Perceiving Administrative Reality

Abstract

UNLESS IT BECOMES POSSIBLE to formulate an alternative to prevailing managerial and administrative practices, the widespread but unfocused discontent about them can only continue to contribute to an enervating malaise. We appear to lack an orientation for identifying and organizing what ails us. I should like to suggest that it remains possible to elaborate on a familiar if repressed vantage point, one that allows us to see the power relations which necessarily characterize bureaucracies even as it leads us to perceive our own irrevocable involvement in them, their deadly hold on us, their inescapable cost in alienation. To see these costs-the experiences we are kept from having-is to be in possession of a perspective that reconstitutes the meaning of reality. It maps a way out of mindless victimization insofar as it formulates a basis for focused action. Such mapping has become a veritable industry. The uneasiness about conventional bureaucracies has inspired a welter of both speculative and practical quests for some alternative-whatever scheme promises to subvert hierarchy, the division of labor, the centralization of control, and ultimately the technology that demands bureaucratic organization. There is no lack of programs for encouraging rank-and-file participation in decision-making by not