Bureaucracy as organizational pathology

Abstract This paper investigates the strengths and weaknesses that bureaucracies derive from their structural rigidity. The first section delineates the historic mission of bureaucracy and its perceived gradual perversion. A second section examines the mechanism through which bureaucracy degenerates from an organizational optimization to an organizational pathology. The viewpoint espoused here reflects the systems approach, particularly such authors as Ackoff, Emery and Trist, and the connection they envision between function, adaptation and learning. It is basically argued that the modern phenomenon of overbureaucratization takes its roots in a deterministic view of causality and a rigid quest for optimality. It is also argued in a final section that bureaucracy has become a systemic phenomenon with a potential for exporting pathological behavior beyond strict organizational boundaries. The discussion implicitly illustrates the advantage of adaptive mechanisms of management and control over non‐adaptive mechanisms which are initially set to produce optimality.