ABSTRACT

This chapter is concerned with the intersections between debates about ‘postbureaucratic’ styles of organization; interpretations of Weber’s sociology; and more generally, assessments about the ‘fate’ of modernity. This latter concern locates the discussion within the framework of the Weberian legacy, even if the analysis draws in addition on more recent sources (notably Habermas, 1984 and 1989). Issues of bureaucracy, rationality, resistance and democratization are explored with reference first, to the crisis of communist bureaucratic regimes, and secondly to the debate about post-Fordist flexible specialization. We argue that despite their divergent natures, the unravelling of two systems of control, state socialism in the ‘east’ and Fordist accumulation in the ‘west’, illustrate some general themes concerning the limits of organizational performance. In the case of state socialist systems, bureaucratic management paradoxically generated its opposite, in the form of de-bureaucratized informal social spaces, in the ‘second society’. We suggest, however, that these were not aberrations, but on the contrary were required by the system in order to continue functioning at all. In a different way, the crisis of Fordism encountered limitations of hyperdifferentiation which prompted a reversion to ‘earlier’ modes of integration that had none the less adapted to an era of high technology (e.g. the electronic cottage). Thus both transformations illustrate how bureaucratic organization encounters limitations of complexity, the management of which leads towards new forms of flexibility, de-centralization and horizontal integration.