A Society of Organizations (1989), — Charles Perrow
Раньше не было организаций, были развиты микро-предприятия или самозанятость. Люди знали и умели в среднем больше, мало зависели от работодателя, могли сами себя прокормить.
Рынок рос, чтобы удовлетворить запросы появились организации и бюрократия. Появились должностные инструкции, полная зависимость от зарплаты и очень узкая специализация. В статье (ниже) об этом подробнее и с примерами.
Чарльз Перроу (1925-2019 гг.) — профессор социологии Йельского университета. Автор книг и статей об организациях, влиянием организаций на общество.
1. Все важные процессы в общесте вызваны, направляются или связаны с организациями. С развитием организаций появились три феномена:
- Зависимость от заработной платы — с такой зависимостью граждане становятся доступными для организаций
- Перекладывание общественных издержек на людей вне организаций — капитализм максимизирует прибыль
- Развитие бюрократии — замена человека функцией, появление "ненавязчивого" контроля
2. Зависимость от заработной платы означает: чтобы выжить — работай на другого и получай денежную компенсацию. В 1820 в США за зарплату работали 20% населения, а к 1950 уже 80-90%. Раньше самозанятые были фермерами, ремесленниками или представителями малого бизнеса.
3. Неполного рабочего дня и работы на дому не хватало, чтобы насытить рынок. Простые задачи, загрузка целый день и разделение труда — эффективное решение. Зависимость от заработной платы закрыла альтернативы и сделала человека полностью зависимым от организаций-работодателей.
4. Чтобы заставить подчиненых усердно работать появилась система: иерархические цепочки, операционные процедуры, нормы и правила. Стандартизация задач сократила время обучения и упростила работу — она доступна бОльшему количеству людей, снижается ценность конкретного сотрудника.
5. С появлением организаций человек треть жизни стал проводить на работе. Общество за пределами организации готовит и социализирует своих членов для этих бюрократических структур. Стали цениться пунктуальность, послушание, уважение, терпение в служении другому, грамотность и навыки счета.
6. Сегодня чтобы доехать до работы, требуется больше навыков, чем для выполнения рабочих задач для трети рабочей силы, в 19 веке это было не так. Средний работник сегодня имеет на два года больше образования, чем требуется для работы, для большинства рабочих мест требуется только 8 классов образования и меньше.
7. Независимые профессии бюрократизировались — мы считаем прогрессивным работодателем фирму, которая предлагает массажиста, психолога, спортзал, обеды и др. Организации формируют поведение и наше сознание ненавязчивым образом, забирают часть выбора, которая была вне трудового договора.
8. Владелец фермы или мастер ремесленник заботились об инструментах производства. Забота о сотрудниках не является частью новой системы с заработной платой. Наоборот, зависимость от заработной платы заставляет сотрудников заботиться о процветании компании.
9. Общественные издержки не включены в цену товаров или услуг, они ложатся на плечи не-собственников. Создаются новые организации, чтобы справиться с ущербом. Появление компенсирующих организаций общество связывает с прогрессом, процветанием.
Оригинальный текст статьи
It is a truism that we live in an organizational society, and that organizations are important.
But it has not been fully appreciated that organizations are more important than most other units of analysis or objects of analysis.
So, unless you are an organizational theorist, in the next 40 minutes your specialty will be treated as a dependent variable; organizations will be the independent variable that shapes political and economic behavior, the stratification system, religion, social psychological processes, and history in general.
I propose that organizations are the key to understanding our society because organizations have absorbed much of society.
They have vacuumed up a good part of what we have always thought of as a society; they were once just one of the many parts of society; now they contain, control, or have eliminated many parts of society.
No important process goes on in the U.S. that is not caused by, directed by, or crucially mediated by, organizations.
Three phenomena gave the U.S. society of organizations: wage dependency, which made Citizens available for organizations; the externalization of the social costs of extensive organized activity, which hid the costs from Citizens; and the development and spread of a novel form of bureaucracy, »factory bureaucracy,« which made controls unobtrusive.
Together they led to a society of organizations where interactive complexity and tight coupling produce economic and social crises.
Wage Dependency
Wage dependency means that to survive, one must work for someone else (and their profit) and receive compensation in the form of money.
It covered about 20 percent of the population in 1820 and went to 80 to 90 percent by 1950.
In 1820 the self-employed were mostly farmers; a small segment consisted of craftsmen or small business people; another segment farmed part of the time and worked part of the time for others, and still others moved back and forth between the wage labor market and subsistence farming or crafts or trades.
Lack of permanent wage dependency in what was, for the early part of the 19th Century, a bountiful society, meant a great deal of individual discretion.
Even the temporary laborer had the resources to secure food and fuel through hunting, fishing, a bit of farming, and woodcutting, and had some time for handicrafts, all of which prevented dependency upon employers.
Permanent wage dependency cut off all alternatives and made one fully dependent upon employing organizations.
Why the change? The population and its buying power grew quickly because of the abundant resources of an unexploited continent.
This created a large market that in turn required continuous feeding.
Part-time workers, cottage industries, and the putting-out system did not provide reliable production.
The most efficient way to feed the market was to require long and steady hours from people doing highly specialized, easily learned tasks.
The steam power and electricity made the 12-hour day, and year-round work close to markets, possible.
Immigrants were an ideal labor source since the self-employed farmers and craftsmen fiercely resisted the wage dependency of factory work.
Immigrants came from depleted societies to a new, abundant one, and 60—70% percent of them stayed on.
Both organizations and the wage-dependent population had a steady increase and produced bountiful goods and enriched the nation, especially the new capitalist class.
Inequality of wealth in the U.S. grew steadily with wage dependency in the 19th Century, but the nation as a whole prospered too, heedlessly consuming the abundant resources and herding the surviving natives into »reservations«.
The spread of the wage System, however, was a fearful change for the society; it was chronicled as »wage slavery«, and then as the »industrial army«; these were the only institutions people could conceive of that had such control over people.
One might want to escape the idiocy of rural life and the hardships of farming by going to the city, but going to the city was supposed to mean going into business for one's self, learning or working at a craft, joining a business of a relative, or temporary wage labor until one could be self-employed.
To go into a factory and be a wage slave was something else.
By the last quarter of the Century, it was clear that few could escape wage dependency; by 1950, only about 20 percent did, a reversal of the proportions in 1820.
With wage dependency, a bit of society disappeared.
A measure of self-sufficiency, the breath of skills that accompanied it, and the cognitive activity associated with it, disappeared.
One's role in the polity shrunk, as wage getting became the primary issue.
And the traditional Obligation that the farm owner or master craftsman or merchant had for the welfare of his »hands« was not a part of the new wage system.
A buffer against hard times, accidents, and death were removed.
As limited as that Obligation might be, it was perceptible, whereas the Obligation under the wage system could be non-existent.
In fact, with blacklisting, an expression of enforced wage dependency, the Obligation was one-way, from the worker to the employer, and backed up by the State.
Since the system now produced violent business cycles, wage dependency was a very serious condition.
Externalities
The second important transformation stemmed from the increasing amount of economic activity controlled by ever larger organizations and involved the displacement of social costs onto non-owners, principally workers and communities.
Since the social costs of the activity are not included in the price of the goods or Services, they are absorbed by non-owners.
Two effects followed: first, the externalities were so large that they overwhelmed the existing institutions that had absorbed them, and thus the viability of churches, neighborhood groups, lodges, burial societies, etc. was weakened, and with it non-organizational society.
Second, new organizations were created to cope with the externalities, increasing the rush to an organizational society, and generating their externalities.
For example, if pollution costs were internalized, less polluting processes would be developed to avoid the cost, and then pollution clean-up organizations would not be needed.
If the costs of workers sustaining possible unemployment were internalized through long-term employment contracts, the incentive to avoid overproduction or declining sales would be high enough to promote more rational planning.
As a consequence, the necessity for welfare organizations would be greatly reduced.
Externalities are present in all economic Systems, but competitive capitalism is the only one that requires that organizations maximize externalization, and a weak central government virtually insures it.
Some of the externalities that were disguised or neglected by firms were pollution, crowded cities, transportation costs once workers could no longer live near their workplace, industrial accidents, violent business cycles, and the exhaustion of easily available natural resources.
New organizations, public and private, rose to cope with the damage.
We associate the appearance of these organizations with progress, even prosperity.
They range from welfare institutions such as prisons and asylums and the related court System to public health departments, hospitals, and associated training institutions, and on pollution clean-up organizations concerned with sewage and then toxic wastes, and more intensive resource extraction organizations as the easily available resources were exhausted.
Much of industrialization is concerned with coping with the problems it generates; all of it brings the small, relatively autonomous, loosely coupled social units into the large organizations or destroys them, and what we still think of as society is destroyed with it.
Factory Bureaucracy
I will refer to the third major change as the development of» factory bureaucracy« to highlight its novelty and the role of factories in developing bureaucracy.
After 1920 or so it is so widespread and firmly grounded that bureaucracy, or even just »Organization« will suffice.
Large-scale organizations have been around for centuries, building the pyramids or Venetian ships, establishing religions, fighting wars, and administering kingdoms.
Some had a core of permanent employees, that is wage dependent individuals, or were total institutions such as the Catholic Church.
But only with industrialization, and initially with the factory, did the elements of factory bureaucracy come together in a large number of organizations, enough of them for the organizational pattern to be readily and easily adopted by new organizations in the growing economy.
The principal problem for entrepreneurs and capitalists producing goods and Services was continuous, predictable production.
If the workforce had to work for someone else to eat, they would show up for work.
But to get them to work hard, and to do exactly what they are told, centralized control is required.
The putting-out system, craft production, inside contracting and other devices did not provide centralized control such that one person at the top could reach directly into all processes.
Factory bureaucracy established centralized control where all processes were either brought together under one roof or otherwise controlled by the owner.
Since production was complex, centralization also meant that hierarchy had to be established, making it quite clear to whom each person, in turn, reported, by establishing hierarchy as a principle, persons such as foremen or Supervisors filled roles or job slots that were independent of the person, and obedience was given to the position, an aspect of formalization.
Formalization meant establishing not only hierarchical chains but Standard operating procedures and rules and regulations.
When fully implemented (it took F. W. Taylor to see the need for füll implementation) it meant that superiors would know what skills the subordinate used (the better to control him or her), could control and change those skills as needed, and subdivide the work so that wages could be closely matched to the level of skill, thus paying each category the minimum possible.
Finally, standardization and specialization of as many tasks as possible were necessary.
Standardizing tasks reduced the necessary training time and simplified the work so that more people would be qualified for the job, lowering employee power.
(It also probably meant more even quality levels, and even lower materials costs.) Specialization could take place once tasks were standardized, raising output.
Specialization is normally thought to mean raising skill levels, and it can mean that.
But it can also mean narrowing them, or what came to be called »deskilling«.
The growth of bureaucracy entailed both skilling and deskilling.
These elements, which constitute the definition of the modern form of bureaucracy — centralization, hierarchy, formalization, standardization, and specialization — were only gradually introduced.
There was Opposition to bureaucracy, just as there was to wage slavery.
One of the biggest impediments to füll bureaucratization during much of the 19th Century was the inside contracting system.
It was used in the most technologically advanced and mass production industries, and it delayed the appearance offüll the fledged bureaucracy in these organizations.
In this system, the owner provided the building, supplies and power source, and major pieces of machinery, and the contractor hired, fired, paid, and directed the work of his crew, which could be as large as 100.
He worked based on annual contracts for so many trigger assemblies, rifle Stocks, sewing machine treadles, or whatever.
Inside contracting, though very efficient and responsible for continuous innovations, violated most of the emerging principles of bureaucracy to at least some extent.
The hierarchy was truncated because the inside contractor hired his workers and the owner had no control over them.
The shortened hierarchy meant that centralized control was limited.
Formalization, standardization, and specialization were all limited since the contractor could set his production rales, etc. Of course, he was bound by the contract to deliver a certain number and quality of rifle barriers or sewing machine chains or whatever, and the delivery date was formalized, but this concerned his contract with the owner, not with his employees.
The system was remarkably efficient since it was in the interests of the contractor to innovate, and the owner did not incur the many »transaction costs« of hiring, paying, and especially, supervising workers.
But it also spread the wealth, and some of the contractors made as much as the owners did.
And it also fostered group loyalty since contractors utilized personalistic bases of hiring and often lived with or close to their workers.
This highly decentralized, profit-sharing, »human relations« oriented System is being rediscovered today.
It disappeared in the late 19th Century because the profits of the contractors could be appropriated by owners if contractors became foremen and because it fostered too much labor solidarity.
Bureaucracy means efficiency for most organizational theorists, but for me it means primarily an unobtrusive control device of unprecedented power, so efficient and effective that it could supplant many of the controls that had no workplace sources, removing them from non-organizational society.
»Habits of the heart« were being installed, often at the age of 10 or 12; certainly by 16, and then 18 later in this Century.
Bureaucracy offered elites assistance that gave them unprecedented control over the society, given the scope and complexity of that society, since it provided such exquisite control over the institutions that were absorbing society — the bureaucracies.
For owners in the private sector and managers in the public and non-profit sectors, indirect and unobtrusive controls are far less costly than direct controls, where Orders have to be given and Performance observed.
Factory bureaucracy replaced direct controls with rules and procedures, which are always in existence and quite impersonal with machinery, which in essence is a bündle of rules built into a machine (recall that workers were brought into factories for surveillance and long work hours; the machinery came later to make use of this convenient agglomeration of hands); bureaucracy delegated any necessary surveillance to lowering levels in the hierarchy, and it standardized inputs and Outputs as much as possible to reduce the need for many controls.
The result was a much more impersonal and remote control system and a vastly more effective one.
It served to legitimize factory bureaucracy in society since it was a vast improvement over direct controls.
But since so much of one's daily time and indeed, one's fate now lay with the Organization, the society outside of the Organization had to prepare and socialize its members for these bureaucratic structures.
Citizenship came to emphasize punctuality, obedience, respect, patience in service to another and patience about moving up, and the necessary literacy and numerical skills.
The unobtrusive controls of society that were irrelevant to the workplace, to the Organization, such as reciprocity, ethnic and religious culture, and the extended family, withered in importance.
The importance of factory bureaucracy can be seen in its swift adoption by almost all organizations in the U.S. in the latter part of the 19th Century and into the first third of the next Century.
Schools, Colleges, hospitals, prisons, State and private welfare agencies, foundations, voluntary associations of all types, and the government itself »bureaucratized«.
Reformers and organizational founders alike hailed the industrial Organization model — factories, by and large — as the important social innovation of the time.
As Max Weber put it, all else is dilettantism, and he cited speed, precision, calculation, predictability, impersonality, and accountability as its virtues.
An unexamined and uncritical conclusion of Max Weber and his contemporaries, and for the vast majority of social scientists today, was that the only way to achieve these efficiencies was through factory bureaucracy.
But industrialization could have taken place under the more flexible and equitable inside contracting system; the crafting system could have been preserved rather than destroyed; and different principles of Organization could have survived that emphasized decentralization of control, profit sharing, Output control rather than control by rules and regulations or direct controls, and so on.
U.S. industry was at a sort of crossroads after the Civil War and could have institutionalized the more decentralized form that existed, mobilizing self-regarding rather than other-regarding forms of behavior.
(According to Piore and Säbel the decentralized form did persist in parts of Europe and has been the basis for a resurgence in productivity and community-wide welfare provisions.) Or, the U.S. could have followed the route that Lenin and his successors in the U.S.S.R. took, where Taylorism was installed with a vengeance and later extended to the satellite countries.
This involved a degree of centralization and deskilling that was attempted in the U.S., but was (1) resisted by labor, (2) resisted by the community, and (3) was less necessary for the profits of owners given the abundant natural wealth and Strategie location of the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th Century.
The form of factory bureaucracy adopted in the U.S. was, then, a middle ground; both the more »liberal« and the more reactionary paths were possible and were taken by others.
Of course, this argument runs counter to most respected interpretations, which cite efficiency as the reason for bureaucracy, as in Chandler, and even massive conglomerates, as in Williamson.
They have a very narrow definition of efficiency and no definition of externalities, however.
I argue that market control and profits are far more important as motives than efficiency, and are consistent with the economic theory of capitalism, which recognizes profits as the driving force, not productivity, and certainly not social efficiency.
Some examples of my reinterpretation of the dynamics of our industrial history will illustrate my point: Child labor was widespread when it was profitable for owners; when the technology and type of work changed, it declined, and only after its decline was it outlawed by reformers.
Wage cuts were not just a response to narrowing profit margins or competition since they occurred when the companies were having banner years and by those with extensive market control.
Wage rates were a matter of class-wide discipline or maximum profits, not just economic survival and competition.
For the great majority of the few firms that established them, Company welfare programs appeared in times of labor shortage and were abandoned at the first sign of labor surplus; this suggests that nothing but obtaining sufficient labor at the lowest cost was involved, despite the rationalizations that owners offered and current researchers accept.
The externality of industrial accidents was addressed in a fashion, under pressure, and with a distinctively bureaucratic Solution: Workman's compensation was enacted because the contingent fee system allowed lawyers to represent poor workers, and the lawsuits being won were beginning to cost the industry dearly.
The Solution was to set up a bureaucracy to adjudicate cases and control the benefits.
Benefits were set at a minimal level, far below those awarded in courts to individuals, and all firms were taxed, thus spreading the resulting price increase extremely widely, and effectively minimizing the incentive of the individual firm to follow safe practices.
The conservative A.F. of L. union supported workman's compensation, but most other unions saw its implications and opposed it.
Deskilling was widespread, not in a static technical sense of comparing Jobs in 1880 with those in 1980, for example, but in terms of the relative skill level of the society at each point in time.
Today it may require more skill to drive to work than to carry out the tasks at work for a third or more of our workforce; this was not true in the 19th Century.
According to some analyses, the average employee today has two more years of schooling than is required by the job, and most jobs require only an eight-grade education or less.
In relative terms, the only terms that count in a society where education and cognitive skills have expanded rapidly, we have a deskilled society as compared to the first half of the 19th Century.
(My point is not that the 19th Century was a preferable society at all; life was nastier, more brutish, and rather short.
My point is first that generally speaking, the history of industrialization, as written, has another one of wage dependency, externalities, the control consequences of bureaucracy, and the alternative paths that might have been taken, for better or worse.
Instead, the history of industrialization has been relentlessly functionalist, assuming linear development, concerned with narrow efficiency and Output, and celebratory.
I believe a focus on organizations will redress that deficiency.
The cost to our society in wealth and income increased markedly up to about the turn of the Century.
Thus, while life for all improves, life for the poor improved far less.
Inequality of wealth stabilized at the end of the Century, but remained high; to this day, it is the highest of all industrialized nations except, I believe, France and South Africa, despite 80 years of social movements and progressive legislation.
The increase in the Standard of living is hardly a matter of celebration since it was based in considerable part on the rapid consumption of the vast natural resources available in the new land, the increased hours of labor of the wage-dependent citizenry, the geographical mobility of labor, and the concentration of wealth that, along with foreign Investments, provided the investment capital and thus reaped most of the returns.
It was necessary for the Standard of living to rise because it had to compensate for the new degradations and the new necessities that industrialization and bureaucracy required, such as more health facilities because of more accidents and pollution, or better transportation. After all, people could no longer live close to their source of livelihood.
The most important change in the Standard of living was better nutrition, and industrialization's contribution to better nutrition was rather indirect — improved transportation and refrigeration.
Most of the industrialization's triumphs were concerned with itself, concerned with the fouling of its own nest.
The triumphs were concerned with such things as facilitating the growth of the organizations that industrialization needed by moving people and goods about more quickly and to more distant places, enabling more crowded cities to appear and survive so that organizational efficiency could be higher, and with the improvement of weapons and warriors for acquiring territory and protecting overseas markets.
A society of organizations began to appear when feeding the organizations and cleaning up after them became the criteria for efficiency, productivity, and progress.)
Complexity and Coupling
Between 1820 and 1900 the U.S. went from a very loosely coupled system to a moderately coupled one; by 1950 it was tightly coupled, and by 1988, perhaps dangerously so.
In 1820 the interactions between communities, and between the few organizations of any consequence were, by and large, visible, predictable, and could be anticipated.
By 1900 the number and size of organizations had grown substantially, as had the communities, and unexpected interactions were beginning to appear, as in the panic of 1893.
One result of the coordination problem for the large organizations were the industrial trusts and combinations, and then the multidivisional form, and finally, by 1950, the first conglomerates — it was the Organization of organizations, with business and trade associations, and government bureaucracies trying to manage the interdependencies.
The power of individual capitalists, families, and alliances peaked about 1920; their control over government and communities was unprecedented.
But internal divisions and contradictions within business and industry made control of the expanding economy more and more difficult, and the tycoons faded.
Nevertheless, their organizational empires continued to grow, bumping into each other, merging and dissolving, and increasingly reacting to organizational rather than class or family dynamics.
As the new system took the form we developed devices to buffer, control, or try to decouple the increasingly mysterious interactions, such as the federal reserve system, occasional price, and wage controls, unemployment insurance, social security, planning Councils, and deficit spending, etc. The federal government, labor, and communities presented somewhat successful challenges to the hegemony of the large financial, industrial, and business bureaucracies.
The degree of inequality of wealth in society no longer increased but was stabilized.
But it took the progressive movement, the New Deal, the union movement, progressive taxation, and the civil rights movement to just maintain that degree of inequality, one of the highest among industrialized nations, and it has recently risen.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure of society was formed to support the system of wage dependency, externalities, and factory bureaucracy, but it was an organizational infrastructure, drawing more power and function out of what was once considered society and putting it into large educational, recreational, medical, government and social service bureaucracies.
Wage dependency soared; the independent professions became bureaucratized; the school system centralized; social work targeted the intrapsychic problems of the non-poor; medicine transformed the hospices and withdrew into them; imperial business created the city manager movement; credentialing and bureaucratizing symbolized the infrastructure.
What was the society that was now being contained within large employing organizations or their small satellites? A füll Service one, where up to 45 percent of your earnings pay for Services — fringe benefits — that you may or may not want, and are designed and controlled by your masters, and only 65 percent is left for you to freely spend.
I think it makes a difference in the relative strength of society as opposed to organizations if the Organization is the source of the following social functions or the arbiter of their availability: psychotherapy and counseling, educational opportunities, sex therapy, days off for a Christmas Shopping, tax and investment advice, sports facilities, comprehensive medical care, maternal and paternal medical leave, vacation planning and vacation resorts, travel Services, Relocation Services, formal training programs, retirement counseling and planning, religious facilities and funeral Services, and if you are really lucky, even child care.
We applaud these; we count as a progressive employer the firm or university that supplies our needs through these Services (some of them tax-avoiding devices that are thus financed by the less fortunate employees in marginal organizations).
But they shape our behavior and our consciousness in unobtrusive ways, taking a bit of choice that once was outside of the employment contract and putting it into that context.
Our choice is less subject to family and kin, neighbors, peer groups, religious or ethnic ties, or the society of the past.
It may even be a compassionate organizational gesture, but we have to depend more and more on large employing organizations for our compassions if we are lucky enough to be in one, not from what was once considered a society we helped construct.
I know, my long list of Services that the enlightened employer provides was poorly performed in 1820, if at all.
But most of these Services now exist to redress externalities that hardly existed then, and with the wealth of this nation, we might expect these and more Services to now be available as a right of citizenship, rather than as a condition of employment at a progressive Organization, and controlled by that Organization.
There is an additional consequence in having such Services as these performed or offered on contract bases by employers, rather than independent groups.
With the absorption of society goes the increasingly unmanageable interdependencies between large, encompassing organizations.
For example, the interdependence of large organizations is increased such that the insurance providers become dependent upon employee medical benefit contracts, and favor them; and the employer becomes dependent upon the insurance providers, who, not incidentally, may invest their funds in the employers firm; and both become interested in government actions in the benefits area, say medicare; and indeed, in the hospitals and other medical facilities, an interest shared by the government also; and we might mention the possibility of a large labor union being involved also, though only 17 percent of workers now belong to one, and more tangentially, professional groups such as the American Medical Association; and when something like AIDS enters the picture, so does the Surgeon General, the National Institutes of Health, political candidates, gay groups, the moral majority schools and so on.
Elsewhere I have argued that interactively complex Systems are prone to system failures, and if they are also tightly coupled, recovery is limited.
I was dealing with such things as nuclear plants, chemical plants, air transport, and the like.
There is some evidence of interactive complexity and tight coupling at work in our social and economic Systems as well: I am analyzing the AIDS crisis as a system failure due to the unexpected interactions of multiple failures; the October 1987 stock market crash is a good example of failures in a system more tightly coupled than anyone thought; the deindustrialization of the U.S. can be seen as a failure to maintain small, flexible units of production with loyalties to crafts and location superseding loyalty to and dependence upon the large employing Organization; the threat of a worldwide economic panic, unfortunately increasingly being managed by making ever tighter links and more elaborate bureaucratic rules, could be another.
I don't see any evolving Solutions to managing the increased complexity and coupling of our nation, and its links to the rest of the world.
There is indeed a renewed interest in decentralization, empowering local units, debureaucratization, flexible production, group autonomy, and group integrity.
But all these wonderful goals have been on our agendas in the U.S. for decades, even generations, but nothing much seems to change.
It may even be that we are not bureaucratized enough, and the corporatism of Europe is preferable to the U.S. variety of capitalism, but I am only beginning to examine the comparative dimensions of the absorption of society by organizations.
To conclude, there are several important sources of our present maladies.
Technological change is an important precondition for the dynamics I have described, once we had wage pendency and factories.
Certainly, our form of capitalism is a part of the explanation; the U.S. has the most virulent form of self-interest maximizing capitalism in the West.
The formation of modern social classes, attendant upon capitalism, the weakness of the central State, and the penalties of race and gender are all important.
But I have tried to focus on what I think is the most important factor, the extraordinary success of a major unobtrusive control device, bureaucracy.
This form of Organization is, I believe, at the root of our success and of our perils.
Coming from an organizational theorist, my conclusion should surprise no one.