Bureaucratic Control Research Articles

Impact of Organizational Culture on Bullying Behavior in Public Sector Organizations

Organizational culture can significantly influence the prevalence of bullying in workplaces. However, there is a dearth of empirical research that thoroughly investigates the various aspects of organizational culture directly linked to bullying behaviors in public sector organizations. To address this gap, a research study was conducted, interviewing senior-level managers across the Victorian Public Sector (VPS), Australia, aiming to identify the cultural elements contributing to bullying behaviors in their workplaces. Utilizing Schein’s organizational culture framework, this study reveals that hierarchical power distance, bureaucratic control, bullying as a political tactic, inaction against bullying incidents, and leaders’ prerogative are the primary cultural features that foster a negative environment and escalate bullying levels. It is imperative for organizations to recognize and rectify these cultural issues to prevent bullying behaviors and foster a safe and respectful workplace culture.

Credentialing care: COVID‐19 and the bureaucratization of doulas

AbstractDoulas in the United States offer embodied, informational, and continuous one‐on‐one care to birthing people. Doulas have historically sought certification to gain knowledge through training and to gain legitimacy for healthcare providers and clients. During the COVID‐19 pandemic, hospitals required doulas to provide proof of certification. The COVID‐19 pandemic, and the proliferation of state‐sponsored doula programs, has sparked a shift in how doulas are viewed and regulated, enabling new forms of bureaucratic oversight and control. Based on participant observation, surveys, and semi‐structured interviews, we examine the connection between certification and care including motivations doulas have for certification, the perceived value of certification, certification as a form of gatekeeping, and increased bureaucratization of doulas. Using a critical feminist approach, we argue that increased bureaucratization and surveillance of doulas has not improved standards of care or led to more equitable access. Indeed, doulas provide a window into the negative impact of bureaucratization on care. While some of these negative impacts are byproducts of policies intended to increase oversight and access to doula care, we argue that increased bureaucratization and surveillance of doulas is also intended to act as a gatekeeping mechanism demonstrating how policies contribute to uneven reproduction.

“Although Burdened, Do We Need to Do More?” Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Organizational Citizenship Behaviors in Poverty Alleviation Policy Implementation

Drawing on attentional resource allocation theory and transaction cost theory, this study links street-level bureaucrats’ problem-solving organizational citizenship behaviors with perceived administrative burden. Based on 28 in-depth interviews and 657 survey responses from street-level bureaucrats involved in China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation Policy during 2019 and 2020, the study found positive relationships between problem-solving organizational citizenship behaviors, resource deficiency, bureaucratic control, and perceived administrative burden. Policymakers should be cautious when using control tools and avoid exploiting street-level bureaucrats’ commitment and compassion for clients to ensure effectively policy implementation and reduce administrative burdens on dedicated public servants.

Trust and management control archetypes in public-private partnerships

PurposeThis paper aims to contribute to the management control systems (MCS) changes in public-private partnerships (PPSs) by developing a conceptual archetype explaining the relationship between trust and MCSs in PPPs, and highlighting how this relationship may evolve over time.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a longitudinal case study methodology focusing on a hospital built and operated under a project finance deal. The methods adopted include semistructured interviews, direct observation and internal documentation analysis. We conducted 15 semistructured interviews from 2019 to 2021. In analyzing different documents and interviews, we triangulated data to ensure solid interpretation.FindingsThe case shows how trust can take different configurations depending on the type of MCS used. The results highlight how different patterns of MCSs, about trust, can be combined to govern PPPs. The case also shows the temporal dynamics of how MCS and trust evolve at different organizational levels and how bureaucratic control matched with contractual trust and trust-based control matched with competence trust can coexist at different times and organizational levels.Practical implicationsManagers involved in PPPs will be aware of the role of different types of trust in shaping and managing the relationship between partners at different organizational levels. Furthermore, the findings could help policymakers to adopt more informed decisions and to promote practice-based trust at various organizational levels of PPPs.Originality/valueThe paper proposes a management control archetype based on bureaucracy- and trust-based patterns concerning the level of programmability of tasks, as well as defined risks.

Reducing organizational inequalities associated with algorithmic controls

Algorithmic technologies are widely applied in organizational decision-making today, which can improve resource allocation and decision-making coordination to facilitate the accuracy and efficiency of the decision-making process within and across organizations. However, algorithmic controls also introduce and amplify organizational inequalities—workers who are female, people of color and the marginalized population, and workers with low skills, a low level of education, or who have low technology literacy can be disadvantaged and discriminated against due to the lack of transparency, explainability, objectivity, and accountability in these algorithms. Through a systematic literature review, this study comprehensively compares three different types of controls in organizations: technical controls, bureaucratic controls, and algorithmic controls, which led to our understanding of the advantages and disadvantages associated with algorithmic controls. The literature on the organizational inequality related to the employment of algorithmic controls is then discussed and summarized. Finally, we explore the potential of trustworthy algorithmic controls and participatory development of algorithms to mitigate organizational inequalities associated with algorithmic controls. Our findings raise the awareness related to the potential corporate inequalities associated with algorithmic controls in organizations and endorse the development of future generations of hiring and employment algorithms through trustworthy and participatory approaches.

Experiences of GDPR in Norway: Politics of autonomy and control

This article explores the challenges Norwegian anthropologists face owing to the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The authors’ analysis reveals a tension between the need to comply with data protection regulations and preserve research autonomy and methodological integrity. The authors document how GDPR's bureaucratic control mechanisms have influenced researchers’ conceptualization of ethics, leading to a split between legalistic adherence and critical responses within the anthropological community. This situation has necessitated negotiations with various stakeholders and re‐evaluating participatory observational methods, particularly in health research, where access has become increasingly difficult. The article highlights the anthropological community's efforts to navigate these regulations through national debates, establishing forums for ethics in ethnographic research and developing strategies to maintain methodological standards while ensuring GDPR compliance. The authors advocate vigilance against the colonization of bureaucratic logic and seek to secure anthropological representation in regulatory bodies to safeguard the discipline's interests.

Navigating trust: The clash of clan culture and conventional management

AbstractHow does a mismatch between management and cultural norms lead to decreased engagement and productivity? Within both Germanic and Mediterranean cultural spheres, trust dynamics mirror deeply ingrained kinship patterns, which evolve slowly over time. The inclination to trust within one's own kin group is notably stronger among Mediterranean populations compared to their Germanic counterparts. Even as these populations migrated to regions such as Latin America and the United States, the distinct trust patterns persist. Germanic managerial methodologies rely heavily on trust‐based behaviors inherent to Germanic cultures, which may not find resonance within the Mediterranean cultural context. Consequently, such managerial approaches often prove less effective within Mediterranean clusters. In contrast, management practices that prioritize kinship dynamics, commonly seen among Mediterranean peoples, foster an environment of trust, teamwork, and a sense of collective responsibility. This approach necessitates fewer bureaucratic controls and cultivates heightened levels of engagement and performance in the workplace. These assertions draw from a synthesis of historical accounts, business literature, anthropological studies, as well as empirical evidence from sources such as the World Values Survey Wave 6 data and field research conducted over a 2‐year period within a Brazilian samba school setting.

Cornelius Castoriadis’ agonistic theory of the future of work at Amazon Mechanical Turk

ABSTRACT Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, often focus on managing the impact of these technologies on workers. They leave the question of how these technologies are designed or how workers can determine their own futures unanswered. This approach risks surrendering the Future of Work debate to techno-determinist imaginaries aligned with corporate interests. Using Cornelius Castoriadis’ early writings on worker struggles in French Tayloristic factories and his later oeuvre on conflictual social imaginaries, I propose an agonistic approach to the Future of Work. Not merely companies implementing workplace technologies, but also workers themselves possess agency in determining the Future of Work. Workers’ frequent contestations against machinic surveillance and technologically mediated coordination of the labour process disclose an alternative Future of Work in which technologies are used to enhance worker autonomy rather than bureaucratic control. Worker struggles at Amazon Mechanical Turk illustrate this agonistic dynamic: Amazon mobilizes algorithmic management to fragment and control a workforce of globally dispersed remote workers, but the latter form online social communities and create counter-technologies to reappropriate control over the labour process.

Bureaucratizing the Clan: Impact of Technology Affordances on Control

ABSTRACT We examine how technology affordances impact clan control mechanisms in organizations. Using an interpretive multisite case study of the use of body-worn cameras in police organizations and technology affordance theory, we identify five technology affordances (Practice Visualization, Behavior Sanitization, Panoptic Supervision, Multiplex Evaluation, and Evidence Persistence). Actualization of these affordances constitutes affordance-based control, which reconfigures clan control mechanisms and extends the scope and intensity of bureaucratic control in our case sites, thereby bureaucratizing the clan. Our study makes significant contributions to affordances, organizational control, and technology-mediated control theory and practice. First, we develop a process model of affordance-based control, demonstrating technology’s role in constraining and enabling employees and supervisors to enact clan and bureaucratic control, respectively. Second, we show how affordance-based control extends the control relationship from traditional dyadic supervisor-employee control to triadic supervisor-technology-employee control. Finally, our study shows how affordance-based control facilitates the co-creation of control mechanisms by actualizing employee and supervisor affordances individually and jointly. Thus, affordance-based control can afford participatory supervision, empowering employees to have an input in control mechanisms that were historically imposed on them.

Исчезла ли античность в городах Малой Азии задолго до падения Римской империи? (Рец. на кн.: Pont, A.-V. La fin de la cité grecque: métamorphoses et disparition d’un modèle politique et institutionnel local en Asie Mineure, de Dèce à Constantin / A.-V. Pont. – Genève : Droz, 2020. – XIII, 585 р. (Hautes études du monde gréco-romain ; vol. 57))

Introduction. The publication is a review of a monograph by Anna-Valerie Pont, Professor of the Sorbonne, devoted to an attempt to determine the time of the disappearance of an ancient city (polis) on the material of Asia Minor. Analysis and results. There is an extensive and complex source base of research in terms of composition and quality, which includes both scanty reports of late Antique and early medieval written heritage, as well as archaeological data, among which the author legitimately highlights epigraphic material. As criteria for the extinction in the city, it is the ancient indicators of public life that have priority: the decline in the functioning of self-government institutions by urban communities, a decrease in the activity of wealthy citizens in organizing spectacles, subsidizing essential products, an increase in the specific weight of imperial bureaucratic control and local management, an increase in the influence of Christians on public processes in policies. The review indicates that the French researcher actually ignored the evolution of municipal property (the degradation of which in the chronological framework under consideration was very modest). In fact, the evolution of such estates as curiales and plebs (whose position at the time under consideration was by no means catastrophic) was also left aside. The social historical realities in the monograph are touched upon only insofar as they are related to institutional elements (the work of city councils, the implementation of magistracies, etc.). The author of the review points out that such a method of analyzing late-antique processes is outdated and goes back to the Enlightenment views on the fall of the Roman Empire. The review focuses on the legitimacy of the priority of epigraphic monuments for the disclosure of the stated topic (due to the insufficiency of narrative sources). However, consideration of the reduction in the number of such monuments at the turn of the 3rd – 4th century (compared with the times of the classical Empire) as an indicator of the extinction of the antique parameters of the policy is doubtful.

Proletarian Feedback: The Mirror of the Soviet Public Sphere

Abstract One glaring problem that faced the Bolsheviks upon seizing power was the absence of their vaunted class subject. The party had led a successful revolution in the name of the industrial worker, but once the dust settled after the civil war, reality exposed the proclaimed “dictatorship of the proletariat” to be little more than an empty slogan for propagandists. The proletariat was a historico-philosophical no-show. Its truancy had a number of reasons, both factual and theoretical. First, while proletarians had always been something of a rarity in the largely agrarian economy of imperial Russia, the industrial working class became even scarcer after the civil war had decimated the manufacturing capacity of Russia and ruralized the country once again. When the Bolsheviks finally took control, Russia's industrial output had fallen to thirty percent of prewar levels. Historians have consequently described the Bolsheviks as a “superstructure in need of a base”2 and a “vanguard of a nonexistent class.”3 Add to this, second, the fact that the physiognomy of the working class was changing in the 1920s as the forces of production shifted away from the methods of heavy manufacture typical of the second industrial revolution toward newer, automated technologies that relied less on physical exertion than on the scientific knowledge of engineers and managers. At least until Stalin's spectacular revival of older, “classical” forms of industry at the end of the decade—a return that seemed to be motivated less by economic exigency than by retrograde iconography—blast furnaces and factory workbenches were being replaced by telematic machinery and bureaucratic control centers. Third, according to revolutionary theory, in the phase of the transition to communism the proletariat was not even a class, strictly speaking, but the social force that abolishes class identity as such in order to establish for the first time in world history the conditions for a truly universal subject.4 The revolutionary class is, necessarily, the last class. Party philosophers could provide no substantialist definition of this “free dynamei (power, force),” as Marx called the proletariat, since this non-class had no concrete features of its own but was instead understood as an energy that dissolved the existing socioeconomic order.5 Paradoxically, then, the very success of the revolution “causes the concept of the proletariat to ‘disappear.’”6

Controle burocrático e suporte organizacional no setor público: efeitos mediados pelo empoderamento psicológico no engajamento

Abstract The study investigates how bureaucratic control and organizational support affect the civil servant’s work engagement and the mediating role of psychological empowerment. The research adopted a quantitative approach using data collected from 159 public servants of Brazilian courts of accounts, with subsequent application of exploratory factor analysis, parceling techniques, confirmatory factor analysis, and ordinary least squares regression (OLS). The results show a negative mediation of psychological empowerment in the relationship between bureaucratic control and work engagement and a partial and positive mediation between organizational support and work engagement. Thus, psychological empowerment constitutes an important mechanism through which civil servants react to characteristics of the work context, being weakened in situations of exacerbated bureaucratic control or lack of organizational support, with consequences for the level of enthusiasm and dedication. The findings are discussed in light of their theoretical and practical implications for management in the public sector.

Concepts and measures of bureaucratic constraints in European Union laws from hand‐coding to machine‐learning

AbstractScholars employ two main measures of the executive constraints embedded in European Union laws: one is based on the variation in the use of different types of restrictions, and the second is based on the frequency of such use. They reflect two alternative conceptualizations of bureaucratic control. We label them, respectively, as the “toolbox perspective” and the “design perspective”. We illustrate that the constraint frequency measure poses fewer validity problems in estimating legislators' intent to constrain implementation and tends to produce less severe measurement errors. We then evaluate the performance in estimating constraint variation of a recent computational application and identify potential drawbacks of automated learning from hand‐coded provisions. We lastly introduce a skeletal framework for a machine‐learning approach based on the syntactic structures employed by legislators that could improve the performance of this innovative technique.

Development and Dynamics of State Administration in Indonesia: The Struggle of the Discourse of the “State” Administration vis a vis the “Public” Administration

Since Woodrow Wilson “stirred up” the United States public through his writing entitled The Study of Administration (1887) in the journal Political Science Quarterly, state administration began to develop to worldwide, including to Indonesia. Since the 1990s, the state administration has grown considerably compared to Wilson's time. It cannot be denied that the development of State Administration Science is so massive in its home country of the United States and other Anglo-Saxon countries such as England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. While in developing countries, the dynamics of State Administration is not so intense because there is still strong political, bureaucratic and cultural control. The concept of “State Administration” is not “public administration” for a while until the author can accept the logic thinking (epistemology) of Public Administration as the mainstream science of State Administration in Indonesia today. In theory, concepts and paradigms, state administration is experiencing a fairly rapid development. Many contemporary theories have emerged in the repertoire of State Administration that criticize and enrich classical theories such as theories about Organization and bureaucracy. That development is something natural considering that state administration is part of the social sciences that have dynamic characteristics, unlike the Natural Sciences which tend to be passive and positivistic. This development should be appreciated because it indicates that the state administration is able to exist in the midst of increasingly complex community problems and needs concrete solutions.

Faku’s Tusks: Colonialism, Resistance and Accommodation in Early 20th‐Century South Africa

An African ploughing his fields in western Mpondoland in 1910 uncovered two elephant tusks at the site of what had once been King Faku’s homestead. This obscure incident in the Transkeian Territories of South Africa provides an entry point to examining the consolidation of colonial bureaucratic control, and African responses to it, in the second decade of the 20th century by the Union of South Africa government. The unearthing of the tusks illuminated, on the one hand, Mpondo attempts to control the relics of Faku, and the memories associated with them, and to reassert traditional authority over the allocation of land; and on the other, efforts by the colonial administration of the Transkei to tighten control over land and strengthen ‘native affairs’ administration. In the process it explores how differing approaches to dealing with the government and contestations for power within Mpondo society impacted on their relations with the colonial state.

The Growth of Organized Violence Structures and the Types of Control Over Them

Macro-historical changes in the practices and structures of organized violence have their own regularities that require theoretical analysis. It is shown that the steady growth and development of these structures are determined by the main trends of social evolution such as demographic growth, the expansion and complication of polities, and the development of technologies and weapons. The internal mechanisms of both the cyclicality and the direction and irreversibility of these changes are considered. The practices of organized violence have changed considerably, and many of those unacceptable today were once common, socially approved, and even obligatory. Hypothetical principles have been formulated for the emergence, spread, and termination of such practices, which are always connected with the nature and outcome of political struggle, as well as with the change of worldviews consisting of primarily moral, social and political values and corresponding normative principles. The inevitable costs of the growth of violence structures are associated primarily with the possibility of their leaders gaining political subjectivity and claims to power, which is fraught with conspiracies, revolts, and similar phenomena that undermine social and political stability. These costs generate concerns of the rulers and elites to control the violence structures. Three basic forms of such control have been described as “ideal types”, those of patrimonial-charismatic control based on emotional commitment to the ruler, conflict-repressive control with divide-and-conquer strategies, and bureaucratic control involving subordination to formal rules. The last type includes two versions, with a reliance on the principle of power and on the principle of law. The social and mental foundations that support the rule of law in institutions and organizations of state violence are examined.

Suffering and Survival in Besieged Leningrad: A Sociologist’s View on the History of a Humanitarian Catastrophe

The subject of the review is a book by American sociologist Jeffrey Hass devoted to the history of the survival and suffering of civilians in besieged Leningrad in 1941–1944. Exploring the strategies of survival, the political and bureaucratic control of the Leningrad authorities, the gender and class dimension of blockade survival, as well as the discursive framework by which the Leningraders explained and comprehended the humanitarian catastrophe that happened to them (theodicy of war), Hass, unlike most historians of the blockade, uses the sociological approach of P. Bourdieu, describing the wartime everyday life of Leningrad through the prism of the concepts “capital”, “habitus” and “field”. Based on an impressive body of blockade ego-documents and official reports, the sociologist wonders why the Leningraders acted in the catastrophic conditions of the blockade in one way or another, what social mechanisms were behind their suffering, resistance, opportunism and ethical choice. Appreciating the book of Hass, the authors of the review consider it a methodological breakthrough in the modern historiography of the siege of Leningrad and hope for the speedy translation of this book into Russian. If for Russian historians of war the book Wartime Survival and Suffering will become a model of a rigorous theory and methodology for studying the wartime everyday life of civilians, then sociologists will be able to see how productive for the social theory may be the study of ego-documents, personal testimonies describing the survival of the inhabitants of a huge city in the conditions of a humanitarian catastrophe and an unprecedented military siege.

The Applied Strategic Leadership Process: Setting Direction in a VUCA World

Strategic leadership frameworks have become more complex in response to our increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. While comprehensive strategic approaches may help leaders of large bureaucratic organizations exercise control over their staff and resources, these approaches may not be optimal for all organizations and contexts. Given the acceleration of environmental volatility, complexity, and competition, we offer leader developers and aspiring strategic leaders the Applied Strategic Leadership Process (ASLP), a focused and simplified strategic leadership approach that integrates relevant scholarship and practical tools to better enable the success of strategic leaders across cultures, situations, and leadership styles. The ASLP is organized with the themes of strategic judgment, strategic influence, and strategic resilience. Strategic judgment includes assessing the external environment, assessing the internal environment, and setting strategic direction by choosing the optimal big ideas. Strategic influence includes leading the organizational change needed to accomplish the big ideas. Strategic resilience includes developing its leaders’ strategic competencies, character, and wellness while attracting and building a pipeline of junior leaders. We conclude by sharing the 10 strategic leader competencies that several modern-day senior leaders believe will be the most important to leading successfully in the future.

The Making of Natural Infrastructure in China's Era of Ecological Civilization

AbstractCampaign-style environmental enforcement that involves the destruction of infrastructure has become increasingly common. Scholars have theorized such crackdowns as a form of bureaucratic control. These explanations are compelling, yet incomplete. This paper adopts an infrastructural lens to call attention to the fact of infrastructural demolition. I argue that the reduction of existing infrastructure to rubble is a way of clearing space for other kinds of infrastructure, specifically natural infrastructure, which has become central in the pursuit of ecological civilization. The creation of natural infrastructure requires calculative tools, which work to obscure the profoundly political nature of the natural infrastructure that they create through spatial zoning, ecological functional zoning and ecological conservation red lines (ECRLs). The article then scales down to two case studies of villages in post-earthquake Sichuan that are within ECRLs and designated for the function of providing ecosystem services. In both, infrastructure within scenic areas that was previously encouraged by the state and central to village livelihoods was suddenly destroyed following ecological civilization enforcement campaigns. The arrival of natural infrastructure marks a national-scale infrastructural time that promises a new future in which village-controlled scenic areas have no part, leading to a ruination of their imagined futures.

Bureaucratic control across enterprise boundaries: labor organization and the control of the online car-hailing platforms

This article shows that the online car-hailing platforms, supported by the digital technology of information matching, are more than some “flat” market organizations but are essentially bureaucratic organizations that are market-oriented and rely on business rules, digital technology, and third-party management institutions. By taking advantage of its monopolistic position, the car-hailing platform has built a bureaucratic control system with multilayer hierarchies in which various market players outside the enterprise participate. The platform first organizes production in a cooperative way by setting up external jobs, then guarantees that both drivers and leasing companies will follow the business rules and improve predictability. Finally, the platform uses digital technology and leasing companies to realize driver management and rule implementation.