In Praise of Bureaucracy

Weber - Organization - Ethics

Paul du Gay

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781446230138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

In this provocative study, Paul du Gay makes a compelling case for the continuing importance of bureaucracy. Taking inspiration from the work of Max Weber, du Gay launches a staunch defence of `the bureaucratic ethos? and highlights its continuing relevance to the achievement of social order and good government in liberal democratic societies.

Through a comprehensive engagement with both historical and contemporary critiques of bureaucracy and a careful examination of the policies of organizational change within the public services today, du Gay develops a major reappraisal of the so-called `traditional? ethic of office. In doing so he highlights the ways in which many of the key features of bureaucratic conduct that came into existence a century ago still remain essential to the provision of responsible democratic government.

PART I

The Religious and Romantic Origins of ‘Bureau Critique’

1

Alasdair MacIntyre and the Christian Genealogy of ‘Bureau Critique’

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As ‘managerial’ values have spread ever wider, encompassing objects and domains previously considered beyond their reach, critical understandings of the meaning and function of management have undergone a significant transmutation too. In contrast to the rather shadowy role as functionaries of capital that managers were allocated in the cruder formulations of labour process theory, for example, all forms of contemporary organizational critique allocate a much more important role to the conduct of ‘managing’ than has generally been the case before. Agreement amongst practitioners of the critical enterprise may not always extend much beyond this but the influential role of ‘management’ in the reproduction and transformation of organizational life is now taken for granted.

This acknowledgement that ‘management matters’ has had some distinctly destabilizing effects for more determinist forms of critical organizational analysis, particularly, but not exclusively, those of a Marxist bent. However, proponents of ‘radical’ management critique have been remarkably inventive in plundering ostensibly ‘alien’ theoretical sources in order to bolster their flagging sense of mission. Communitarian political and moral philosophy, post-structuralist cultural theory and postmodern social theory, to name some of the more obvious recruits, have all received their joining instructions in the battle to problematize the conduct of management (Hassard and Parker, 1993; Willmott, 1993; Burrell, 1997).

Foremost amongst the moral philosophers whose work has provided a constant source of inspiration for critical theorists of management in recent years is Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s (1981) arguments about the ‘character’ of the Manager have commanded considerable support within critical organizational circles and have regularly been cited by critical intellectuals keen to unmask an ethical vacuum at the heart of the managerial enterprise (Anthony, 1986; Deetz, 1995; Mangham, 1995; McMylor, 1994)¹.

Although both MacIntyre and his admirers are united by their criticism of management in general, it is interesting to note that the object of MacIntyre’s critique is in fact quite specific. It is none other than Max Weber’s ‘ideal typical’ bureaucrat. A detailed analysis of MacIntyre’s critique of the manager offers a very useful entroe to the philosophical variant of bureau critique outlined in the Introduction to this book. In particular, it provides valuable insights concerning the ethos of this form of critique and the persona of the critical intellectual who practises it.

The chapter begins by delineating and examining the central arguments of MacIntyre’s After Virtue and indicating the crucial role allocated to the bureaucratic ‘manager’ as an agent of moral decay. In particular, attention is focused upon the ways in which MacIntyre attempts to hold the character of the manager accountable to a particular ideal of the person, one that derives many of its characteristics from Christian theology.

I then compare MacIntyre’s conception of the bureaucrat with Max Weber’s. I argue that although MacIntyre deploys a distinctively Weberian theoretical lexicon in formulating his case against both Weber and his ‘ideal typical’ bureaucratic manager his conclusions concerning the ethical vacuity of bureaucratic conduct are the very antithesis of Weber’s own. While Weber is concerned to offer a positive description of the bureaucrat as a bureaucrat, MacIntyre attempts to hold the bureaucrat accountable to an ‘ideal’ of the person derived from a very different ethical milieu. However, because the person of the bureaucrat does not attempt to approximate to this ‘ideal’ it cannot be criticized for failing to meet its demands.

The predicament

Alasdair MacIntyre’s widely praised text, After Virtue (1981), is a work of moral philosophy which offers a critique of something called ‘management’ as part of an attempt to diagnose the presumed disintegration of moral relationships in modern liberal societies. MacIntyre claims that modern morality is in a grim state. Indeed, he paints Western history as an unremitting process of impoverishment and decay. Past societies, we are told, were orderly and healthy while ours is sick and chaotic. People who were once firmly located in harmonious communities are now rootless and soullless. Social relations have been torn assunder by atmostic individualism. A solidaristic communal order has given way to an egotistical and morally hollow one. Normative consensus has been supplanted by endless disagreement. Deep pre-modern forms of social identity have been dislocated by thinner and more universal ones. As a result, modern humanity is clueless about how to live the moral life. (For a detailed discussion of MacIntyre’s thesis see Holmes, 1993.)

For MacIntyre, the diagnosis is so bleak because the decline of a telos or objective purpose to human existence has stripped us modern souls of any objective conception of the end or goal of human life, any idea of the good life that morality can subserve. According to him, the shift from an Aristotelian language of morality (in which a thoroughgoing hierarchy exists among conceptions of the good life) to a contemporary emotivist doctrine, in which morality is purely and simply a matter of personal preference, has led to rationally interminable moral disputes (1981: 11). Without a shared view of our moral purpose we seem incapable of deciding between rival claims, for we continually invoke competing moral rules.

The absence of a fixed, monistic view of human morality to which our individual choices must be subordinated has, in turn, effectively removed all limits to the scope of individual choice. All associations and life-plans have become voluntary. Because moral discourse has become the expression of individual preferences, incapable of rational consensus, practical reason has come to be equated with the instrumental reason of bureaucratic institutions, the choice of efficient means to arbitrarily chosen ends. Whatever the mutual antagonism of individualism and bureaucratic impersonality, MacIntyre argues, they are dialectical opposites that thrive on one another (1981: 35). And they do so to most telling effect in what MacIntyre refers to as the ‘character’ of the ‘manager’.

Emotivist culture and the ‘character’ of the ‘manager’

According to MacIntyre:

A moral philosophy … characteristically presupposes a sociology. For every moral philosophy offers explicitly or implicitly at least a partial conceptual analysis of the relationship of an agent to his or her reasons, motives, intentions and actions, and in so doing generally presupposes some claim that these concepts are embodied or at least can be in the real social world. (1981: 23)

So what might the social embodiment of emotivism actually entail? MacIntyre (1981:23) argues that its primary requirement is ‘the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations’. According to him, emotivist moral philosophy regards moral discussion as nothing more than an attempt by one party to alter the preferences and opinions of another party so that they accord with their own, regardless of the means deployed to effect this change. No distinction is made between reasons that will influence the other party in the desired manner and ones that the party in question will judge to be good; ‘there is no such thing as appeal to genuinely impersonal criteria whose validity the person must judge for herself regardless of her relationship to the speaker’ (Mulhall and Swift, 1992:75).

By collapsing the distinction between personal and impersonal reasons, emotivism undermines the possibility of treating persons as ends. ‘To treat someone as an end is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons’ (MacIntyre, 1981: 23). For emotivism, though, no moral debate can be anything other than an attempt by one party to make another party an instrument of their own purposes, ‘by adducing whatever influences or considerations will in fact be effective on this or that occasion’ (MacIntyre, 1981:24).

If emotivist moral discourse regards all moral debate as involving manipulative interpersonal relations then, MacIntyre suggests, emotivist sociology will hold the same view of social relationships per se. In order to show what the world looks like through emotivist eyes, MacIntyre proceeds to describe three central ‘characters’ of modern culture each of whom embodies the obliteration of manipulative and non-manipulative relations in a particular way. MacIntyre uses the term ‘character’ to refer to the fusion of a specific role with a specific personality type in a way ‘that emblematizes certain moral and metaphysical ideas embedded in a culture’ (Mulhall and Swift, 1992: 75). The three central characters of ‘our’ emotivist culture are the Aesthete, the Therapist and the Manager (MacIntyre, 1981:23–35). The Aesthete regards the social world as an arena for the satisfaction of his or her own desires, and social relations as occasions for contriving behaviour in others that will be responsive to his or her wishes. The Therapist is similarly disinclined to treat people as ends in themselves, concentrating rather on techniques through which neurotic symptoms can be effectively transformed into ‘directed energy’ and ‘maladjusted individuals into well adjusted ones’. The Manager represents the obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative relations in the socio-economic field in much the same way that the Therapist represents this obliteration in the sphere of personal life. The Manager treats ends as given, as outside his or her scope; his or her concern also is with technique, with directing human and non-human resources in order to achieve these pre-determined goals with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

For my purposes, of course, it is the character of the Manager which is of most interest. Indeed, MacIntyre (1981:74) himself describes the Manager as the ‘dominant figure of the contemporary scene’, laying at the door of this creation considerable responsibility for the degeneration of morality alluded to earlier.

Managerial moral fictions

So what is it about the Manager that makes this character quite so culpable in MacIntyre’s eyes? Well, while he regards each of his three characters as traders in ‘moral fictions’ – concepts which purport to provide us with an objective and impersonal criterion but which singly fail so do – he does not believe the Aesthete or the Therapist have any fictions ‘which are peculiarly their own, which belong to the very definiton of their role’. By contrast, the Manager is a character with a moral fiction all of its own. MacIntyre (1981: 74) argues that ‘among the central moral fictions of the age we have to place the peculiarly managerial fiction embodied in the claim to possess systematic effectiveness in controlling certain aspects of social reality’.

Moreover, while the Manager’s claim to effectiveness is represented in morally neutral terms, MacIntyre (1981: 74) argues that this claim is actually a morally loaded one because it is inseperable from ‘a mode of human existence in which the contrivance of means is in central part the manipulation of human beings into compliant patterns of behaviour; and it is by appeal to his own effectiveness in this respect that the manager claims authority within the manipulative mode’. In other words, it is this character’s possession of its own unique – and to the philosopher’s mind ‘most culturally powerful’ – moral fiction, within which is embedded a particular claim to authority, which leads MacIntyre to describe the Manager as the ‘central character of the modern social drama’ (1981: 104). And, as should now be obvious, when MacIntyre allocates someone a crucial role in modern society he is not paying them a compliment. Because the Manager is so central to the ‘contemporary scene’, MacIntyre argues that if he can show this character’s claims to expert effectiveness to be largely groundless then ‘to a disturbing extent our morality will be disclosed as a theatre of illusions’ (1981: 77). Having already written off modernity as a catastrophe and having positioned the Manager as a key character in this catastrophe, it will come as no surprise to learn that MacIntyre also concludes that the Manager’s claims to effectiveness are totally unsupportable and that, as a result, our morality is indeed a ‘theatre of illusions’. But how exactly does the philosopher reach this conclusion?

MacIntyre believes that the Manager’s assumed authority rests upon the claim to possess systematic effectiveness in controlling certain aspects of social reality. He argues that in order to vindicate this claim, managerial expertise requires a stock of law-like generalizations which would enable ‘the manager to predict that, if an event or state of affairs of a certain type were to occur or to be brought about, some other event or state of affairs of some specific kind would result’ (1981: 77). This claim, he argues, and its related presumption concerning the existence of a domain of morally neutral ‘fact’ in which the manager can be ‘expert’, parallels the claims made by natural scientists.

Civil servants and managers alike justify themselves and their claims to authority, power and money by invoking their own competence as scientific managers of social change. Thus, there emerges an ideology which finds its classical form in a pre-existing sociological theory, Weber’s theory of bureaucracy … [I]n his insistence that the rationality of adjusting means to ends in the most economical and efficient way is the central task of the bureaucrat and that therefore the appropriate mode of justification of his activity by the bureaucrat lies in the appeal to his (or later her) ability to deploy a body of scientific and above all social scientific knowledge organized and understood as comprising a set of universal law-like generalizations, Weber provided the key to much of the modern age. (1981:86)

MacIntyre regards modern science as profoundly immoral. This is in large part due to the role of science in destroying theism, in discrediting those religious worldviews on which, he claims, morality itself depends. A society where science is revered, he argues, is a society adrift. The crux of his argument against the Manager therefore appears to be that this character derives its claims to expertise from science and that science cannot tell us how to live.

According to MacIntyre, the apple of scientific knowledge is a poisoned fruit because it disputes the reality of chance. It does so, by claiming, purportedly, that the human species can somehow replace God. Social science, in particular, hubristically denies ‘the permanence of Fortuna’, Machiavelli’s Twitch goddess of unpredictability’ (1981: 93). It was and remains, he argues, terribly naive for Enlightenment thinkers and their heirs to assume that ‘fragility and vulnerability could be overcome in some progressive future’. But that is what science and those – such as the Manager – who act in its name continue to claim.

MacIntyre’s rebuttal of science in general, and social science in particular, leads him to conclude that the claims of ‘bureaucratic managerial expertise’ are illusory. The manager’s claim to authority, he asserts

is fatally undermined when we recognize that he possesses no sound stock of law-like generalizations and when we realize how weak the predictive power avaialable to him is… The dominance of the manipulative mode in our culture is not and cannot be accompanied by very much actual success in manipulation … [Tine notion of social control embodied in the notion of expertise is indeed a masquerade. Our social order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed, anyone’s, control. No one is or could be in charge. (1981:106–7)

Belief in managerial expertise is thus disastrously misplaced.

The Manager as character is other than he at first sight seems to be; the social world of everyday hard-headed practical pragmatic no-nonense realism which is the environment of management is one which depends for its sustained existence on the systematic perpetuation of misunderstanding and of belief in fictions. (1981:107)

According to MacIntyre, the Manager’s ‘objectively grounded’ claims are in essence nothing more than expressions of his own arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference. The effects of Enlightenment scientific prophecy, MacIntyre claims, ‘have been to produce not scientifically managed social control, but a skillful dramatic imitation of such control. It is histrionic success which gives power and authority in our culture. The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor’ (1981:107).

In sum, then, MacIntyre conjures up for us a world in which moral discourse is impossible. And the most important agent in the destruction of morality may be management, a characteristic modern activity that, in its conduct and in its intentions, exemplifies all the worst aspects of emotivist culture.

The solution

Having diagnosed the moral ills of modern liberal societies and unpacked the contribution of the Manager to the contemporary malaise, MacIntyre sets out to recover what he considers to be the most distinctive feature of Aristotelian ethics – the idea that there is a single answer to the question ‘What is human life lived at its best?’ For MacIntyre, our success as moral beings – as ‘good’ teachers, parents, games players, etc. – depends upon our understandin...