Beyond Rational Bureaucracy: Changing Values and Social Integration in Post-Industrial Society

Abstract

Rational values and their bureaucratic embodiment as defined by Weber are declining in the United States. The rational production economy freed resources to support new groups with nonrational qualitative values. These groups adopted activism as a technique and appeared to threaten the bureaucractic system. Then activism was institutionalized, with elites representing activist movements incorporated into the system. These elites' qualitative values and outputs were unmeasurable, so that bureaucratic decisionmaking became a nonrational political process of appeal to outside publics for bargaining power. The institutionalization of activism has stabilized social integration, but new and ephemeral values arise in rapid succession, weakening what is left of the sense of moral direction formerly provided by rational values. Nonrational mass movements may emerge to fill the vacuum. Modern society grew up around an economy devoted to the production and distribution of standardized material goods. This society embodied values of rationality: the application of the calculus of efficiency to adapt means to specific, limited, and measurable ends. Rational values were well suited to increase production in a context of limited resources and technology. Many analysts of the modern world have emphasized its rationality. Max Weber (1925) saw rationality in the Protestant Ethic, in modern law, in disenchantment, in bureaucracy, and in other elements of society and culture. Parsons' (1951) pattern-variables specify dimensions of rationality. His (1961) theory of structural differentiation together with the pattern-variables views society as a sort of machine, with specialized parts chosen and arranged in accordance with rational specifications and dismantled and reassembled from time to time to improve its efficiency. Coleman (1970) has epitomized the modernization of life as a change from person-based to role-based social organization. A structure built of separate roles rather than of whole persons allows the individual and the system to behave more rationally. Ellul (1964) feels that the emphasis on technical efficiency has come to dominate not only economic and social organization, but all facets of culture and man's inner thought processes as well, driving out all considerations that interfere with rationality. These analyses, and similar ones by other authors, stress not only the pervasiveness of rationality but also its imbeddedness in organizations. Modern rationality was originally that of the individual entrepreneur, but after the Industrial Revolution the locus of rationality shifted from the individual to the structure of bureaucracy, a system of social action set up rationally like a machine. The growth of rational bureaucracy with its routinized procedures and its hierarchical decisions based on calculations of efficiency has been attributed to the effectiveness of such a system in producing a limited and stable range of measurable outputs such as standardized material goods (Woodward, 1965). STRUCTURAL CHANGES AND THE CHALLENGE TO BUREAUCRATIC RATIONALITY It is our contention that this rational bureaucratic system is, in fact, declining. Bureaucracy keeps growing, as the main form of organization to accomplish a growing variety of functions and to represent a growing variety of groups, and in complex networks linking different functions and groups (Boulding, 1953; Turk, 1970; Warner and Low, 1947; Warren, * Revision of the presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 1972.