ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the changing balance between concerns for predictability and allowances for flexibility in Chinese news management since the launching of economic reforms in the late 1970s. It argues that predictability is an essential objective of newswork in China, as it must be for any industry that operates according to clocks and timetables, depends on steady supplies of raw materials, and explores acceptance by a mass of consumers. Michel Crozier's framework arose from his research on industrial and government bureaucracies, but it readily translates to mass media organizations and institutions—indeed, it fits the journalistic enterprise perhaps better than any other type of endeavor. The chapter suggests that flexibility became an additional necessity of newswork during the post-Mao reform period, when existing adaptive capacities in the system began to be exercised. Rigid concepts and practices in newswork that had withstood the Maoist era proved dysfunctional in the post-Mao period, and flexibility became essential to the maintenance of the system itself.
