Search results

Bureaucratic power – the power derived from the formal authority of the bureaucratic organization – has become a central organizing mechanism in modern societies. In this study, we develop theoretical arguments to identify institutional sources as well as limitations of bureaucratic power. We argue that the very institutional sources of bureaucratic power also cultivate the countervailing forces that set limit to the exercise of bureaucratic power in formal organizations. These arguments and considerations are illustrated in two case studies of the “inspection and appraisal” processes in the Chinese bureaucracy. Our study raises issues about organizational isomorphism and calls for a closer look at the behavioral patterns in organizational processes.

The article aims to explore the methodological implications of gaining access into a bureaucratic organisation for an ethnographic research project. It broadens the understanding of this crucial part of ethnographic research and problematises the notion of access by questioning the view of access as an official, singular and straightforward moment prior to fieldwork.

The article is based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the office of a Dutch health insurance company.

In this article, the author shows that research in a bureaucratic setting requires a deep level of reflexivity especially in order to maintain access and deepen the relationships in the field.

The study of bureaucratic organisations is a relatively new field of investigation for anthropologists and is becoming more popular. The question of how to study these types of organisations in terms of access has not yet been fully addressed through an ethnographical lens.

The recent move towards system‐wide diversity in the Israeli educational system has made the structure of public schools increasingly complex and fragmented, and has greatly influenced many aspects of the principalship. Today, principals in public schools are moving towards a dynamic definition of their role. Principals are being required to move from being routine‐managers to leader‐managers. This role change is reflected in four pivotal areas including: resource allocation, organizational framework, governing system and market structure. Contrary to traditional roles, Israeli principals are increasingly required to be environmental managers who mobilize resources and manage professional organizations with pluralistic governing systems in a competitive market structure. The success of local school initiatives depends upon principals′ abilities to adapt their roles to new realities inherent in such dynamic, diverse school networks.

Researchers and practitioners have found a correlation between a mature corporate culture and high levels of collective performance. One of the features of advanced organizations is the ability to satisfy all stakeholders simultaneously: shareholders, organizational members, customers and society at large. While the benefits of a healthy corporate culture may be widely acknowledged in theory, in practice there is usually a considerable gap between the desired state of affairs and reality. Considers Tomra Systems ‐ the world leader in reverse vending machines for the recycling of beverage containers. States that what is extraordinary about this organization is not its laudable goals, but the fact that it has realized these ideals to a remarkable degree.

The chapter describes the SHL Corporate leadership model (Bartram, 2002) and the results of an investigation of leadership competency potential in 11 different European countries (39,354 people). The measures of potential used are eight competency factors known as the ‘Great Eight’ (Bartram, 2005) derived from Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ32) scale scores. The results show some very clear trends in terms of effects of managerial experience and effects of gender on competency potential profiles. While there are differences in patterns of results between countries, these tend to be relatively small and non-systematic. The gender and experience effects, on the contrary, are consistent across countries. Overall, we find that transactional competencies decrease and transformational competencies increase with increases in level of managerial experience and that females show generally lower levels of transformational competencies and higher levels of transactional competencies than males. These findings are discussed in relation to the literature on gender differences in leadership.

In recent years, public management research has been focused at the public value paradigm. However, many discussions on this topic are motivated at least as much by theory as by evidence. We do not yet have a comprehensive empirical understanding of what happens when the public value paradigm is translated into practice within organizations. An important theoretical question is how to match the public value approach and measurement to specific contexts. Understanding barriers to effective implementation and identifying what might be done to overcome obstacles are interesting issues for advancing theory and practice.

By deploying and testing the same approach and method of measuring public value in two local governments, this article aims to shed light on barriers to implementing the public value paradigm in practice.

The study’s findings show little evidence to support claims for a paradigmatic shift towards the public value paradigm in the Italian case.

Managerial implications of public value measurement are also taken into consideration.

We know little about what conditions drive individual governments towards the adoption of a public value approach and measurement. Undoubtedly, this issue has huge practical relevance when introducing public value discourses in bureaucratic governmental settings.

This aim of the paper is to explore regenerative work supporting employees' personal development and, thus, sustainable coping capacity in the post‐bureaucratic transition.

A comprehensive literature review was carried out to build a theoretical framework on regenerative work. Two case studies with an interpretative, action research approach provide empirical examples. Qualitative semi‐structured interviews and participative observations were carried out.

The case studies indicate that the regenerative potential of work is threatened by the unbalanced nature of the post‐bureaucratic transition. Confined bureaucratic work is changing into more complex and boundaryless post‐bureaucratic work. However, organizational practices are still founded on the bureaucratic mentality emphasizing impersonality, pre‐planning, and rigid top‐down use of power. Post‐bureaucratic work realities exist in bureaucratic work organizations; the clashes between the two mentalities lead to human resources consumption rather than their regeneration.

As the paper is founded on only two case studies, further research should be carried out on the inconsistencies between the nature of work and organizational practices regulating work.

The paper outlines alternative post‐bureaucratic approaches to organizing; post‐bureaucratic organizational values and structures are depicted, employees' autonomy and interconnectedness are discussed as the elements of a post‐bureaucratic organization.

It is shown how the post‐bureaucratic transition proceeds in an unbalanced manner such that daily work activities are more influenced by the post‐bureaucratic approach while the solutions for organizing still rely on the bureaucratic mentality. The proposed theoretical model on regenerative work outlines the kind of work experiences leading to employees' sustainable well‐being.

Discusses the factors relating to the success of Friedrich Althoff as an innovator (or entrepreneur), within the nineteenth century bureaucratic Prussian public administration, that enabled him to be the driving force in the building of the university system. These include acquiring control over resources (salesmanship); the political skills of evaluation, of dealing with superiors in the system, and negotiating with other departments and other powerful groups (Althoff had to bypass hierarchical constraints from above); mastery of his own field, tight management; and an immense capacity for work. The prevailing stereotypes of bureaucracy have no room for the public entrepreneur who succeeds only by usurping the role of bureaucracy within his own private realm.

Studies which hate examined relations between the organizational orientations of professionals, who work in bureaucracies, and measures of professionalism hate produced inconsistent and inconclusive findings. The results remain equivocal partly because restricted statistical techniques have been used and because studies have failed to differentiate between the structural and attitudinal components of professionalism. In the present study regression surface analysis was used to investigate relations between the bureaucratic orientations of 230 secondary school teachers and their professional attitudes at different levels of autonomy. The Jackknife technique was used to adjust the significance levels in the analysis. Bureaucratic orientations and autonomy had significant linear and curvilinear relations with attitude measures of ideal of service and dedication to teaching. Although the regression surfaces differed between female and male teachers, they showed that at each level of bureaucratic orientation increases in professional attitudes were associated with increases in the amount of autonomy allowed teachers. That is, bureaucratic orientations and the professional attitudes of teachers need not be in conflict if schools increase the autonomy allowed teachers.

Given the context of accountability-driven policy environments, research has shown that school leaders perceive bureaucratic rules and protocols in negative ways, but they also utilize organizational structures and routines to lead changes. To better understand both enabling and hindering mechanisms of bureaucracy in schools, this study explores how Korean school principals understand and perceive bureaucratic structures using a lens of ambivalence. The authors draw on Weber's theory of bureaucracy, with a particular focus on the paradoxical aspect of bureaucracy that might be experienced by individuals within the system.

This study analyzed qualitative data collected from 26 in-depth interviews with 10 Korean school principals between 2013 and 2015. The authors used the multiple cycles of coding to explore patterns and themes that emerged from the participants' responses.

The analysis of this study showed that the participants' ambivalent responses toward bureaucracy were particularly salient in three areas where formal organizational structures were changing through policy initiatives: teacher evaluation, electronic approval system and school-based management promoting decentralized decision making. The study participants reflected on how such changes can enable and/or hinder schools to achieve organizational goals and collective values, from the viewpoints of multiple aspects, which led to their ambivalent responses to bureacratic structures in school settings.

This study contributes to the understanding of school organizations by revisiting Weber's theory of bureaucracy in school settings. Using the lens of ambivalence enabled us to reconcile school principals' contradictory perceptions toward bureaucracy, which complicates analyses of tensions and paradoxical responses found in leadership practices within school systems.