Post-Bureaucracy

The Weberian bureaucracy that has emerged in the early 20th century, due to Max Weber’s works on bureaucracy, is now widely spread throughout public and private sectors. However, it is not a perfect structure and has several disadvantages which this essay will cover. This called for a shift to a new, improved way of organizing work. It is widely believed that post-bureaucracy has stepped in now as an organizational structure which eliminates the negative sides of bureaucracy, but we need proof in favour of that argument. In this essay I will try to show that a new form of organisation is now used by doing a comparison on how is managerial work done now and before the stepping in of post-bureaucracy.

In the rise of industrialization, administration of work has not faced a lot of problems, but with the expansion of the structures this led to the need of new and more complex organization. Offe (1976) argued there are two types of organization, “task continuous” and “task discontinuous”. The first is typical for small enterprises where the employees are involved in running the firm. Large-scale organizations are recognized as the latter, people that do the work in these organizations are not involved at all in the administrative structures of the business. Today in our economic life we observe the most common form of “task discontinuous” organization – bureaucracy. The works of Max Weber on bureaucracy have a massive influence on our understanding of organizational structures and how they are implemented in enterprises. He outlined the basic characteristics which are as follows: division of labour which means that every individual has a specific task assigned, responsibilities are carefully laid out. Hierarchical structure...

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...priate examples of information-based organization will give a better understanding of the concept. As a good example we can consider hospitals where “each specialty has its own knowledge, its own training, its own language” Drucker, P. (1988). In each department there are specialists which “report directly to the top and there is little middle management” Drucker, P. (1988) and every individual takes responsibility for information. Drucker (1988) argues that large business organizations need to change in order to last, but a comparative study needs to be done to show if any changes have undergone in enterprises through the years.

Works Cited

Drucker, P. (1988). The coming of the new organization. Harvard Business Review, January-February: 45.

Chapter 12 in Fincham, R. and Rhodes, P. (2005). Principles of Organizational behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.