ABSTRACT

Ever since the 1970s many of the larger institutions in the more technologically advanced nations in the world have undergone an organizational shake-up designed to enable them to respond more nimbly to changing conditions than they were in the days when they were structured in ways that conformed well to the model Max Weber laid out in his famous writings on bureaucracy. Especially has this been true in the business world, where the drive to “reinvent” enterprises has been motivated primarily by a desire to take advantage of the opportunities presented by digital technology to increase profitability. But it has also attracted support from people interested in creating an institutional environment more conducive to the realization of humane values, and that has only added to its appeal. Postist thinkers have often taken the movement in this direction as evidence that our societies have entered a “post-bureaucratic” phase that makes Weber’s thinking on such matters obsolete. But even if that claim has some truth to it, it is at best a half-truth, and the reason for that is not just that our societies currently have many institutions that do not appear to have been affected by the trend in question at all. It is also that the drive to reinvent has usually been motivated by the selfsame instrumentalism to which Weber attributed the rise of bureaucracy in the first place. So even if the institutions that have undergone reinvention have gotten away from bureaucracy in its classic form, they have not escaped the mentality Weber believed inspired it. Indeed, in some ways they appear to be even more aggressively instrumentalist than their predecessors. Especially has that been the case since the rise of neoliberalism and the obsession with considerations of efficiency it has brought.