Thinking about beauracracy in a way that differs from the norm.
This piece is covering a topic that has been on my mind a lot in the last few weeks. It’s only throwing fuel on the fires generating my thoughts, but most things seem to do that with me of late.
In this set up, a world of organisations, everyone is a cog within a cog within a cog in an infinite regress.
This vision of the modern world as consisting of powerful organisational means, amid systematic disregard for the substantive values those means serve, was first sketched out by the German political and social thinker Max Weber. What Weber had his finger on was the ever-widening gap between the values we believe in and the means we use to realise them.
We cannot escape bureaucracy, but every day, in a thousand little ways, bureaucracies drift further away from the ends they ideally should serve. At the same time, bureaucracy systematically disables us from reflecting upon - and acting upon - our ultimate values.
The employee of a corporate supermarket chain who manages to figure out he or she is part of a process which degrades the environment and makes the people obese, in order to enrich shareholders, is unlikely to complain about it to the manager.
Weber was keen to point out that a bureaucratic world had a way of turning tables on people, even the powerful, helping them achieve the opposite of their intentions.
(via aljazeera)
