Hierarchical Bureaucracy Research Articles

People: hearts and minds. The City of Mississauga, Canada

The City of Mississauga is located on the western boundary of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in Ontario, Canada. As a municipality it is undergoing rapid urban growth, pressure from citizens to keep the taxes down, political pressure to reorganize the surrounding municipal areas, rapidly changing technology, increasing competition for economic development and increasing demands for high level services from its citizens. This article will indicate how, in the face of the challenging demands of the '90s, the city is making a significant shift in the ‘culture’ of the organization. The City is moving from a traditional style of management emphasizing control to one that stresses leadership and empowerment of the workforce. It involves changing from a hierarchical bureaucracy to an organization that is more flexible, responsive, innovative and creative with a strong customer focus. To meet the demands of this shifting culture there needs to be a highly skilled workforce. There are a number of initiatives in the City to accomplish this ‘cultural shift’. This article deals with the continuous learning aspect called Capability Development, focusing on Team Effectiveness, Continuous Improvement and Customer Service. We developed two phases for the learning. Capability Development Phase I outlined the concepts and tools for managers at all levels to be able to support the learning required to accomplish the ‘cultural shift’. Phase I included the City Strategic Plan, Management Strategy and Human Resources Vision and practical management tools. Phase II was designed for front line staff working in their ‘intact teams’. It incorporates the concepts and tools from Phase I and is being delivered by trained volunteer facilitators within the City. We will discuss the process, the results and learnings we have discovered on our journey.

Company Culture and Men's Usage of Family Leave Benefits in Sweden

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gave some parents in the United States the right to stay home from work to care for babies or seriously ill children. Despite its limitations (the leave is short, unpaid, and only about one half of workers are covered), many individuals who approve of government support for individuals' managing work and family roles see the FMLA as a small step in the right direction. One interesting aspect of the new law is that men as well as women are entitled to take leave. Indeed, the FMLA seems to be the first U.S. law that has promoted the equal participation of men and women in child care. Few observers expect, however, that men will take great advantage of this new law. Many people believe that families cannot afford for fathers to stay home from work without pay, whereas others assume that men would not want to stay home to care for children because they see children as women's responsibility and gain more satisfaction from work than family. We think that these assumptions must be critically examined. It is not clear that families can better afford for mothers to stay home without pay than fathers, or that financial considerations always outweigh other concerns about family well-being. It is also not clear that men do not care to spend more time with children. Indeed, researchers have found that a majority of men consider their family role as more important than their work role, and many are concerned that they do not spend enough time with their children (Altergott, 1988; Gibbs, 1993; Jacobsen & Edmondson, 1993). Two studies of men's attitudes toward parental leave revealed that a majority felt they should have the right to take unpaid leave from work for child-care purposes (Hyde, Essex, & Horton, 1993; Shapiro, Patterson, Russell, & Young, 1987). A study of DuPont employees found that almost two thirds of the men wanted the opportunity to stay home with sick children and over half wanted the option of part-time work when their children were small (Efron, 1992). The greatest obstacles to men taking advantage of family leave may originate not in individual gender identities or family economics but in the gendered culture of work organizations. The purpose of this article is to assess how corporate culture--the assumptions, norms, expectations, and beliefs inherent in organizational policy, structure, and practice--may affect men's likelihood of becoming more actively involved in child care and using government-mandated family leave benefits. It is too early to examine this issue in the U.S. because the legislation is so recent. The setting chosen for this study is Sweden, a country that granted men family leave benefits as early as 1974. GENDER AND CORPORATE CULTURE Gender has been a fundamental aspect of work organizations in industrial societies. This aspect is manifested in several ways. There are links between the traditional male stereotype and values that historically have dominated organizations. Corporations emphasize rational communication and decision making, impersonality, hierarchical bureaucracy, analytical thinking, and toughness and aggressivity, while suppressing characteristics traditionally associated with women and family life, such as emotion, flexibility, collaborative problem-solving, praise, and positive feedback (Bowen & Orthner, 1991; Kanter, 1977; Mills, 1992; Morgan, 1986; Shepard, 1985). Women are often regarded as less suitable workers, particularly as managers, because they lack masculine qualities (Morgan, 1986). Tasks that are gendered outside of work--especially breadwinning and caring of children--are affirmed and recreated through organizational practices and ideology (Martin, 1992). Employers assume men are more responsible than women for family income provision and that participation in paid work is their primary life pursuit. It is expected that women, even if they are employed, will take on the major responsibility for home and children, freeing up husbands and fathers for employment (Bowen & Orthner, 1991; Martin, 1992). …

Sustaining third world infrastructure investments: Decentralization and alternative strategies

AbstractThe paper assesses the effectiveness of two institutional strategies, one centralized and the other decentralized, for sustaining infrastructure investments in the Third World and the organizations that have developed from them. It argues that each has been flawed. Institutional over‐centralization, involving a centrally directed and hierarchical bureaucracy is widely found to have been ineffective in undertaking complex tasks of rural development under conditions of uncertainty and severely limited resources. It has failed to secure beneficiary participation, adequate maintenance and utilization of infrastructure, administrative co‐ordination, responsiveness to local needs, as well as flexibility and adaptability. But decentralization has not been a widely successful solution. Decentralized planning, attempts to increase the role of beneficiaries in development projects, and localized training and organizational developments efforts have all produced disappointing results. There is a lack of theoretical understanding in this area. Human behaviour and relationships within organizations have been neglected. An alternative strategy, using the individual as the unit of analysis, is suggested. It requires ‘institutional analysis’ of the incentives and disincentives involved in getting people to perform specific tasks relating to specific goals.

Cahokia: The Political Capital of the “Ramey” State?

Cahokia, a prehistoric site in the American Midwest, had massive human sacrifice which shows that a small elite had control over the legitimate use of force, probably had political and economic classes, had a hierarchical bureaucracy, and had a settlement system of at least four decision-making levels. As such it was probably the capital of a society organized at a “state” level.

Administrative Control in Large-City School Systems: An Investigation in Chicago

Big-city school systems have been described as rigid, ponderous, hierarchical bureaucracies. They have also been called loosely coupled systems virtually out of control. Which are they-tight or loose? A study of Chicago principals reveals that the system does indeed exert powerful hierarchical control, but it does so not through a muscular apparatus of directives but rather through a not-so-subtle enforcement of loyalties, values, and unspoken expectations.

Organizing the poor

Piven and Cloward aimed to be provocative, but they did so by badly overstating their argument. They are too fair-minded to ignore completely the contribution and courage of organizers in these movements. In spite of their thesis, they pay occasional obeisance to movement organizers and exemplars. “There were nevertheless organizers in these [labor] struggles,” they acknowledge. “Some of these organizers were insurgents from the rank and file; others were radicals whose vision of an alternative future helped to account for their exemplary courage. Wherever these organizers came from, their vision helped goad workers into protest, and their courage gave workers heart and determination” (148). Nor can they ignore the role of organizational activists in the civil-rights movement. They seek exemption from the implications of this activity by noting that these organizations were not much concerned with building formal membership and were “cadre organizations.” But the idea of cadre organizations doesn't appear in the index, is introduced in an ad hoc manner to preserve their argument, and is never developed. In their account of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Piven and Cloward advocate a cadre organization, modelled on the successes of the civil-rights movement and of SCLC in particular (, 282–85). When Poor People's Movements goes from general thesis to specific case analysis, the argument becomes less provocative but more reasonable. Apparently, it is not every organization that discourages insurgency, aspires to create a mass membership and hierarchical bureaucracy, and is willing to sell its birthright for a mess of elite pottage. Some movement organizations' stimulate anger and defiance, and escalate the momentum of the people's protests. Some use their communication networks to spread disruptive forms of collective action and their organizational planning to chart strategy and timing, and to increase the effectiveness of collective action. Some institutionalize their dependence on their own constituency rather than come to rely on elite resources for survival. If some militant organizations later become tame and abandon their oppositional politics, other formerly docile organizations sometimes become centers of militancy - as the black churches and colleges did in the Southern civil rights movement. The intellectual task becomes the more exacting one of figuring out what types of organization are likely to facilitate insurgency or abandon their oppositional politics under different historical conditions. Poor People's Movements might be interpreted as providing one kind of answer to this question, an argument against mass-membership organizations. This is certainly a much less dramatic and provocative thesis. But in the end, an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of organization is a great deal more useful to students of social movements than the anti-organizational phillipic that the authors offer us.

Hierarchical resource allocation decisions

A model of resource allocations within a hierarchical bureaucracy is presented. Since at the departmental level programs of other departments overlap on certain objectives, allocations independently determined by departments are not optimal. It is well known that if only budgetary guidelines are transmitted by a central decision maker they are insufficient to assure desired allocations. A minimal set of guidelines exist which, when transmitted to departmental advisors, result in desired allocations.