to be a direct and identifiable target. Moreover, the power

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being resisted appears in the garb of life itself. Something we actually live. And how do we resist that?

AGAINST BIOCRACY? It is understandable if, at this juncture, the analysis might seem somewhat pessimistic about the possibility of resisting biocracy. If the above propositions are correct, then it is easy to conclude that an exploitative power has finally won the day. Indeed, this is close to what Jean Baudrillard (2010) surmised in the dark lectures delivered shortly before his death. While he is prescient about the kind of power many now confront in the workplace, his analysis might also point to useful ways to theorize the resistance it can evoke. What we have described as biocracy, he calls ‘hegemony’, something very different to plain domination: We must distinguish between domination and hegemony. Until now, we were dealing with domination. A master/slave relationship, a symbolic one if you like, a dual relationship with the possibility of explosion, revolution, alienation and disalienation. This domination has made way for hegemony, which is altogether something else. There is no longer a dual relationship. Everyone is an accomplice. Everyone is caught up in the network and submits to this hegemony. We are both victims and accomplices; guilty and not responsible. Hegemony is within us. If we want to resist hegemony and escape it using the means we once used against domination (revolt, critical thought, negative thought, etc.), there is no hope. Baudrillard (2010, pp. 116–117).

For Baudrillard, then, dialectical reasoning (the traditional way of understanding industrial dissent) is problematic here since the target of opposition is now somehow us. Recall how Lucas (2010) found industrial methods of struggle difficult to execute in a climate of distributed power relations. However, biocracy is certainly resisted, just not in the manner that characterizes traditional forms of protest. And this is difficult to conceptualize since how does one resist what appears to be life itself? Based on a number of empirical observations, I want to suggest it involves a process of de-working the common, repossessing that rich wellspring of social living that exists prior to economic rationality. To begin with, it involves not mistaking the commonwealth for capitalism. Not mistaking life and its conduct for the ideology of work. Not mistaking the body and its fine sensibilities for a pliable human resource. Not mistaking self-direction and its astonishing improvisational energies for the boss function. Each mistaken conflation creates conditions ripe for self-exploitation (the true currency of biocracy). Each detachment, however, represents a positive

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moment of removal, separation or withdrawal from the scene of power, an escape back into an unexploited life. Not all escape attempts, however, are successful.

Failed Escape Attempts Let us begin with failed escape attempts since it serves to demonstrate what resistance means in a climate of biocracy. One of the most common ways that biocracy is resisted today gets almost everything wrong. But it is still of the bio-political era. It mistakes the boss function for the body, the individual for life, and the human resource for living labour. It says to itself: ‘if I am the bearer of power, then I will hurt it by hurting myself. I will incapacitate it by incapacitating myself.’ Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call this a failed escape simply because it concedes life to capital, and thus resists by resisting life itself. No detachment is achieved, in fact the opposite. Think again of our ‘sleep worker’ (Lucas, 2010) and the way he rejoiced in the onset of the flu. The incapacitated body was represented as a moment of freedom from the continuous pressure to work. Indeed, this proactive utilization of illness was first experimented with in early 1970s. The Socialist Patient Collective urged workers to ‘use illness as a weapon’ and exhorted the proletariat to reconfigure the damaged body into a beacon of freedom. But can illness really change the face of an overworked society? The author has argued elsewhere (see Fleming, 2011) that self-destruction is a widespread, if misinformed, counter-attack against biocracy. We might link the attempt to purge the boss function ‘within us’ to a number of pathologies including alcoholism, burnout, suicide (of which work-related cases is at an all-time high according to the ILO) and so forth. One fascinating example of this can be found in Hamper’s (1992) tragic-comedic account of life in a large automobile factory that was slowly implementing controls associated with biocracy. To curb production defects, management took a man off the line, dressed him up in a garish yellow cat suit and called him Howie the Quality Cat. At first Howie seemed happy with his newfound freedom. But he soon became the butt of almost every anti-management joke. One co-worker even tried to set him on fire. Soon a dejected Howie began to look more like a dishevelled stray, sitting for long periods in the car park smoking cigarettes and drinking hard liquor. The end was nigh. Howie mistook himself for the bio-regulated human resource he had become and turned on his own body. From the company’s perspective, it was easy to categorize him as yet another post-industrial stress casualty.

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The Refusal to Work A more successful mode of repossessing life from capital is the refusal of work. This kind of protest does not ask for more work, less work or better work but an end to work. This refusal seeks to detach the artifice of work from life, instrumental activity from the practice of being human and sociable. Unlike other experiments in this area – most famously Larfargu’s classic ‘right to be lazy’ – this politics of disengagement is not individualist but radically social in character. In a number of key works, Hardt and Negri (1994, 2009) point to a more productive mode of resistance that accompanies bio-power (and in our case biocracy), one that returns to the notion of the common explored earlier. This might be called the strategy of exit whereby labour simply withdraws from the parasitic obstruction that is economic rationality. Again, this is not a withdrawal into solitude or individual isolation. It can be conceptualized more as a tactical departure from the scene of power in which new social networks engage in a process of self-valorization. That is to say, activating social relations that repossess, nurture and extend the commonwealth that is already present, but currently being put to work by capital. In part this involves what Stefano Harney (2011) calls social preservation or ‘social rest’, an escape from the frenetic attention economy of corporate life. It might also involve the making of alternative worlds outside of capitalism, as practiced by independent media groups (Shukiatis, 2009) and co-operative working communities in the large metropolis of the West (see Pasquinelli, 2008 for an excellent overview). Hardt and Negri (2009) call this positive detachment of life from capital exodus: by exodus here we mean, initially at least, a process of subtraction from the relationship with capital by means of actualizing the potential autonomy of labour power. Exodus is not thus a refusal of productivity of bio-labour of labour power but rather a refusal of the fetters placed on its productive capacities by capital. Hardt & Negri (2009, p. 368)

There are many examples of exodus in and around the formal enterprise. We only need to look to the multitude of employees who have departed their jobs – including the so-called ‘downshift movement’ – in order to lead less exploited lives (see Nelson, Paek, & Rademacher, 2007). Hundreds of websites are available to this end including leavingacademia.com and many others. We might also think about the multitude of non-workers that chose never to enter the corporation in the first place (for a discussion of this see

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Costas & Fleming, 2010). For example, an ex-consultant recounted to the author (see Fleming, 2012) that when he left the business he himself started, he was overwhelmed with the congratulations received from colleagues, more so than we he started it. Escaping the self-entrapment of modern business life was considered a major achievement. Becoming Imperceptible We often associate political struggle with being heard, with being recognized and being counted. However, in the bio-political climate, becoming visible to power might be counter-productive. Why so? First, if bio-capitalism is purely parasitical, then why even bother speaking to power? It simply reinforces the idea that capitalism can give us something (and perhaps it can’t or won’t). Many among the bio-precariat worry that even voicing one’s discontent might simply strengthen the legitimacy of the control structure being questioned. Indeed, the ideology of liberalism has always functioned in this manner. Think of the bizarre self-referentiality in the reasoning of former US president George W. Bush when he said he felt vindicated by the millions of protesters opposing his policies because he too stood for free speech. Most recently, another example can be found amidst the 2011 anti-corporation protests that began with an occupation on Wall Street and spread around the world. While certainly a worthy form of struggle, the corporate world saw it in another light. In the London business newspaper, Financial News, a lead article entitled ‘How to Profit from the Protests’ (2011) recommended engaging with the protests to find new forms of innovation and ideas. Once again, the bio-proletariat was brought back onto the stage of power. Rather than speaking to power and thus risk falling prey to the ideological mirror game of recognition politics, some have suggested simply turning away from the gaze of domination. This strategy of reclaiming life (through the various detachments we have discussed above) might be better described as the struggle to be left alone. Some have achieved this by becoming inscrutable to power, refusing dialogue and simply disappearing to valorize that which business had sought to exploit. This is what some have called the politics of imperceptibility (see Papadopoulos, Stephenson, & Tsianos, 2008) or a post-recognition politics (see Fleming, 2011). But again, it does not entail disappearing into some kind of private solitude. It is a very social disappearing. The infamous ‘Invisible Committee’ (2009) in France is

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a good example when it comes to anti-corporate protest and the refusal to work. They explain the rationale: turn anonymity into a defensive position. In a demonstration, a union member tears the mask off an anonymous person who has just broken a window. ‘Take responsibility for what you’re doing instead of hiding yourself.’ But to be visible is to be exposed, that is to say above all, vulnerable. When Leftists everywhere continually make their cause more ‘visible’ – whether that of the homeless, of women or of undocumented immigrants – in hopes that it will get dealt with, they’re doing exactly the contrary of what must be done. Not making ourselves visible, but instead turning the anonymity to which we’ve been relegated to our advantage, and through conspiracy, nocturnal or faceless actions, creating an invulnerable position of attack. The Invisible Committee (2009, pp. 112–113)

Anne Elizabeth Moore (2007) nicely explores this post-recognition politics in the music industry, which is notorious for capturing the living labour of artists. In the 1990s a thriving network of autonomous culture producers had developed a unique sub-economy of music in a number of US cities. These communities often celebrated anti-capitalist independence and a DYI ethic that dispensed with the need for large commercial labels. At the same time, however, large music multinationals were making ever-deeper forays into this sub-culture. While engagement with the powerful corporates through various forms of ironic and cynical lampooning was and still is common currency (ala Nirvana or Radio Head), this frequently resulted in artistic ‘sell-out’. In this context, Bikini Kill (which had considerable underground success with the song ‘Suck My Left One’) and other ‘riot grrrl’ bands (anti-consumerist, feminist DYI groups) understood this aspect of commodification. So these bands practiced a politics of imperceptibility: ‘riot grrrl participants developed a sophisticated response: a media blackout y for the most part the mainstream media were forced to describe what they could comprehend of the burgeoning scene from the outer edge of a sweaty mosh pit’ (Moore, 2007, p. 9).

CONCLUSION This paper has aimed to show how the appearance of ‘life itself’ in today’s workplace does not represent a moment of freedom, but the insidious extension of the regulation of labour. The term biocracy (and its defining components) hopefully maps some of the key features of this form of control, placing it in the context of bio-politics and changes in how capitalism exploits labour. It hopefully explains why corporations are so

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interested in non-work and what some have called ‘the common’ at this juncture of late capitalism. I remind the reader that this is not a quantitative argument, but a qualitative one. Indeed, the number of organizations that are ‘biocratic’ would certainly be in the minority, with traditional technocratic and bureaucratic controls still the predominant way labour is exploited globally. Instead, this paper suggests biocracy may signal a qualitative development in the way work and employment is organized today. Just as the factory only made up a minority of workplaces when Marx was writing, so does biocracy today. Whether, however, like the factory of yesteryear, it represents the vanguard of a new paradigmatic shift in socio-economic life remains to be seen. This paper has set out to achieve the more modest task of making some preliminary comments about what it actually entails as a form of social control. Finally, the paper has raised the crucial question of resistance. In turning our traditional Hobbesian view of the corporation on its head, perhaps it is capital that is resistant, repressing the irrepressible communism underlying it that threatens to come into its own someday. And while biocracy aims to remove resistance from the vocabulary of the working subject, the disdain for exploitation has never diminished. Hardt and Negri (1994) summarize this well, and offers us a useful conclusion to the discussion of biocracy at work: ‘the communism of capital can absorb all values within its movement, and can represent to the fullest the general social goal of development, but it can never expropriate that particularity of the working class that is its hatred of exploitation, its uncontainability at any given level of equilibrium’ (Hardt & Negri, 1994, p. 51).

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SUPER FLAT: HIERARCHY, CULTURE AND DIMENSIONS OF ORGANIZING Martin Parker ABSTRACT This article considers a series of ways in which hierarchy is ontologically and politically opposed to flatness, particularly in the work of the artist Takashi Murakami and the cultural critic Dick Hebdige. It explores the attractions and problems of flatness as an alternative to hierarchy, but concludes that both are equally two-dimensional representations of organizing. Instead, alternative organizers with a commitment to anti-hierarchical practices would be better learning from the three-dimensional practical examples of anarchism, feminism, socialism and environmentalism. Keywords: Art; Japan; hierarchy; culture; alternatives

Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy – from the Bureau to Network Organizations Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 35, 229–247 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000035011

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BEGINNINGS The world of the future might be like Japan is today – super flat. Society, art, customs, culture: all are extremely two dimensional. It is particularly apparent in the arts that this sensibility has been flowing steadily beneath the surface of Japanese history. Today, the sensibility is most present in Japanese games and anime, which have become powerful parts of world culture. — Takashi Murakami (2000) ‘The Super Flat Manifesto’

The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami produces a range of cultural objects – paintings and sculptures, but also ‘commercial’ products such as little plastic figures, mouse mats, T-shirts and key chains. His work is broadly inspired by the Japanese animation and comic book traditions of anime and manga – highly coloured cartoons of fantasy figures which often exhibit a big eyed cute (kawaii) menace – and is often generally referred to as an otaku aesthetic. His work, like that of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and many other ‘pop’ artists, operates to blur the distinctions between ‘high art’ and popular culture (Bankowsky, Gingeras, & Wood, 2009), as well as in his case between the West and the rest. Murakami describes some of his work as ‘super flat’, and I take this to be a description of both the quality of the highly coloured, glossy, computer-generated surfaces of the objects he makes, but also of an approach to cultural forms. There is only surface, and any claims about depth or elevation are dismissed as illusory pretensions, held in place by the operations of power and a sensibility that trades on some elderly normative assumptions about the aesthetic. Probably the most famous of Murakami’s characters is Mr DOB,1 a hypercoloured mutant Mickey Mouse with a crazed grin. Mr DOB’s big eyes shine as he cavorts with smiling flowers, pandas, mushrooms and jellyfish. Sometimes he has sharp teeth and slides through bad acid trip backgrounds. DOB can be anything – a sculpture, balloon, painting, sticker, bath towel, video, plastic toy. He is happy, sad, scary and shocked. He is reproduced on expensive paintings, cheaper prints and cuddly toys – serially produced and customized for different market niches. Mr DOB is only part of Murakami’s output. His resin sculpture ‘My Lonesome Cowboy’, a naked and fully erect kawaii figure with a lasso of spunk around his head sold at Sotheby’s for 15.2 million dollars. Murakami also does work for Louis Vuitton, the luxury goods manufacturer, as well as organizing GEISAI, a biannual arts fair that features other Japanese artists and teen J-Pop stars – the candy coloured sex and violence of toon world, the global art market and the gyrating 120 beats per minute video on a flat

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plasma screen. It’s all the same. As disposable and as important as a Mr DOB shokugan – a ‘snack toy’. The super flat ontology and politics that Murkami trades in seems to me to be related to other ideas about lateral relations – the generalized symmetry between people and things that philosophers of the material such as Deleuze, DeLanda and Latour have promoted, as well as the many attempts to dethrone ‘high’ culture, and celebrate the everyday that we find in cultural studies (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 2004; Hebdige, 1979, 1988; Latour, 2005). In this chapter I want to suggest that it is also related to ideas about hierarchy in organization. This might seem an odd claim, but it reflects my conviction that questions of organization are, in some quite important ways, cultural ones. In general terms, we seem to find it difficult to express flat relations, perhaps feeling that the flows of cause and power expressed in vertical relations – top/bottom, surface/depth, superstructure/base – somehow explain the world more fully. Like Bhaskar’s (1978) realist device of a ‘stratified ontology’ which explains social phenomena in terms of underlying mechanisms, it is as if we see the lateral as merely descriptive, a mapping of a terrain, whilst the vertical captures necessary causal truths that explain why the visible is laid out in the way that it is. Indeed, for some realists, to call an ontology ‘flat’ is to suggest that it has no explanatory power (Reed, 1997). And so it is, relentlessly, with questions of organization. From bureaucratic organograms to expressions of the transcedent power of leaders, our dominant conceptions of organization appear to be constituted as if elevation necessarily provided vision, and that only rare and precious creatures can breathe the air of the executive suite. Power, it seems, only works properly when it is piled on top of itself, and the higher the pile gets, the more effective the power is. In this chapter, written in a deliberately non-linear style, I will explore these embedded ideas about hierarchy by responding in a meandering way to Murakami’s project. If organizations are constituted culturally, and culture can be understood in some super flat ways, then what does this do to our conceptions of organizing? Murakami’s work encourages us to question our hierarchies – to treat cartoons, toys and pornographic sculptures as art, and to treat his mass production as an extension of the white cube gallery. Such flattening might well be helpful for political projects which push radically democratic forms of decision making (Lovink & Scholz, 2007) but, just as importantly, it might also encourage us to see organizations in different ways, with power as an effect of particular organizational arrangements, rather than the reason why all organizing inevitably has to be

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hierarchical. It might be that this sort of anti-art provides a way to think beyond a culture which reifies power as the inevitability of hierarchy. So what happens when all judgements have been suspended, and everything is as good as everything else? Is it possible, or even desirable, to have super flat forms of organizing?

FLAT CULTURE One way of locating Murakami is through the frame of ‘Business Art’. His Tokyo-based Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd. studio and production facility, like Andy Warhol’s Factory, is both art and business. He employs 50 people in Tokyo and a further 20 in an office in New York. The organization curates art exhibitions and sells stuffed kawaii toys, works on brand goods, makes music videos and always refuses the separations between high art and low commerce. In 2010, KaiKai and KiKi (also both cartoon characters themselves) became gigantic balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York. Murakami is certainly not the only artist to have proposed that art, money and work are intimately layered together (Molesworth, 2003; Parker, 2012; Siegal & Mattick, 2004) but he is perhaps one of the most challenging contemporary examples, simply because of the number of fields that he has now become involved in. Murakami continually shifts. When the Japanese TV star Kase Taishuu lost the legal right to use his image and name after a dispute with the producers of his show, Murakami hired four actors to be him until the Yakuza – heavily involved in Japanese media – objected because it was damaging their profits (Siegal & Mattick, 2004, pp. 62–65). He routinely employs other people to make his work, and PR consultants to help him with his media image. Google his name and there are lots of images of Murakami smiling. A round impenetrable smile, repeated at exhibitions across the world. Like his cartoon flowers, tessellated together and grinning so hard that the image is emptied, and becomes blankly manic. Thus, according to this alternative value system, Murakami is no ‘sell-out’ as would be said of an artist in the West; the white cube art production, luxury fashion brand consulting and Kaikai Kiki merchandising are all equally weighted in his radical cultural maelstrom. (Gingeras, 2009, p. 80)

The Kaikai KiKi Co. Ltd. doubtless has a structure of some sort, with a division of labour and someone who makes sure that the hundred employees on three sites get paid and the art supplies cupboard is refilled every week. It

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might be a flexible structure of the sort that creative industries are said to have, but it will be a structure nonetheless. It would be difficult to imagine how a Mr DOB shokugan could be imagined, made and placed in a snack packet without some fairly intricate arrangements of people and things to ensure that the stuff arrived in the right places at just the right time. In New York and Tokyo, highly trained Kaikai KiKi employees work under the supervision of Takashi Murakami to produce cutting-edge, innovative artworks. (y) Kaikai Kiki paintings are painstakingly rendered by hand, using computer rendering technology and advanced printing techniques as guides. After a training of at least 1 month, each staff must, as an initiation test, complete a small painting of a mushroom to be critiqued by Murakami. (Kaikai Kiki, 2011)

This is a description of an organized world, one in which there are employees who are ‘supervised’ by an authority which establishes the rules governing labour and technology in a particular time and place. The employee must pass the tests set by the authority, and the implicit assumption here is that if your mushroom painting fails to meet a standard determined by a particular individual you will no longer be an employee. As we all know, employees are like mushrooms. Kept in the dark and fed shit. In the ‘Super Flat Manifesto’ Murakami compares his thesis about two dimensionality to the process of producing graphic art. One way to imagine super flatness is to think of the moment when, in creating a desktop graphic for your computer, you merge a number of distinct layers into one. Though it is not a terribly clear example, the feeling I get is a sense of reality that is very nearly a physical sensation. (Murakami, 2000, p. 5)

‘A sense of reality?’ As if the real were flat, and there is a kind of vertigo in no longer seeing it as layered? As Murakami explains in his essay ‘A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art’ (2000, pp. 9–25), for a long time Japan has produced art forms which emphasize surface. Other art might be concerned with depth and perspective, such as that which develops in Italy in the 15th century (Azuma, 2000; Berger, 1972), but he claims that Japanese art is planar. There is no optical illusion of a viewer, with the world unfolding away to a vanishing point in front of them, but an image to be scanned. Further, the technical means to produce this image are clear on the surface of the work. In a drawing of a plum tree, or Mount Fuji, there is no attempt to fool us into thinking that we are looking at a plum tree, or Mount Fuji. This flatness then extends, Murakami argues, into a cultural flatness too. It is difficult to express the singular idea of ‘art’ in Japanese, and to distinguish it from technique, craft or learning. The Western idea of high ‘art’ was imported in the late 19th century, and an understanding of what counts as

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‘art’ is hence inextricably associated with particular non-Japanese forms and the markets they since created. Since that time, the popularity of pottery, sculpture, or Japanese painting, or Western painting, or Japanese versions of Western painting styles have fluctuated depending on fashion and economics. So if Japanese art tends to flatness, and the distinctions between ‘art’ and its other are unstable, it follows that Godzilla is equivalent to Kurosawa. It might sound like a radical cultural relativism to those schooled in Western aesthetics, but for Murakami’s Japan this is no more than expressing a truth about perspectives and markets. ‘Art is the supreme incarnation of luxury entertainment’ (Murakami, 2011). Things are worth what you might pay for them, and of taste there is no disputing. In his book he goes on to show how he treats anime, teen J-pop, classical Japanese drawings and paintings as equivalents. The ‘Western’ moral economy that celebrates age and craft skill, and is suspicious of market penetration and mechanical reproduction, is irrelevant here, and the book presents a variety of cultural goods with equal care. Video game screen shots, photographs of varying quality, pop song lyrics, enamelled screens and detailed embroideries, cartoon panels and dance instruction drawings are laminated next to erotic resin sculptures of teenagers with big eyes and delicate prints of the fading pink petals of a lotus flower. For Murakami, the market makes these things flat, exchangeable with one another, and he wants to ensure that the work of Japanese artists (such as those working within Kaikai KiKi) has a market. Flatness, in that sense, has another connotation – being just as good as the West. In Murakami’s floating world, everything moves relative to everything else. There are no foundations, no places we can stand in order to ground a hierarchy in which this is better than that. Thomas Friedman’s pro-globalization book The World is Flat (2005) seems to echo Murakami rather neatly. The relentless predicate of the book is that everything can be exchanged and value is a matter of markets. Friedman’s thesis is that the application of information and transportation technologies to multiple markets has made the global economy into a level playing field. Anyone can sell anything anywhere, and geography and history no longer matter that much. Though Friedman wants to warn his fellow Americans that they need to develop skills to prevent themselves from being washed away, his message is not protectionist. Just as Murakami sweeps into Manhattan, so will ‘Globalization 3.0’ do away with elderly ideas about the competitive advantage of nations. The market corrodes established hierarchies, and makes everyone the same. We can all exchange value, and move people and things without friction across the surface of the

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world in jets and shipping containers. In a world of exchange, all hierarchies are temporary, all rules, laws and institutions are provisional, all that was solid melts into air. Murakami, in response to being told that one of his works was printed upside down in a newspaper article responded that ‘it didn’t matter much’ (Azuma, 2000, p. 147). Perhaps this super flatness is the ‘post-modern’ condition, a relentless creative destruction that bulldozes everything in its path.

THE FEAR OF FLATNESS MORE: What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ROPER: I’d cut down every law in England to do that! MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws being all flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down (y) d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Robert Bolt A Man for All Seasons (1960, p. 39)

But what happens when all the world is flat, and all value is reduced to exchange? In Bolt’s play, Thomas More has faith in institutions, including the King who eventually martyred him. It seems fitting that this Tudor cleric with such faith in the sheltering capacities of organization should be the author of Utopia (1516), a thought experiment which has given its name to an entire genre. Murakami and Friedman’s celebrations of flatness seem to be the cultural and economic equivalent of the great wind that so troubles More, because what will be left after such a bonfire of the certainties? In his essay ‘The Bottom Line on Planet One’, the cultural critic Dick Hebdige invited us into a different sort of thought experiment. He asks us to imagine two worlds based on different principles. Planet One has ‘a priestly class of scribes’ who ‘determine the rules of rhetoric and grammar, draw the lines between disciplines, proscribe the form and content of all (legitimate) discourse and control the flow of knowledge to the people’ (1988, p. 158). Thanks to the activities of these mandarins, this is a world with depth, as signs are made to signify for other signs, and with history, as signs are made to tell stories. Planet One is our world, a world in which cultural distinction is made through authority relations, and maps of social distinctions can be constructed that locate people and things in more or less predictable relations (Bourdieu, 1984). Planet Two, on the other hand, is a world where – the vertical axis has collapsed and the organization of sense is horizontal (i.e., this world is a flat world). There are no scribes or priests or engravers here. Instead knowledge is

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assembled and dispensed to the public by a motley gang of bricoleurs, ironists, designers, publicists, image consultants, hommes et femmes fatales, market researchers, pirates, adventurers, flaˆneurs and dandies. (op. cit., p. 159)

First published in 1985 in an art photography magazine, the essay explores a sense of flatness, a world of kaleidoscopic configurations which need no authorization to be what they are and in which the shiftings of the patterns cannot be called history – in a teleological sense – but merely tell of endlessly shifting difference. Hebdige’s essay was written as a response to the British style magazine The Face, which was at that time an example of the image driven glossy collision of ideas which was then called ‘post-modernism’ but is now just culture. Interviews with pop stars, fragments from fashionable intellectuals (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze y), pictures of clothes and buildings, ethnographies of sub-cultures, political gestures, ironic nods to old styles and coverage of opera, starvation somewhere and adverts for anything that might sell to the inhabitants of Planet Two. Because everything in The Face is for sale, it’s just a question of how you consume as you drift across the shiny surfaces of words and things. What makes this essay really interesting is that oddly, for a commentator who has done so much to celebrate treating popular culture as every bit as important as high culture (1979), and who studied at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Hebdige appears to be nostalgic for Planet One. To stare into the blank, flat Face is to look into a world where your actual presence is unnecessary, where nothing adds up to much anything anymore, where you live to be alive. Because flatness is the friend of death and death is the great leveller. That’s the bottom line on Planet Two. (Hebdige, 1988, p. 161)

Though he is sceptical of the epistemology of Planet One, one in which it is assumed that the elect can see through appearances to a reality which lies behind and beyond, Hebdige baulks at the ethical-political implications of such flatness. Since there is no topology to Planet Two, he fears skidding off the surface, being reduced to two dimensions, and floating in space not knowing which way is up.

2D VS. 3D There seems to be a problem here then. Murakami wants to flatten things, because he sees the distinctions that exist as arbitrary. Murakami’s logic is based on a hostility to cultural and historical hierarchies which he sees

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as complicit in the dismissal of Japan, Japanese art and Japanese popular culture. This is a programme of cutting things down to size, a radical democratization of questions of judgement which uses Friedman’s market equivalence as its means to place Mr DOB alongside Mickey Mouse, and otaku in the elite white cube galleries of The West. Hebdige is troubled by this flattening, because he wants to be able to celebrate and condemn, to engage with warm people rather than the onedimensional ciphers of the market. He seems sympathetic to a politics of symbolic redistribution, but worries about what flatness does to judgement. His sentimental humanism demands purchase on the surface of Planet Two, as he continues to insist that everything is not the same, and some things are better than others. If everything is flattened by the market, then how do we organize ourselves around things that matter? This seems to be a normative demand for judgement to be recognized as what humans should do. Whatever Baudrillard or The Tatler or Saatchi and Saatchi, and Swatch have to say about it, I shall go on reminding myself that this earth is round not flat, that there will never be an end to judgement, that the ghosts will go on gathering at the bitter line which separates truth from lies, justice from injustice, Chile, Biafra and all the other avoidable disasters from all of us, whose order is built on their chaos. And that, I suppose, is the bottom line on Planet One. (Hebdige, 1988, p. 176)

It seems we have a reassertion of some sort of hierarchy against flatness here, but it has been flatness that appears to have been fashionable for some time. Nietzsche announced the ‘transvaluation of all values’ a century ago (2007), and many of the posts which have been staked since are an attack on the idea that some grounds for judgement are more elevated than others. Those who sit at the top of the church, state, university, art gallery or corporation have no more right to determine right than those who don’t, so drag the statues down and storm the universities. But, Hebdige reminds us, if everyone is the same, then are there no grounds for decision, for preferring Beethoven to Lady Gaga, or democracy to fascism. Everything is permitted, everything is for sale. If we are looking for some grounds to prefer flatness to hierarchy, then this is a criticism that needs to be addressed, because (unless we are happy to give up on institutions altogether) we need to decide how decisions are made in order that we can make worlds to live in together. These are organizational matters, questions of distribution and legitimacy which cannot be solved by simply insisting that everything is treated as equivalent, however attractive such rhetorical declarations might sound.

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FLATNESS AND HIERARCHY Is organizing necessarily hierarchical? Let’s begin by noting that we don’t need to imagine the intricacies of institutions as vertical matters, like a Super Mario platform game where an employee jumps up to a new level and collects some gold coins. This is a habit, one that is difficult to break perhaps, but it is not a necessary condition of organization. It is quite possible to think about organization as a distribution of capacities, each node or element performing some function which is different from others. We do not need to assume the neo-Platonist argument from the fictional Hierotheus of the 5th century CE, that the universe is ordered from God downwards, via nine orders of angels and eight more of different sorts of humans (Parker, 2009). The great chain of being might have been an influential template for thought, but it is quite possible now to think about organizations as systems, with functions distributed across a network, in the way that they are in the human body or a computer for example. Indeed, the Christmas tree organization has a rather fairy story verticality to it, assuming as it does that there is only one sort of power and you will find it in the pointy top. In the place under the roof of the organization, enclosed in an office somewhere so that it doesn’t leak out. If we want to trouble stories of hierarchy, then it’s a good idea to start off by noting just what a bizarre story the organization chart tells. If someone suggests that it is ‘idealistic’ to want to explore alternatives to hierarchy, does that mean that the organogram is a realistic depiction? In fact, it’s not even as realistic as a flat map, since all it really charts are the imagined distributions of tasks and rewards. It ignores ‘informal’ elements of organizing (all those that are not ‘formalized’) and is a truly fantastic representation of the empirical. If instead we were to take the organization chart, lay it flat and then redistribute or explode it like a circuit board, engineering diagram, maze or mandala, the imagined geography of hierarchy becomes clearer. A flat depiction of a division of labour doesn’t necessarily assume that some bits are more important than others, or that some parts can see the whole. Flatness has a democracy to it too. It dispenses with the idea that some are more equal than others, and consequently that some are special and deserve parking spaces and shiny suits. Flatness doesn’t dispense with the idea of organization, of the patterning which is an effect of the dispersal and arrangement of people and things. Neither would flatland organizers be troubled by the idea that some bits might co-ordinate, or relay, or occupy a centre, node or steering position of some kind. Such questions are technical matters about how particular things get done, and how certain sorts of

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powers are allocated to different parts. What the reduction to surface does is to suggest that hierarchy is not necessarily embedded into organizing in the way that we might assume is inevitable. The change of perspective re-orders what we see, and might allow us to think in different ways. On the other hand, describing things as ontologically flat doesn’t make them politically flat, because it can all too often simply ignore existing sedimentations of power. This is the problem with Friedman’s view from the New York Times skyscraper, across a world in which most people don’t have access to telephones, let alone the internet and shipping containers. His assertions about the way that things are reflect 50 years of post-industrial futurology in which bureaucracy is replaced by the project, the matrix and the virtual. Take the example of the word ‘network’.2 This word has been applied to transportation, media, biology, technology, mathematics and human societies. In its essence, it suggests a non-hierarchical web of connections (or ties) between organizations and/or people and/or objects. Such a web would have communication nodes but no controlling centre. In principal, unlike a hierarchy, the network does not need centralized direction, and could hence still operate even if parts of it were not functioning. It thus has something in common with ‘cellular’ or ‘bottom-up’ methods of organizing. However, the metaphor is an elastic one, since some ‘nodes’ can be conceptualized as more important than others (in terms of establishing rules for the rest of the network), and some connections can be seen to be more important than others (if their information is particularly valued). In other words, things called networks can easily begin to look like hierarchies if there is a great deal of distinction between the elements of the network. Further, since networks have been theorized as being ‘weak’ or ‘strong’, then it is possible to imagine a hierarchy of networks, or even (in the most conventional case) the word ‘network’ functioning a little like the term ‘informal structure’ in relation to the formal structures of organizations. The utilitarian use of the term ‘networking’ appears to have this meaning, by people who really want to make sure that they climb up a hierarchy. So the radically non-hierarchical potential of the word has hence been degraded considerably. At its most general, it has even been used (by Castells, 2000 or Boltanski & Chiapello, 2006 for example) as a general description of an information society – just the sort of social order that Friedman is describing. However, since this ‘network society’ contains forms of organization and economy that are clearly hierarchical and exclusionary, it is difficult to see what distinctiveness the word has in this context. Like so many ‘new’ organizational forms over the last 50 years, the managers are still

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the ones insisting that others be flexible (Heydebrand, 1989). My point is that many of the claims about the world being flat – informalization, empowerment, the wisdom of crowds, post-modernism, post-bureaucratic organization – should not be treated as empirical statements or ontological claims but as advertising slogans. Indeed, sometimes they should be treated with extreme caution because the person who claims that we are all in the same boat usually isn’t. Treating hierarchy as if it does not exist offers wonderful support to those at the top of the hierarchy. (Bratton 1989, p. 1499)

Hierarchy denial can be a form of ideology, a sort of obfuscation which is usually practiced by those whose elevation allows them to see no detail of the problems experienced down there on the ground. So we cannot wish political hierarchies away with fashionable words, but neither should we assume that hierarchy is a necessary organizational form. Other worlds are possible. That is to say, there are plenty of places where we can often empirically document hierarchies, but this doesn’t mean that all organizing must (and therefore should) be hierarchical. To assume the latter would be to fall into the Functionalist Fallacy 101, that the social phenomena that do exist must exist, and hence that radical social change is merely idealism. The question that remains is whether there are ways of thinking which can preserve the possibility of different and non-hierarchical forms, but without losing a sense of organizing as the engineering of relative powers.

DIMENSIONS OF ORGANIZING Let’s begin by thinking about hierarchy and super flat as being equally twodimensional accounts of organizing. Whether flattening distinctions, or constructing them, the oscillation takes place between the horizontal and the vertical when neither can possibly be stable states. First, the vertical organogram tends not to express horizontal relations, even though it has been empirically established since at least the 1950s ‘dysfunctions of bureaucracy’ literature that the informal is what allows the formal to exist at all. James Scott notes that the organization chart is the public or official transcript of some sort of institution in which all members are joined only by vertical relations, and ultimately only given unity ‘by the lord, patron or master, who represents the only link joining them’ (1990, p. 62, italics in original). This is a form of picturing the social which ignores so much else that connects and divides people. The informal organization is then

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relegated to being what Scott calls a ‘hidden transcript’, a kind of residue which is only of interest insofar as it assists or blocks the schemes of those ‘higher up’ the organization. So we might say that an emphasis on hierarchy is a form of blindness which ignores the planar nature of much of what actually happens in organizations – the self management, informality, subcultures and so on – in favour of an account which justifies the elevation of those who provide it. No wonder that the schools which teach management also tend to teach the inevitability of hierarchical power relations. Second, though the impulse to push over the Christmas tree is understandable enough from those with commitments to equality, a flat picture of organizing does fail to capture its political topology in a very convincing way. It tends to be a normative description, one motivated by certain commitments which I happen to agree with, but which (as Hebidge noted) end up describing a world which is just as glossily unrealistic. Complex forms of organizing do have centres of power. For example, as Pamela Lee suggests, it is vector graphics programmes like Adobe Illustrator which have allowed Murakami to produce scalable images that can be reproduced on and as a wide range of products from Macy’s parade balloons to a key chain (2007). Adobe allows for stretchable surfaces, and hence for both customized high end products and serial production at the bottom end. So Mr DOB represents a form of branded commodity which has partly been made possible by the technology provided by a global software company with headquarters in San Jose California, a turnover in 2009 of 2.946 billion dollars and 8,715 employees.3 This particular version of mechanical reproduction is using post-Fordist production methods to sell into luxury markets willing to pay for a Louis Vuitton accessory, others willing to pay a few yen for a snack toy, as well as millionaires and museums who will bid on artworks worth 15.2 million dollars. Louis Vuitton is part of the LVMH group, the world’s largest producer of luxury goods with a turnover of h20.3 billion in 2010. I’m with Hebdige here. This doesn’t seem like a very flat world to me, and saying that organizing is flat doesn’t make it so. The problem might be the Manichean nature of the set up – either hierarchy or super flat – when the ontology and politics of organizing is always more complex than that. Indeed, there is no particular reason to assume that a particular ontology of organizing commits you to a politics which necessarily supports or questions political hierarchies. Those who claim that the world is flat might be doing so in order to ensure that you buy whatever it is that they are selling, and those who insist on hierarchy might be imagining organizations that more effectively distribute resources for reasons of social justice.

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POST-HIERARCHY ‘after death the heart assumes the shape of a pyramid’. (Julian Barnes, quoted in Burrell, 1993, p. 66)

Nevertheless, there is an odd convergence here between the pro-market claims of Murakami and Friedman, and the long-standing suspicion of hierarchy that we find in a wide series of anti-authoritarian positions. Both viewpoints appear to be trading on some notion of human freedoms and an opposition to constraint, but the similarities shouldn’t blind us to some very substantial differences. For Friedman, the ceaseless waves of innovation are inevitable, and his objections are not to hierarchy as such, but rather to the idea that any particular hierarchy could last. Like a bourgeois merchant, he objects to the feudal and the bureaucratic, but only in order that he can get his own pile. Murakami, it seems to me, is a similar case, with his seductive attempts at equalizing cultural value being largely plays within a market system, and being both predicated and justified on the same grounds which that system provides. If you sell more product, you deserve more profit, and to claim anything else is rather old fashioned. So these are not objections to hierarchy in general, or in principal. However, from another point of view there are plenty of good reasons why hierarchy itself should be regarded with suspicion. As Gibson Burrell appears to be implying with the use of his epigraph, the bureaucratic organization appears petrified, rather than alive, and its linearity kills (1997). Decades of writing on organizations have suggested that its immutable hierarchies produce bureaucratic personalities, banal conformists who follow orders, solidify rituals and spend lifetimes striving for the gold watch or executive washroom (Bauman, 1989; Whyte, 1961). Symbolically it very often seems that hierarchy is conservative and arboreal whilst radicalism is flat and rhizomatic. The tower must be pulled down and the new world built. The diverse factions which gather in the Post identify the centralized source of this oppressive power variously as the Word/the Enlightenment Project/European Rationalism/the Party/the Law of the Father/the Phallus as (absent) guarantor of imaginary coherence. In other words, the project is a multi-faceted attack on the authority/ authorship diad which is seen to hover like the ghost of the Father behind all First World discourse guaranteeing truth, hierarchy and the order of things. (Hebdige, 1988, p. 163)

There are lots of capitals in these sentences, lots of ironic implications, but nonetheless, many forms of intentional community, alternative organization, anti-capitalist movement and utopia are informed by some sense of organization as distributed and democratic. Hierarchical assumptions, whether institutionalized in political parties, states, capitalist organizations or

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particular human relations have been subjected to consistent suspicion. Many radicals would assume that the work of organizing can and should proceed through the autonomous yet co-ordinated activities of the organizers. This could be an imagined state of social order in an utopian sense; or the operationalization of a normative political philosophy like anarchism, socialism, environmentalism or feminism; a technological practice in the case of open source, creative commons and copyleft ideas; or a specific and located form of intentional community or co-operative. In all these cases, there are deep and practical commitments to direct democracy and engagement, as forms of life that need to be worked at in order to sustain them. If hierarchy is a form of the petrifaction of power, as many of these alternative organizers would agree, then it needs to be continually addressed, reflected upon and challenged in order that it can be resisted (Blaug, 1999; Bookchin, 1982, p. 62, passim; Parker, Fournier, & Reedy, 2007). But, this does not mean that the result of these reflections are necessarily normatively flat forms of organizing. Indeed, Murakami’s version of flatness is a wilful myth, precisely because his practice actually requires that the cultural hierarchies are there in the background. There would be nothing interesting about Mr DOB in an art gallery if art galleries and cartoon characters were normally part of the same world. If otaku was equivalent to Leonardo, Murakami would have less to sell. It is the fact that they are not that makes Murakami interesting, and provides his work with a market value. Murakami isn’t flattening, but social climbing. In order to make sense of his practice, it needs to be understood as incongruous against some sort of backdrop. Murakami’s seeming commitment to cultural equity is laudable only if we view it as the sort of flatness which Friedman describes. As an artist of floating values, he will sell into whatever markets are available, and that includes the hyper-rich consumers who can afford a superluxury Louis Vuitton handbag for more money than most people on the planet earn in a year. Murakami is a contemporary version of what Hebdige fears, a fluid movement of capital across the surface of the world assembled and dispensed to the public by a motley gang of bricoleurs, ironists, designers and so on. There are no rules, only choices, and hence the only commitments that make any sense are those of Friedman’s free market, of which Murakami’s art market is a small example. It does seem important to question hierarchy in the way that Murakami does, but not to thereby suggest that two-dimensional flatness can or should replace two-dimensional verticality. To borrow some terms from Deleuze and Guattari, but refuse their implied politics, arboreal and rhizomatic accounts are not in opposition to one another (2004, p. 3, passim). This is a

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practical fact of organizing, and simple dualisms are in danger of obscuring it. Many ‘alternative’ forms of organizing do have hierarchies, but they are rarely naturalized or assumed to be inevitable. In 200 years of anarchist, feminist, environmentalist and socialist thought we have a vibrant variety of accounts concerning how and whether legitimate individuals or groups should co-ordinate the life and labour of others. Added to that are questions concerning the length of tenure, the span and limitation of responsibilities, differential rewards, the processes of consultation and democratic participation, and grounds for legitimacy (Ferree & Martin, 1995; Lovink & Scholz, 2007; Marshall, 1993; Parker et al., 2007; Parker, Cheney, Fournier, & Land, 2013). The literature on alternative ways of thinking about organizing is huge, but rarely recognized within the Business School. These are three-dimensional issues, practical issues and they demand that organizing is conceptualized as taking place in space and not in a single plane, whether vertical or horizontal. Simply opposing hierarchy with flatness does not recognize the ways in which arboreal forms of organizing work well for trees, and rhizomes produce sprouts which push upwards. Simple oppositions rarely capture empirical complexities, or the ethical-political questions that are raised by any form of organizing that wants to get things done and also reflect on the means by which things are done. If institutions are power made durable, then the question is not whether hierarchy can be opposed with flatness, but whether and how institutions can keep de-institutionalizing themselves. Judgements will happen, Hebdige is right, but the hierarchy of Planet One can represent judgement turned to stone. Decisions will be made, hierarchies will grow as power congeals for a while and produces certain sort of arrangements and effects. But that doesn’t mean that hierarchy is the equilibrium state of organizing. Order can exist without hierarchies being permanent. Positioning a theory of organizing, or a political practice, against the inevitability of hierarchy does not imply that everything becomes equivalent and we end up in Mr DOB’s world. This sort of flattening which is predicated merely on the market runs the danger of reducing incommensurable values to one common coin, and hence effacing other sorts of value altogether. In other words, there is no reason why hierarchy itself cannot serve a value, without it thereby becoming a universal principle. Edwin Abbot’s mathematical romance Flatland, first published in 1884, tells the story of a square and his two-dimensional universe. The flatlanders are a narrow and conservative bunch, with severe traditions and judgements about the rectitude of the angles of their fellows. For men, the more sides the

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better, with circles being the most perfect. The working class are triangles, with equilateral triangles being the most respectable, whilst women are very dangerous and pointed needles who can easily kill by accident and hence require firm control. Despite their flat world, the Flatlanders have clear hierarchies and classes, enforced by violent authority, and no doubts that theirs is the only sensible world that should and could exist. When our protagonist sees ‘Lineland’ (one dimension) and ‘Spaceland’ (three dimensions) he begins to reflect on the relativity of customs and assumptions that he had always assumed inviolable. Of course he is assumed to be mad or seditious by the rulers of Flatland, and writes to us from prison. Widely assumed to be a satire on Victorian morality, as well as a neat primer in the mathematics of dimensions, Flatland does not present flatness as a virtue, and shows that hierarchy can exist there too. Spinning Flatland on its side allows us to see that the problem that this non-linear essay set itself is two dimensionality, not flatness as such. Claiming that the earth is flat, or that we are part of a great chain of being, or that the social world has a stratified ontology, simply refuses to acknowledge the complexity of the politics of organizing. The tree is not bad, and the rhizome is not good, and both actually spread in three dimensions. Opposing hierarchy with flatness is like opposing the x-axis with the y-axis, and such a definitively Cartesian gesture is unlikely to produce any convincing accounts of the world, or ways of acting on that world. Better to be clear about what sort of organizations are wished for, what sort of utopias can be imagined and work towards those, than claim a warrant in preferring one dimension to another. Mr DOB has helped me think through what flatness means, but his politics are as thin as a coin. Anarchists, feminists, communists and environmentalists have been concerned with these issues for hundreds of years, and their accounts of organizing are driven by ethical-political commitments, not a marketing strategy or naturalized ontological myths.

NOTES 1. In Azuma’s essay in the Super Flat book (2000), the words ‘DOB’ and ‘Super Flat’ are rendered in Western characters in the Japanese text. I assume this is significant. 2. In a rhizomatic manner, some of the words here are borrowed from the ‘network’ entry in Parker et al. (2007). 3. Retrieved from www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pdfs/fastfacts.pdf. Accessed on 18 March 2011.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Mats Alvesson is professor of business administration at the University of Lund, Sweden and at University of Queensland Business School, Australia. Research interests include critical theory, gender, power, management of knowledge intensive organizations, leadership, identity, organizational image, organizational culture and symbolism, qualitative methods and philosophy of science. Recent books include Interpreting Interviews (Sage, 2011), Metaphor We Lead By: Understanding Leadership in the Real World (Routledge, 2011, edited with Andre Spicer), Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies (Oxford University Press, edited with Todd Bridgman and Hugh Willmott), Understanding Gender and Organizations (Sage, 2009, 2nd edition edited with Yvonne Billing), Reflexive Methodology (Sage, 2009, 2nd edition edited with Kaj Skoldberg), Changing Organizational Culture (Routledge, 2008, edited with Stefan Sveningsson) and Knowledge Work and Knowledge-Intensive Firms (Oxford University Press, 2004). Peter Bloom is a lecturer in the School of Business and Economics at Swansea University in Wales, UK. His research primarily concentrates on critical reinterpretations of ideology and power for explaining issues of identity, capitalism and organizational subjectivity. His work has been published in the Journal of Political Ideologies, Organization, Journal of Organizational Change Management, International Journal of Zizek Studies. Haldor Byrkjeflot is researcher at Department of Sociology and Human Geography at University of Oslo. He has directed research programmes on comparative management and public sector reforms and has published on topics relating to comparative employment systems, comparative management, globalization of the MBA as well as health care reform. Currently he is engaged in projects on reputation management in the public sector as well as accountability reforms and policy developments in welfare states. Stewart R. Clegg has been professor of sociology at the University of New England; of organization studies at the University of St Andrews; of management at the University of Western Sydney and University of 249

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Technology, Sydney, where he currently holds a chair. He is also a visiting professor at Universidade Nova, Lisboa and at EM-Lyon’s doctoral programme as well as at Copenhagen Business School. Recently he has been a distinguished fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University and the Montezelomo visiting professor, Cambridge Judge Business School. He has produced several hundred papers, many contributions to edited collections such as this one, and about 45 books on a diverse array of topics in sociology and organization analysis, often focused on power relations. In addition he has produced edited Handbooks of Organization Studies (2006), Power (2009) and Macro-Organizational Behaviour (2009) with various colleagues, as well as a four volume International Encyclopaedia of Organization Studies (2008), all published by Sage. In addition, he has produced two textbooks with colleagues: Managing and Organizations: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (2012 3rd edition) and Strategy: Theory and Practice (2011). Thomas Diefenbach is associate professor of business ethics at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), Beppu, Japan. In his research, Thomas investigates primarily the problematic existence and relationships of individuals within all types of organisations, different forms of organisations and the fundamental principles of past, present and future organisations and societies. Thomas is particularly interested in identifying and investigating non-hierarchical structures and processes as well as alternative forms of management, organisations and societies. In his latest monograph Management and the Dominance of Managers (2009) he developed a comprehensive and multi-dimensional model for critically investigating managers’ power, interests and ideology within an organisational context. In another monograph on Hierarchy – The Eternal Beast (2012, forthcoming) he tries to develop a ‘General Theory of the Persistence of Hierarchical Social Order’. Peter Fleming is professor of work and organization in the School of Business and Management. His research interests include new forms of power, conflict in the workplace, corporate corruption and the politics of working life. His books include Contesting the Corporation (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Authenticity and the Cultural Politics of Work (Oxford University Press, 2009), Dead Man Working (Zero Books, 2012) and The End of Corporate Social Responsibility (Sage, 2012). Paul du Gay is Globaliseringsprofessor in the Department of Organization (IOA) at Copenhagen Business School, where he directs the Velux

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Foundation Research Programme ‘What Makes Organization?’ and codirects the School’s Business in Society Platform on ‘Public-Private Relations’. His publications include In Praise of Bureaucracy, The Values of Bureaucracy and Organizing Identity: Persons and Culture ‘After Theory’. He is currently completing New Spirits of Capitalism? Justifications, Crises and Dynamics (Oxford University Press, edited with Glenn Morgan) and a monograph, For State Service: Office as a Vocation (Routledge). Susanne E. Lundholm earned her PhD at the School of Economics, Lund University, Sweden, in 2011. Her thesis project explored hierarchy in contemporary work, conceptualizing it as a formal-informal dynamic constructed in everyday work-interactions between managers and subordinates. The intersection between the formal-informal organization is also the subject of a book, on HR work and managers, that she is presently working on together with Mats Alvesson. Other research interests include leadership, identity and gender. Alan McKinlay is a professor at Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. He has written extensively on business and labour history in British manufacturing and financial services. He has also written about Ford Motor Company, both in the early days of mass production and the corporation’s adoption of new, participative management techniques from the late 1980s. Theoretically, his main interest is in the development of the ideas of Michel Foucault through an engagement with management and organizational history. Martin Parker works at Warwick Business School. He writes about a variety of topics on the boundary between culture and organizing, and his most recent book is Alternative Business: Outlaws, Crime and Culture (Routledge, 2011). He also co-edits the journal Organization. Jens Rennstam is assistant professor at the School of Economics, Lund University, Sweden. His research mainly employs ethnographic methods and his research interest regards control in organizations and the relationship between vertical and horizontal forms of organizing. Recently, he is also engaged in research on branding and the role of materiality in organizations. During the full academic year of 2011, when this paper was written, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder.

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Carl Rhodes is professor of organization studies at Swansea University, UK. His research focuses on critically interrogating the narration and representation of organizational experience in practice and popular culture, with a particular concern with the possibilities for organizational ethics and responsibility. Carl’s most recent books are Organizations and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2012, co-edited with Simon Lilley), Bits of Organization (Liber, 2009, co-edited with Alison Pullen) and Critical Representations of Work and Organization in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2008, co-authored with Robert Westwood). John A. A. Sillince is research professor of organization studies and strategy at Newcastle University Business School. He has a PhD from the London School of Economics. His research interests are in discourse, narrative and rhetoric and in institutional theory.