Colossal Immodesties and Hopeful Monsters: Pluralism and Organizational Conduct

Abstract

This paper problematizes a particular story of organizational transformation currently circulating within organization studies. In this story a chain of equivalences emerges in which the vicissitudes of contemporary 'environmental change' make certain forms of organizational conduct redundant while at the same time bringing novel forms into being. The old and the new can even be named. The former is represented by the hierarchicallyordered bureaucracy-often described as the epitome of 'modern' organization-and the latter by the entrepreneurial corporation-often imagined as typifying 'postmodern' organization. According to proponents of this story the ascendance of the new entrepreneurialism is a cause for celebration as it offers hopeful ways of living with difference and promoting pluralism in contrast to the bureaucratic practice of excluding or nullifying difference and suppressing pluralism. The paper sets out to challenge this 'just so' story of organizational transformation by indicating that under certain circumstances and in certain domains it is bureaucratic norms of organizational conduct that protect and enhance pluralism. Instead of agreeing with the representation of the impersonal, procedural and hierarchical character of bureaucracy as a symptom of moral deficiency, the paper argues that the bureau be assessed in its own right as a crucial ethical andpolitical resource of liberal democratic regimes. In so doing the paper seeks to restore to the bureau some of the ethical and political gravity imputed to it by Max Weber.

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