THE PROFESSIONAL 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:

·         professional – 전문적

·         standardization –표준화 

 

INTRODUCTION

Prime Coordinating Mechanism:	Standardization of Skills
Key Part of Organization:	Operating core
Main Design Parameters:	Training, horizontal job specialization, vertical and horizontal decentralization
Situational Factors:	Complex, stable environment; nonregulating, nonsophisticated technical system; fashionable

Professional bureaucracy is a proof that organizations can be bureaucratic without being centralized. Their operating work is stable, leading to “predetermined or predictable, in effect, standardized” behavior. It is also complex, and so must be controlled by the operators who do it. Hence, the organization turns to the coordinating mechanism that allows for standardization and decentralization at the same time – namely, the standardization of skills. Professional bureaucracy is common in universities, general hospitals, school systems, public accounting firms, social-work agencies, and craft production firms. All rely on the skills and knowledge of their operating professional to function; all produce standard products or services.

I.        THE BASIC STRUCTURE

A.      The Work of the Operating Core

The professional bureaucracy relies for coordination on the standardization of skills and its associated design parameter, training and indoctrination. It hires duly trained and indoctrinated specialists – professionals – for the operating core, and then gives them considerable control over their own work. In effect, the work is highly specialized in the horizontal dimension, but enlarged in the vertical one. Control over his own work means that the professional works relatively independently of his colleagues, but closely with the clients he serves. For example, “the teacher works alone within the classroom, relatively hidden from colleagues and superiors, so that he has a broad discretionary jurisdiction within the boundaries of the classroom” (Bidwell, 1965:976).

Training and indoctrination are very important design parameters before becoming a part of this structure. As noted by Spencer (1976), “becoming a skillful clinical surgeon requires a long period of training, probably five or more years.” An important feature of that training is “repetitive practice” to evoke “an automatic reflex.” But no matter how standardized the knowledge and skills, their complexity ensures that considerable discretion remains in their application. No two professional – no two surgeons or teachers or social workers – ever apply them in exactly the same way. Many judgments are required.

The initial training typically takes place over a period of years in a university or special institution. Here the skills and knowledge of the profession are formally programmed into the would-be professional. Then a long period of on-the-job training follows, such as internship in medicine and articling in accounting. Here the formal knowledge is applied and the practice of the skills perfected, under close supervision of members of the profession. On-the-job training also completes the process of indoctrination, which began during the formal teaching. Once this process is completed, the professional association typically examines the trainee to determine whether he has the requisite knowledge, skills, and norms to enter the profession. But upgrades and retrainings are necessary for the professional to enhance new knowledge and new skills. Hence, the process of training continues.

 

B.      The Bureaucratic Nature of the Structure

The structure of these organizations is essentially bureaucratic, its coordination – like that of the machine bureaucracy – achieved by design, by standards that predetermine what is to be done. But the two kinds of bureaucracies differ markedly in the source of their standardization. Machine bureaucracy generates its own standards – its technostructure designing the work standards for its operators and its line managers enforcing them. While the standards of the professional bureaucracy originate largely outside its own structure, in the self-governing associations its operators join with their colleagues from other professional bureaucracies. These associations set universal standards, which they make sure are taught by the universities and used by all the bureaucracies of the profession. Whereas the machine bureaucracy relies on authority of a hierarchical nature – the power of office, the professional bureaucracy relies on authority of a professional nature – the power of expertise.

 

C.      The Pigeonholing Process

To understand how the professional bureaucracy functions in its operating core, it is helpful to think of it as a repertoire of standard programs – in effect, the set of skills the professionals stand ready to use – that are applied to predetermined situations, called contingencies, also standardized. As Weick (1976) noted, “schools are in the business of building and maintaining categories.” The process is sometimes known as pigeonholing. In this regard, the professional has two basic tasks: (1) to categorize the client’s need in terms of a contingency, which indicates which standard program to use, a task known as diagnosis; and (2) to apply, or execute, that program. Pigeonholing simplifies matters enormously. “People are categorized and placed into pigeonholes because it would take enormous resources to treat every case as unique and requiring thorough analysis. Like stereotypes, categories allow us to move through the world without making continuous decisions at every moment” (Perrow, 1970:58). Thus, a psychiatrist examines the patient, declares him to be manic-depressive, and initiates psychotherapy.

This pigeonholing process enables the professional bureaucracy to decouple its various operating tasks and assign them to individual, relatively autonomous professionals. Each can, instead of giving great deal of attention to coordinating his work with his peers, focus on perfecting his skills. In the pigeonholing process, we can see fundamental differences among the machine bureaucracy, the professional bureaucracy, and the adhocracy. The machine bureaucracy has no diagnosis as it executes its one standard sequence programs. Diagnosis is a fundamental task in the professional bureaucracy but it is circumscribed. The organization seeks to match a predetermined contingency to a standard program. Fully open-ended diagnosis – that which seeks a creative solution to a unique problem – requires a third configuration, which is adhocracy. No standard contingencies or programs exist in that configuration.

It is an interesting characteristic of the professional bureaucracy that its pigeonholing process creates an equivalence in its structure between the functional and market bases for grouping. Because clients are categorized, or categorize themselves, in terms of the functional specialists who serve them, then structure of the professional bureaucracy becomes at the same time both a functional and a market-based one. Two illustrations help explain the point: A hospital gynecology department and a university chemistry department can be called functional because they group specialists according to the knowledge, skills, and work processes they use, or market-based because each unit deals with its own unique types of clients – women in the first case, chemistry students in the second. Thus, the distinction between functional and market bases for grouping breaks down in the special case of the professional bureaucracy.

 

D.      Focus on the Operating Core

The operating core is the key part of the professional bureaucracy. The only other part that is fully elaborated is the support staff, but that is focused very much on serving the operating core. Given the high cost of the professionals, it makes sense to back them up with as much support as possible, to aid them and have others do whatever routine work can be formalized. Thus, universities have printing facilities, faculty clubs, alma mater funds, publishing houses, archives, athletics departments, libraries, computer facilities, and many, many other support units.

The technostructure and middle line of management are not highly elaborated in the professional bureaucracy. In other configurations (except adhocracy), they coordinate the work of the operating core. But professional bureaucracy, they do little to coordinate the operating work. Figure 10-1 on page 194 of our reference book shows the professional bureaucracy as a flat structure with a thin middle line, a tiny technostructure, and a fully elaborated support staff. All these characteristics are reflected in the organigram of McGill University, shown in Figure 10-2 on page 196.

 

E.       Decentralization in the Professional Bureaucracy

The professional bureaucracy is a highly decentralized structure, in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions. A great deal of the power over the operating work rests at the bottom of the structure, with the professionals of the operating core. Often, each works with his own clients, subject only to the collective control of his colleagues, who trained and indoctrinated him in the first place and thereafter reserve the right to censure him for malpractice.

One is inclined to ask why professionals bother to join organization in the first place. One reason is that professionals can share resources, including support services, in a common organization. Professionals gather together to learn from each other, and to train new recruits. Some professionals must join the organization to get clients. Professionals band together since some clients often need the services of more than one at the same time. Finally, bringing together different types of professionals allows clients to be transferred between them when the initial diagnosis proves incorrect or the needs of the client change during execution. As an example, when a kidney patient develops heart trouble, there is no time to change hospitals in search for a cardiologist.

 

F.       The Administrative Structure

What we have seen suggest that the professional bureaucracy is a highly democratic structure, at least for the professionals of the operating core. In fact, not only do the professionals control their own work, but they also seek collective control of the administrative decisions that affect them – decisions, for example, to hire colleagues, to promote them, and to distribute resources. Some of the administrative work the operating professionals do themselves. Every university professor, for example, serves on committees to ensure that he retains some control over the decisions that affect his work. Moreover, full time administrators who wish to have any power at all in these structures must be certified members of the profession and preferably be elected by the professional operators, or at least appointed with their blessing. What emerges, therefore, is a democratic administrative structure.

This administrative structure relies largely in mutual adjustment for coordination. It has liaison devices in the middle line. Task forces and especially standing committees also exist in this structure. Because of the power of their operators, professional bureaucracies are sometimes called “collegial” organizations. Some argued of an inverse pyramid, with the professional operators at the top and the administrators down below to serve them.

What frequently emerges in the professional bureaucracy are parallel administrative hierarchies, one democratic and bottom-up for the professionals, and a second machine bureaucratic and top-down for the support staff. In the professional hierarchy, power resides in expertise; one has influence by virtue of one’s knowledge and skills.  These two parallel hierarchies are kept quite independent of each other, as shown in Figure 10-3 on page 198.

 

G.     The Roles of the Professional Administrator

The professional administrator may not be able to control the professionals directly, but he does perform a series of roles that gives him considerable indirect power in the structure.

First, the professional administrator spends much time handling disturbances in the structure. Problems such as who should teach the statistics course in the MBA program, etc. Often the unit managers – chiefs, deans, or whoever – must sit down together and negotiate a solution on behalf of their constituencies. Coordination problems also arise frequently between the parallel hierarchies, and it often falls to the professional administrators to resolve them.

Second, the professional administrators – especially those at the higher levels – serve key roles at the boundary of the organization, between the professionals inside and interested parties – governments, client associations, and so on – on the outside. They are expected to protect the autonomy of professionals from external pressures; or else invite outsiders to support the organization, both morally and financially. Thus, the external roles of the manager – maintaining liaison contacts, acting as figurehead and spokesman in a public relations capacity, negotiating with outside agencies – emerge as primary ones in professional administration.

Ironically, the professional becomes dependent on the effective administrator. This leaves the professional two choices: to do the administrative work himself, in which case he has less time to practice his profession, or to leave it to administrators, in which case he must surrender some of his power over decision making. And that power must be surrendered, it should be added, to administrators who, by virtue of the fact that they do not wish to practice the profession, probably favor different set of goals. As the common argument says – damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.

We can conclude that power in these structures does flow to those professionals who care to devote effort to doing administrative instead of professional work, especially to those who do it well. But that, it should be stressed, is not laissez-faire power: the professional administrator keeps his power only as long as the professional perceive him to be serving their interests effectively. The managers maybe the weakest in this structure but they are far from being impotent. The chief executive remains the single most powerful member of the professional bureaucracy – even if that power can easily be overwhelmed by the collective power of the professionals.

 

H.     Strategy Formulation in the Professional Bureaucracy

Professionals are significantly constrained by the professional standards and skills they have learned. That is, the professional associations and training institutions outside the organization play a major role in determining the strategies that the professionals pursue. All organizations in a given profession exhibit similar strategies, imposed on them from the outside. We can conclude that the strategies of the professional bureaucracy are largely ones of the individual professional within the organization as well as the professional associations on the outside.

How do these organizational strategies develop? It would appear that the professional bureaucracy’s own strategies represent the cumulative effect over time of the projects, or strategic “initiatives,” that its members are able to convince it to undertake – to buy a new piece of equipment in a hospital, to establish a new degree program in a university, etc.

What is the role of the professional administrator in all this? The power of the effective administrator to influence strategy goes beyond helping the operating professionals. But since he is doing it in a bottom up process, he must rely on his informal power, and apply it subtly. Knowing that the professionals want nothing more than to be left alone, the administrator moves carefully – in incremental steps, each one hardly discernible. In this way, he may achieve over time changes that the professionals would have rejected out of hand had they been proposed all at once.

 

II.      CONDITIONS OF THE PROFESSIONAL BUREAUCRACY

Professional bureaucracy configuration appears wherever the operating core of an organization is dominated by skilled workers – professionals – who use procedures that are difficult to learn, yet well defined. This means an environment that is both complex and stable – complex enough to require the use of difficult procedures that can be learned only in extensive formal training programs, yet stable enough to enable these skills to become well defined – in effect, standardized. Thus, the environment is the chief situational factor in the use of the professional bureaucracy.

Professional bureaucracy passes quickly through the stage of simple structure in their formative years because they are professionals and they are familiar with their job. So the factors of age and size are of less significance. Also, in the pure form of professional bureaucracy, the technology of the organization – its knowledge base – is sophisticated, but its technical system – the set of instruments it uses to apply that knowledge base – is not. Thus, the prime example of the professional bureaucracy is the personal-service organization – schools and universities, consulting firms, law and accounting offices, and social-work agencies – all rely on this configuration as long as they concentrate not on innovating in the solution of new problems, but on applying standard programs to well-defined problems. The same is true to hospitals which are driven toward a hybrid structure, with characteristics of the adhocracy. But other than the service sector, we can also find this configuration in the manufacturing sector – the craft enterprise – whose environment demands work that is complex yet stable. Craft is defined today as associated with functional art, those handmade items that perform a function but are purchased for their aesthetic value.

The markets of the professional bureaucracy are often diversified – like that of the hospital that employs gynecologists to serve women, pediatrics to serve children. In the case of a dispersed professional bureaucracy (diversified geographically), the organization relies extensively on training and indoctrination, especially the latter. Often, training and indoctrination in this sense is often undertaken by the organization itself (e.g. CIA agents, forest rangers). The professional bureaucracy is also occasionally found as a hybrid structure. There is the combination with the characteristics of adhocracy that we can call the professional bureau/adhocracy. There is also another hybrid – the simple professional bureaucracy – occurs when highly trained professionals practicing standard skills nevertheless take their lead from a strong, sometimes autocratic leader, as in the simple structure.

Finally, professional bureaucracy is a highly fashionable structure – and for good reason, since it is a rather democratic one. Thus, it is to the advantage of every operator to make his job more professional.

 

III.    SOME ISSUES ASSOCIATED WITH PROFESSIONAL BUREAUCRACY

The professional bureaucracy is unique among the five configurations in answering two of the paramount needs of contemporary men and women. It is democratic, disseminating its power directly to its workers (at least who are professionals). Thus, the professional has the best of both worlds: he is attached to an organization, yet he is free to serve his clients in his own way, constrained only by the established standards of his profession. As a result, they tend to emerge as responsible and highly motivated individuals, dedicated to their work and the clients they serve. Autonomy allows them to perfect their skills, free of interference.

But in these same characteristics of democracy and autonomy lie the major problems of the professional bureaucracy. Since there is virtually no control of the work from that by the profession itself, they tend to overlook the major problems of coordination, of discretion, and of innovation that arise in these configurations.

 

A.      Problems of Coordination

The standardization of skills is a loose coordinating mechanism at best, failing to cope with many of the needs that arise in the professional bureaucracy. Between the professionals and support staff, coordination problems arise. It is because he is following orders between two systems – the vertical power of line authority above him and the horizontal power of professional expertise to his side.

Perhaps a more severe one is the coordination problems among the professionals themselves. The pigeonholing process, in fact, emerges as the source of a great deal of the conflict of the professional bureaucracy. Much political blood is spilled in the continual reassessment of contingencies, imperfectly conceived, in terms of programs, artificially distinguished.

 

B.      Problems of Discretion

Such discretion of standardized skill and autonomy is, perhaps, appropriate for professionals who are competent and conscientious. Unfortunately, not all of them. And the professional bureaucracy cannot easily deal with professionals who are either incompetent or unconscientious. No two professionals are equally skilled.  So the client who is forced to choose among them – to choose in ignorance – as in the case of medicine, where a single decision can mean life or death.

Discretion not only enables some professionals to ignore the needs of their clients; it also encourages many of them to ignore the needs of the organization. Cooperation, as we saw earlier, is crucial to the functioning of the administrative structure. Yet, as we saw, professionals resist it furiously. Professors hate to show up for curriculum meetings; they simply do not wish to be dependent on each other. One can say that they know each other only too well!

 

C.      Problems of Innovation

The reluctance of the professionals to work cooperatively with each other translates itself into problems of innovation. The problems of innovation in this structure find their roots in convergent thinking, in the deductive reasoning of the professional who sees the specific situation in terms of the general concept. This means that new problems are forced into old pigeonholes. Some professionals resist change.

As long as the environment remains stable, the professional bureaucracy encounters no problem. It continues to perfect its skills and its given system of pigeonholes that slots them. But dynamic conditions call for change – new skills, new ways to slot tem, and creative, cooperative efforts on the part of multidisciplinary teams of professionals. And that calls for another configuration, as we shall see in chapter 12.

 

Dysfunctional Responses

What responses do the problems of coordination, discretion, and innovation evoke? Most commonly, those outside the profession – clients, non-professional administrators, members of the society at large and their representatives in government – see the problems as resulting from a lack of external control of the professional and of his profession. So they do the obvious: try to control the work with one of the other coordinating mechanisms. Specifically, they try to use direct supervision, standardization of work processes, or standardization of outputs.

Direct supervision typically means imposing an intermediate level of supervision, preferably with narrow “span of control” – in keeping with the tenets of the classical concepts of authority – to watch over the professionals. However, the impositions of such intermediate levels of supervision stems from the assumption that professional work can be controlled, in a top-down manner, an assumption that has proven false again and again.

Likewise, the other forms of standardization, instead of achieving control of the professional work, often serve merely to impede and discourage the professionals. And for the same reasons – the complexity of the work and the vagueness of its outputs. Complex work processes cannot be formalized by rules and regulations, and vague outputs cannot be standardized by planning and control systems. Except in misguided ways, which program the wrong behaviors and measure the wrong outputs, forcing the professional to play the machine bureaucracy game – satisfying the standards instead of serving the clients. This goes back to the means-ends inversion.

The fact is that complex work cannot be effectively performed unless it comes under the control of the operator who does it.  Too much external control of the professional work itself leads, according to hypothesis 14, to centralization and formalization of the structure, in effect driving the professional bureaucracy to machine bureaucracy. Also, technocratic controls only serve to dampen professional conscientiousness. Controls also upset the delicate relationship between the professional and his client, a relationship predicated on unimpeded personal contact between the two.

Are there then no solutions to a society concerned about its professional bureaucracies? Financial control of professional bureaucracies and legislation against irresponsible professional behavior are obviously necessary. On the other hand, change seeps in by the slow process of changing the professionals – changing who can enter the profession, what they learn in its professional schools (norms as well as skills and knowledge), and thereafter how willing they are to upgrade their skills. Where such changes are resisted, society may be best off to call on the professionals’ sense of responsibility to serve the public, or, failing that, to bring pressures on the professional associations rather than on the professional bureaucracies.

 

Reference: Mintzberg, H. (1993). Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 189-214