Total bureaucratisation, neo-liberalism, and Weberian oligarchy

David Graeber’s book on rules and bureaucracy examines the topic from a refreshing standpoint. Much management literature, since at least Bennis (1965), has made the claim that bureaucracy and competitive markets and/or change are somehow incompatible. The world needs to be post-bureaucratic – ‘bureaucracy must die’ (Hamel, 2014), organizations must be more entrepreneurial (Drucker, 1984). These are the refrains we hear – if we are to survive and grow, creativity must be unleashed from the shackles of bureaucracy. A dominant neo-liberal motif has been to burn red tape – most recently one thinks of David Cameron’s demands of the EU wherein if British membership is to continue, red tape (and perhaps reds) is to be burned – those dynamic commercial Brits taking on the sclerosis of bureaucratic Europe on our behalf. In reply, management scholars opposing such a position argue that bureaucracy and its rules protect us from unethical behaviour, arbitrary power, anti-democratic forces, and so on. Bureaucracy here equates with rational-legal authority and the rule of law. It may not be perfect but it at least defends the weak and the infirm, e.g. Du Gay’s (2013) defence of bureaucracy as more ethical than post-bureaucracy. Building on Hennis (1988), Du Gay argues that the father of bureaucracy, Max Weber, sought to find a way through which personality would allow an individual to live ephemera: theory & politics in organization 16(1): 179-191 180 | review ethically. The entrepreneurial or post-bureaucratic firm undermines such an ethic by encouraging an arbitrariness more closely associated with charismatic or traditional rule. Indeed, neo-liberalism itself is in the dock because it undermines ethics and subsumes life to something like Weber’s instrumental rationality (see Gane, 2014 – although importantly Weber [1975: 33] argued that the heuristic device of the ideal type known as rational economic man was an ‘approximation’ that was becoming more and more a reality as institutions altered to act as though it were true). Here, in my crude summary, bureaucracy, ethics, and Weber line up against post-bureaucracy, ethically neutral instrumental rationality and neo-liberalis