In the late 1940s, a research team led by Alvin Gouldner descended upon a gypsum factory that included both gypsum mining operations and the manufacture of sheet rock. Their aim was to study the factory via ethnography to examine the applicability of Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy. What Gouldner found was a series of patterns by which bureaucratic rules formed – some rules being more widely accepted and adopted than others. The study would be published in 1954 as Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, the first of two related volumes (more on the second one later).

Gouldner’s work is remarkable in that it tells a story of how the factory evolved after a significant succession of leadership, from the venerable and lenient “Old Doug” to the strict and insecure “Vincent Peele”—all names are fictitious—who was emplaced by senior management to step up production. Peele’s actions and pressures he was under led to a significant change in the working climate, from one characterized as exhibiting an “indulgency pattern” where workers were provided freedom and forgiven for various transgressions of the rules to a much more intense bureaucratized environment with little freedom or forgiveness.

The results of the study focused on the emergence of three patterns of bureaucratic rules differentiated by how much workers and management accepted and abided by them. The mock bureaucracy represented rules that neither side accepted nor followed, usually because they were imposed from higher and held no meaning within the organization. Representative bureaucracy was the opposite, rules that both management and workers found to be very meaningful and compliance was expected and enforced culturally, with the need for supervision. But the most troubling case was the punishment-centered bureaucracy where one side was imposing its will on the other – management imposing rules to force compliance by workers, or workers imposing their will on a reticent management.

As we discussed the book, we found that the patterns Gouldner identified still have relevance for the present day. How well do they align with the bureaucratic rules in your organization?

Read with us:

Gouldner, A. (1954). Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. New York: Free Press.

To Learn More:

Alt, J. (1981). Alvin W. Gouldner (1920-1980). Telos, 1981(47),198-203.

Blau, P. M. (1963). The Dynamics of Bureaucracy: A Study of Interpersonal Relations in Two Government Agencies. University of Chicago Press.

Burawoy, M. (1982). The written and the repressed in Gouldner’s industrial sociology. Theory and Society, 11(6), 831-851.

Chriss, J.J. (2001). Alvin W. Gouldner and industrial sociology at Columbia University. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 37(3),241-259.

Gouldner, A. (1954b). Wildcat Strike: A Study in Worker-Management Relations. Yellow Springs, OH: The Antioch Press.

Hallett, T. & Ventresca, M. J. (2006). How Institutions Form: Loose coupling as mechanism in Gouldner’s patterns of industrial bureaucracy. American Behavioral Scientist, 49(7), 908-924.

Hallett, T. & Ventresca, M. J. (2006). Inhabited institutions: Social interactions and organizational forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory and society, 35(2), 213-236.

Haveman, H. A. (2010). The Columbia School and the Study of Bureaucracies. In The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies.

Kunda, G. (2006). Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation. Temple University Press.

Merton, R. K. (1947). Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe: Free Press.

Selznick, P. (1949). TVA and the Grass Roots. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Turco, C. J. (2016). The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media. Columbia University Press.

Other Talking About Organizations Podcast episodes referenced:

Episode 6. Bureaucracy — Max Weber

Episode 49. Engineered Culture and Normative Control – Gideon Kunda

Episode 61. Power & Influence in Organizations — Dan Brass