Organizational Environments and Organizational Discourse: Bureaucracy between Two Worlds

Abstract

The controversy around Weber's theory of bureaucracy that occupied post-war American organization theorists serves as a backdrop to consider differences in the institutional and cultural environments of American and continental European, notably German, organizations. I suggest that formal organizations in the United States emerged under institutional and cultural conditions sufficiently different from those Weber witnessed as to account for the differences in the European and American organizational discourses. European institutional-cultural conditions favored a centralized, hierarchical, obedience-based organizational form with little uncertainty tolerance emphasizing loyalty. In the US, by contrast, the primacy of the large business organization which operated in volatile markets under the cultural imperative of equality favored flatter, less hierarchical, and more nearly decomposable organizations in which compliance was based on a temporary contract. Indifference vis-à-vis the national and cultural particulars of formal organizations may have led early organization research to prematurely close off a potentially fruitful line of inquiry in the field of comparative organization.