Managerial Strategies of Domination. Power in Soft Bureaucracies

Abstract

This paper discusses the emergence and reinforcement of organizational political regimes based on domination and centralization in French organizations.

Domination and power are old concepts in organizational sociology, but the confrontation of two well-known approaches to politics in organizations, that of Weber and that of Crozier, suggests that an 'archaic' notion such as domination is still very useful for understanding how business leaders 'govern' organizations today.

Based on empirical studies, the paper proposes that organizations should be seen as 'soft bureaucracies', in which centralization and entrepreneurial forms of governance are combined. Thus, choosing a Weberian point of view, this paper simultaneously describes organizations as 'structures of domination' and as 'structures of legitimacy'. It defends the idea that, in spite of the success of the network form utopia, the re-emergence of bureaucracies is a sign that organizations are more and more politically centralized and governed.

Descriptors: power, domination, legitimacy, control, governance, bureaucracy

Introduction

How can more flexible, organic, decentralized organizations be governed? This is the same old question organization scholars have been asking for more than twenty years. More precisely, their question was: How can organizations be both simultaneously innovative ('organic structures work best') and yet be able to implement and even control these innovations ('bureaucratic structures work best')? One classical answer to that question can be found in a liberal version of organizational governance, derived from a 'managerial tradition' (Hardy and Clegg 1997). If we follow Crozier, for instance, we can conclude that organizations are governed informally through the micropolitics of gaming and through multiple decentralized negotiations concerning power, creating an 'entrepreneurial' form of governance (Friedberg 1993).

However, there is also another answer deriving from Weber's framework: micropolitics of gaming, when they exist, are necessarily influenced by prevailing authority. Therefore, the essence of governance lies on a structure of legitimacy. Thus, the problem of organizational leaders is to elaborate and reproduce specific resources of legitimacy within a 'bureaucratic' form of governance.

Today, most organization scholars assume that soft controls, soft managerial practices and policies have supplanted hierarchical and bureaucratic control, and that the entrepreneurial form of governance is pervasive (du Gay 1996) -- but is that really the case?

This article aims at showing and illustrating that the real explanation is not so simplistic. The hypothesis it will defend is that contemporary tools and strategies of 'soft' control and coordination are not the opposite of hierarchical and bureaucratic governance. To some extent, we can even assume that this soft governance is fused with and is itself governed by legitimate authority. In other words, existing legitimate authority perpetuates itself by incorporating soft practices and articulating these with hierarchical and formal bureaucratic practices. This is the consequence of the fact that games and soft controls are influenced by prevailing authority. This prevalence is what we could call 'domination'.

To develop this hypothesis, we proceed in three stages. First, we propose a brief view on the theoretical opposition existing between Weber and Crozier concerning the topic of organizational governance. This opposition illuminates the debate between 'bureaucratic' and 'entrepreneurial' systems of governance. Second, we propose to analyze two case studies illustrating the logic of incorporating soft methods of governance within a general framework of political domination. In the first case study, we tackle the question of the decision of redundancy, showing that business leaders mix an authoritarian centralized decision with a soft argumentation and with soft methods of managing the effects of redundancies. In the second case study, we analyze the ways used by business leaders to control professional elites, and to legitimize the organizational fact that experts have to be controlled, exactly like others, and sometimes more so. In both cases, the difficulty of strategies of domination constrains business leade rs to elaborate complex structures of legitimacy to perpetuate their centralized authority.

Third, we propose the concept of 'soft bureaucracy' to gain an understanding of how organizations are evolving towards an ambivalent structure of governance, within which domination is not essentially exerted by means of, for example, violence, direct punishment or local hierarchical supervision, but through sophisticated managerial strategies.

Weber vs. Crozier : Structures of Domination vs. Structures of Games

For Weber, organizations exist because 'certain persons will act in such a way as to carry out the order governing the organization' (Weber 1968: 49). Organizations are sustained by an expectation of confidence in the obedience of other members. The organizational order is based on the couple [confidence-obedience], which creates the structure of domination.