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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.

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.

Argues that the autonomy of the Althoff administration was based on the “personal regime” of Friedrich Althoff. The public choice approach of bureaucratic behaviour reveals the basis for this autonomy: professionalism and continuity. Manageable span of control and entrepreneurship safeguarded the internal efficiency of Althoff′s agency. The information network of Althoff allowed the German scientific community to play its role as defined by the economics of inquiry. The auditing procedures of the community, that allow for technical and allocative efficiency, exert such pressure on its members that it works both as a voluntary monitoring device and as an incentive structure. In order to reduce the huge monitoring costs of scientific production, adopting a bureaucratic structure for the large academic organization of the Althoff system is consistent with the arguments that transaction cost analysis provides. The principal‐agent problem that arises from the attenuation of control, characteristic of bureaucracy, was solved by the comparative information advantage and the autonomy of the Althoff administration. Property‐rights theory further suggests that the centralized autocratic managing style improved academic productivity. The efficient organization of the Althoff system (both the administration and the academic organization) constituted a major improvement for the development and recognition of German science and scholarship.

This research investigated ideas regarding the concept of culture in contemporary New Zealand by critically evaluating the formal consultation processes surrounding the issue of genetic modification. Such analysis provides a basis for advising those who work within public relations on subtle forms of marginalisation and exclusion, which could be reduced with increased awareness of the dynamics of privilege.

The research design involved a multi‐sited ethnographic approach drawing on three bodies of empirical data: participant observation within the Royal Commission of inquiry into genetic modification, textual analysis of the written submissions by Interested Persons to the inquiry, and interview material from people who were involved in the inquiry to varying degrees.

The main findings indicate that “culture” is often used in bureaucratic structures to describe the knowledges and practices of minority groups, where “minority” refers to those with less power, rather than those of smaller number. Lack of acknowledgement of the implicit privileging of dominant rhetorics allows for the further marginalisation of less‐dominant viewpoints. Insofar as policymakers have a responsibility to incorporate moral legitimacy and social justice within legislation, the findings encourage alertness to the dynamics and implications of unintentional exclusion.

I aim to assist in providing a language with which to better articulate subtle dynamics of power and privilege, exclusion and marginalisation, both generally and within discussions of best practice in public relations.

By providing a critique of a particular consultative process, this research highlights some of the limitations of bureaucratic consultation and discusses these theoretically as well as descriptively. It is hoped that these critical observations (from within a consultation setting that was remarkably inclusive and egalitarian by most standards) will assist consultative and advisory bodies, as well as policymakers, to design more inclusive processes for democratic participation and deliberation, particularly in relation to controversial technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how participatory budgeting (PB) as a democratic governance tool has been translated within the Russian public sector by addressing the local specifics of its design and mobilization through the formation of networks.

The paper is based on a case study of one pioneering municipality. Data have been gathered through triangulation of interviews, document search, video and netnographic observations. By relying on ideas from actor–network theory, the study focuses on the relational and rhetorical work of human (allies/inscriptors) and non-human (inscriptions) actors involved in the development of PB in Russia.

The findings indicate that the initial democratic values of PB underwent several stages of translation as a continuous inscription-building process and the formation of networks. The main finding is that putting democratic idea(l)s of PB into practice proved problematic, since PB depended on many “allies” which were not always democratic. Paradoxically, in order to launch democratic practices in Russia, PB relied largely on bureaucratic and even New Public Management inscriptions, which it was originally supposed to fight against. Notwithstanding, while these inscriptions can fog the democratic values of PB, they are also capable of uncovering its democratic potential over time, albeit not for a long time as the “external referee” is needed.

The paper juxtaposes PB development in Russia with the translation literature. Not only does the study emphasize the role of human, but non-human actors as well.