Culture and Organizational Structure and Process: A Comparative Study of Local Government Administrative Bureaucracies in the Walloon and Flemish Regions of Belgium

Since the resurrection of Weber by American sociologists in the 1940s, the shadow of his ideal-typical discussion of bureaucracy has been cast on almost every important sociological study of organizations. While sociologists have recognized the importance of many of the elements embodied in Weber's ideal-typical model, they have ignored the fact that this ideal-typical construct is culturally specific. From Weber's perspective, bureaucracy must be understood within the context of specific cultural, normative and historical constraints (cf. McNeil, 1976). The tendency to ignore culture in organizational analysis has reduced culture to a ceteris paribus condition, reaffirming an old sociological foible: what can not be parsimoniously quantified as a variable is too often discarded or neglected.