THE MACHINE BUREAUCRACY

Presented by J. B. Nangpuhan II (MPA Student) for the class (Organizational Design) of Dr. S. K. Kim at Chonnam National University, South Korea. 2010

 

SUMMARY

 

KEY TERMS:

·         machine – 기계

·         bureaucracy - 관료제

·         top management -경영진

·         formulation -공식화

·         implementation -구현

 

INTRODUCTION 

Prime Coordinating Mechanism:	Standardization of Work Processes
Key Part of Organization:	Technostructure
Main Design Parameters:	Behavior formalization, vertical and horizontal job specialization, usually functional grouping, large operating-unit size, vertical centralization and limited horizontal decentralization, action planning
Situational Factors:	Old, large; regulating, nonautomated technical system; simple, stable environment; external control; not fashionable

Machine bureaucracies are structures fine-tuned to run as integrated and regulated machines (e.g. national post office, security agency, steel company, custodial prison, airline, giant automobile company). This is the structure closest to the description of Max Weber – a structure with standardized responsibilities, qualifications, communication channels, work rules, and clearly defined hierarchy of authority. It is the structure that Stinchcombe showed to arise from the Industrial Revolution, the one that Woodward found in the mass-production firms, Crozier in the tobacco monopoly, Lawrence and Lorsch in the container firm.

I.        DESCRIPTION OF THE BASIC STRUCTURE

A clear configuration of the design parameters has held up consistently in the research: highly specialized, routine operating tasks; very formalized procedures in the operating core; a proliferation of rules, regulations, and formalized communication throughout the organization; large-sized units at the operating level; reliance on the functional basis for grouping tasks; relatively centralized power for decision making; and an elaborate administrative structure with a sharp distinction between line and staff.

 

A.      The Operating Core

The obvious starting point is the operating core, with its highly rationalized workflow. This will result to simplified and repetitive operating tasks, generally requiring a minimum of skill and little training. There will be a sharp division of labor in the operating core leading to narrowly defined jobs, specialized both vertically and horizontally – and to an emphasis on the standardization of work processes for coordination. Formalization of behavior emerges as the key design parameter. Very large units can be design in the operating core.

 

B.      The Administrative Component

The middle line will be fully developed, especially well above the operating core, and is sharply differentiated into functional units. The managers of the middle line have three prime tasks: (1) to handle the disturbances that arise among the highly specialized workers of the operating core; (2) to work in liaison role with the analysts of the technostructure to incorporate their standards down into the operating units, which is why they are grouped on functional bases; and (3) to support the vertical flows in the structure – the aggregation of the feedback information up the hierarchy and the elaboration of the action plans that come back down.

Because the machine bureaucracy depends primarily on the standardization of its operating work processes for coordination, the technostructure – which houses the analysts who do the standardizing – emerges as the key part of the structure. However, despite the lack of formal authority, considerable informal power rests with the analysts of the technostructure – those who standardize everyone’s work. Hence, rules and regulations permeate the entire machine bureaucracy structure; formal communication is favored at all levels; decision making tends to follow the formal chain of authority. In general, on the five configurations, it is the machine bureaucracy that most strongly emphasizes division of labor and unit differentiation, in all their forms – vertical, horizontal, line/staff, functional, hierarchical, and status.

 

C.      The Obsession with Control

Machine bureaucracy is a structure with an obsession – namely, control. a control mentality pervades it from top to bottom. The obsession of control reflects two central facts about these structures: (1) attempts are made to eliminate all possible uncertainty, so that the bureaucratic machine can run smoothly, without interruption; and (2) by virtue of their design, machine bureaucracies are structure ridden with conflict; the control systems are required to contain it.

The problem in this kind of structure is not to develop an open atmosphere where people can talk the conflicts out, but to enforced a closed and tightly controlled one where the work can get done despite them.

 

D.      The Strategic Apex

The managers at the strategic apex of these organizations are concerned in the large part with the fine-tuning of their bureaucratic machines. Hunts notes that these are “performance organization,” not “problem-solving” ones. But all is not strictly improvement of performance. It is just keeping the structure together in the face of its conflicts also consumes a good deal of the energy of top management. Direct supervision is also another major concern of top management, formalization can do only so much at the middle levels, where the work is more complex and unpredictable than in the operating core.

Considerable power in the machine bureaucracy rests with the managers of the strategic apex. These are rather centralized structures, they are second in this characteristic only to the simple structure. The formal power rests at the top and also even much of the informal power. The only ones to share any informal power with the top managers are the analysts of the technostructure, by virtue of their role in standardizing everyone else’s work. Hence, we can conclude that the machine bureaucracy is centralized in the vertical dimension and decentralized only to a limited extent in the horizontal one.

 

E.       Strategy Making

The process of strategy making is clearly a top-down affair, with heavy emphasis on action planning. In top-down strategy making, all relevant information is ostensibly sent up to the strategic apex, where it is formulated into an integrated strategy. This is then sent down the chain of authority for implementation, elaborated first into programs and then into action plans.

There are two characteristics of strategy-making system: (1) it is intended to be a fully rationalized one, as described in our second overlay of Chapter 1; (2) unique to this structure is a sharp dichotomy between formulation and implementation in strategy making. Figure 9-1 shows the machine bureaucracy symbolically, with a fully elaborated administrative and support structure and large operating units but narrower ones in the middle line to reflect the tall hierarchy of authority.

 

II.      CONDITIONS OF THE MACHINE BUREAUCRACY

1.       Machine bureaucracy is highly rationalized, its tasks simple and repetitive. The work is found in environments that are simple and stable.

2.       It is typically found in the mature organization, large enough to have the volume of operating work needed for repetition and standardization, and old enough to have been able to settle on the standards it wishes to use.

3.       It tends to be identified with regulating technical systems, since these routinize work and so enable it to be formalized. These technical systems range from the very simple to the moderately sophisticated, but not beyond. Highly sophisticated technical systems require that considerable power be delegated to staff specialists, resulting in a form of decentralization incompatible with the machine bureaucratic structure.

4.       Mass-production firms are perhaps the best known machine bureaucracies. The operating work flows form integrated chains, open at one end to accept raw material inputs, and after that functioning as closed systems that process the inputs through sequences of standardized operations until marketable outputs emerge at the other end. Figure 9-2 shows the organigram of a large steel company, functional right to its top level of grouping.

5.       Another condition often found with many machine bureaucracies is external control. Hypothesis 14 indicated that the more an organization is controlled externally, the more its structure is centralized and formalized, the two prime design parameters of the machine bureaucracy. Public machine bureaucracy in government agencies make the employees in government accountable to the public for their actions. Control bureaucracy, safety bureaucracy, and contingency bureaucracy exist depending on their function as an organization or a section of the organization.

 

III.    SOME ISSUES ASSOCIATED WITH MACHINE BUREAUCRACY

Max Weber emphasized the rationality of this structure, in fact the word machine comes directly from his writings. A machine is certainly precise, reliable, easy to control, and should be efficient. When an integrated set of simple and repetitive tasks must be performed precisely and consistently by human beings, the machine bureaucracy is the most efficient structure – indeed, the only conceivable one.

But these advantages lie all the disadvantages of these structure: human problems arise in the operating core, coordination problems that arise in the administrative center, and problems of adaptability at the strategic apex.

 

A.      Human Problems in the Operating Core

James Worthy cited the work of Frederick W. Taylor’s “scientific management” as efficient however, worker initiative did not enter into Taylor’s efficiency equation. Worthy argued that “the methods of engineering have proved inappropriate to human organization.” Treating people as “means” and as “categories of status and function rather than as individuals” had the “consequence of destroying the meaning of work itself.”

Stud Terkel (1972) argued that doing the same thing everyday and repeating the same process everyday will make the work boring.

Democratization does not eliminate the fundamental conflict in the machine bureaucracy between engineering efficiency on the one hand and individual satisfaction on the other. The discouraging conclusion is that the machine bureaucracy creates major human problems in the operating core, ones for which no solutions are apparent. Joan Woodward had it right when she argued that in these structures, there is an irreconcilable conflict between the technical and social systems. What is good for production is simply not good for people.

 

B.      Coordination Problems in the Administrative Center

Since the operating core of the machine bureaucracy is not designed to handle conflict, many of the human problems that arise there spill over into the administrative structure. Narrow functionalism not only impedes coordination, it also encourages the building of private empires. So to reconcile the coordination problems that arise in its administrative center, the machine bureaucracy is left with only one coordinating mechanism, direct supervision. In effect, just as the human problems in the administrative center, so too do the coordination problems in the administrative center become adaptation problems at the strategic apex.

 

C.      Adaptation Problems at the Strategic Apex

Adaptation problems in this context are the existence of nonroutine problems from the operating core to the strategic apex. In theory, machine bureaucracy is designed to account for this problem. The management information system (MIS) that aggregates information up the hierarchy is the perfect solution for the overloaded top manager. Except that much of the information is the wrong kind.

The information of the MIS, by the time it reaches the strategic apex – after being filtered and aggregated through the levels of the administrative hierarchy – is often so bland that the top manager cannot rely on it. Hence, the obvious solution is to bypass the MIS and set up their own informal information systems that are quick and reliable.

The essential problem lies in one of the major tenets of the machine bureaucracy, that strategy formulation must be sharply differentiated from strategy implementation. The first is the responsibility of the top management, the second is to be carried out by every one else, in hierarchical order. The formulation-implementation dichotomy presupposes two fundamental conditions in order to work effectively: (1) the formulator has full information, or at least information as good as that available to the implementor; (2) the situation is insufficiently stable or predictable to ensure that there will be no need for reformulation during implementation. The top manager who cannot get the necessary information simply cannot formulate a sensible strategy.

We emerge from this discussion with two conclusions: First, strategies must be formulated outside the machine bureaucratic structure if they are to be realistic; second, the dichotomy between formulation and implementation ceases to have relevance in times of unpredictable change. Together these conclusions tell us that machine bureaucracies are fundamentally nonadaptive structures, ill-suited to changing their strategies.

 

CONCLUSION

To conclude, the machine bureaucracy is an inflexible configuration. As a machine, it is designed for one purpose only. It is efficient in its own limited domain but cannot easily adapt itself to any other. Above all, it cannot tolerate an environment that is either dynamic or complex. Nevertheless, the machine bureaucracy remains a dominant configuration – probably the dominant one in our specialized societies.

 

Reference: Mintzberg, H. (1993). Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 163-188