"The conception of government as the machinery that guarantees the execution of the monarch’s utterance was now reshaped into one that prepares texts for the monarch’s signature. The state governed by the management of texts - that is, the modern bureaucratic state - was taking shape." [ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (Marion Boyers, 1988) Penguin ed pp 65-66]
Bruno Latour
"The prime job of the bureaucrat, according to Latour, is to compile lists that can then be shuffled and compared." [Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out (MIT Press 1999) p 137]
Lewis Mumford
"The impersonal, bureaucratic order of the counting house vied with monastic and military order in laying the foundations for the inflexible discipline and impersonal regularity that has now gradually extended itself to every aspect of institutional life in Western civilization. This order has been smoothly translated into automatic machines and computers, even more incapable of exercising humane judgement and discretion than a trained clerk. The new bureaucracy devoted to managerial organization and coordination again became a necessary adjunct to all large-scale, long-distance enterprises: book-keeping and record-keeping set the pace, in standardized uniformity, for all the other parts of the machine. The failure to reckon with this mathematical aspect of mechanization, as a prelude to industrial inventions, has resulted in a warped and one-sided picture of modern technics. This account gives to specific tools and machines by themselves the priority in effecting changes that first took place in the human mind and were translated later into institutions and mechanisms." [Myth of the Machine, 1967, pp 278-9]
"Precisely at a time when the expansion of bureaucratic methods in business and government, and the expansion of large-scale manufacture were making the whole routine of practical activity an ever deadlier grind, Protestantism developed a special faculty for getting pleasure out of that grind. ... Drudgery served the Protestant as a valuable mortification of the flesh: valuable in a worldly as well as a spiritual sense, for unlike the hair shirts and self-whippings of the mediaeval saint, his unflagging concentration on dull work brought tangible profits." [Condition of Man, p 199]
Slavoj Zizek
"A French businesswoman was recently summoned to the Prefecture because - as the official letter of invitation claimed - she had lost her carte vitale (the French health smart card). In fact, she had not lost it; so when, after waiting for over two hours, she got to the front of the queue and produced her card as proof that she had not lost it, the bureaucrat who was dealing with her said: 'But the computer says you have lost is, so the one you have now is no longer valid - you'll have to hand it in to be destroyed, and then ask for a new one!' If there was ever such a thing as an ethic of bureaucracy, this is an example of it." [Revolution at the Gates (Verso 2002) p 185]
Originally posted at http://www.veryard.com/orgmgt/bureaucracy.htm
Updated 11 July 2019
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