Since the 1921 publication of Max Weber’s Economy and Society throngs of writers have analyzed the problem of bureaucracies.
Bureaucracies. You know? “I have to fill out a form, to fill out a form, for this request?”
I’m a university professor and I can assure you that in higher education, bureaucracy is creeping.
Bureaucracies don’t exist to fix the problems they allege to address but only to ensure the impossibility of further discussion about them.
The first line of creation of a bureaucracy is “policies and procedures.” In institutional terms, pressure from attendant administrators is increased on central operating employees to create regulatory processes (policies and procedures) that force employees into gymnastic maneuvers of form-filing, authorization-getting, and rule-complying, all of which mediates and replaces previous, quite human approaches to accomplishing tasks. Bureaucratic bloodhounds sniff out and snuff out all person-to-person, situational, solve-as-preferred-or-needed interactions.
Eventually as more and more person-to-person, situational, solve-as-preferred-or-needed interactions disappear, the work environment becomes the true definition of “bureaucracy”: a processing plant whose labor could be as effectively performed (probably ought to be performed) by non-conscious robots or machines.
The pressure from attendant administrators on central operating employees to create policies and procedures need not be overt and indeed is most often barely acknowledged in the creation of bureaucracies. This is because their strategy of persuasion is nearly impossible, especially over time, to oppose. That strategy, in a nutshell, is legal threats.
The language of “best practices” is introduced. “Best practices” is code for “what most others do.” Most often, though not always, the suggestion by employees to “look at what others are doing” is proposed leaving unspoken the true purpose: “what others are doing to avoid litigation.” Dropping the legal point from the phrase encourages hearers to think the proposal is about generating ideas in a brainstorming session. In fast-moving, harried meeting-contexts, when ideas are needed, there is little-to-no tolerance for deliberation and original creative insight.
My workplace is and has for some time been undergoing radical pressure to bureaucratize its functioning. The main source of this is a narrative about an outside accrediting agency. “So and so says we have to such and such…” has triggered a wide range of institutional reforms, and indeed has taken on a momentum where it is almost never questioned as a rationale.
Perhaps the time has passed when such questioning is even possible, after all, as the opening of this writing indicated, bureaucracies are created in order to make such questioning impossible.
Weber was dead correct in his view of bureaucracies, in his view that it erodes individual liberty and places humans in an “iron cage” of rational control.
We remaining humans in the field of higher education, some of whom appear to wish not to be turned into robots, ought to worry about bureaucracies.
I’m Matthew Flamm, and that’s my perspective.
I wish to dedicate this “perspective” to recently passed WNIJ “Sessions” host Carl Nelson, a person whom although I only had the privilege meeting twice, I sensed had the rebel spirit to resist bureaucratic institutional powers.