ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we describe some societal and organizational trends that researchers use to account for the bureaucratic acceleration in many parts of society. The application of New Public Management was meant to free managers from detailed regulations but instead intensified bureaucracy. Associated trends are the audit culture, a preoccupation with measuring professional activities, and the quest for evidence, such as with different treatment or therapy models that demand a lot of reporting and documenting. Another tendency is the changing occupational landscape, with an increase in management bureaucrats (e.g., controllers, human relations staff, communicators), and the much-celebrated concept of collaboration. Among societal trends, increasing democratization entails representation of different categories in committees and boards, so that more people are drawn into the “meetingization” of a society where balances of power grow more equal. Similar consequences can be found from managers’ anchoring processes to “get all aboard” when new policies are introduced and from new ways of governing. Finally, digitalization, which was presented as a “time-saver,” has meant that professionals themselves, in repeated “mini-administration,” perform practically all tasks that administrative assistants previously performed manually. Researchers focusing on these themes often support their reasoning with statistics, which in turn provide rhetorical fodder for critics of excessive administration, illustrating both the magic such numbers can hold and how they can be used.
