Bureaucratic organizations, whether of the corporate or the government variety, are very much based on formal rationality, their hierarchically ranked offices filled by officers of narrow specialty and authority guided in their decision making and actions by rules and precedent. Wright Mills tried a different course.
He asserts that by their participation in bureaucratic organizations individuals lose their ability to control their own actions and are forced to submit to the rational rules of the organization.
The individual is thereby guided not by her conscious reason—with all its attendant human emotions, social traditions, and conflicting values—but rather by the prescribed rationalized rules and procedures of the organization itself. There is then rationality without reason. This middle-course of using colloquial English terms seems valuable to me, but I do not think Mills chose his terminology wisely.
I suggest that formal rationality is better translated into English as technocratic thinking , substantive rationality as critical thinking. Further, Weber maintained that even though a bureaucracy is highly rational in the formal sense of technical efficiency, it does not follow that it is also rational in the substantive sense of the moral acceptability of its goals or the means used to achieve them.
Nor does an exclusive focus on the goals of the organization necessarily coincide with the broader goals of society as a whole. It often happens that the single-minded pursuit of practical goals can actually undermine the foundations of the organization or even of the social order. What is good for the bureaucracy in the short-term is not always good for the society as a whole--and often, in the long term, is not good for the bureaucracy either.
As bureaucracy grows in power and scope around us, as the social world becomes ever more rationalized, that is as formal rationalization becomes more prevalent, substantive rationality takes less and less of a role in human affairs.
Higher education is fond of claiming that one of its major goals is teaching critical thinking. But c ritical thinking is tough to define—one of those qualities that you may know when you see it but difficult to put into words.
I once had to attend a workshop on critical thinking at my previous university. They brought in a big-name philosophy professor from Vanderbilt University to run the workshop on a Saturday, and mandated that all faculty show up for the services. The professor was giving several definitions of critical thinking, none of which I really under stood he was a philosopher, after all. The picker was designed to cut tomato vines, shake the tomatoes loose, spray wash them, place them on a conveyor belt where the poorer quality tomatoes would be removed by hand and then the conveyor belt would drop them into a wagon that followed.
However, there was a problem: to clear the machine the tomato had to withstand an impact of 15 miles an hour into the wagon. They tried several adjustments to the machine but just could not solve the problem.
Finally, the Vanderbilt professor said, a critical thinker came along with the solution: he developed a tomato that could withstand a 15 mile an hour impact. Since that time I have done a little research on the issue and found that the Vanderbilt professor made several errors. First off, it was not a tomato picker, the correct name is tomato harvester—though I still use the term picker because that is how I have come to think of it.
He was also in error in that it was not simple problem solving, but a series of problem solving steps. To accommodate the mechanical picker the technologists not only had to develop a tomato that could withstand a 15 mile and hour impact, but it also had to be resistant to bruising. As traditional fields were harvested by hand several times as they ripened, all the tomatoes in the field to be picked mechanically had to ripen at about the same time as the machine cut the vines below the ground and would kill the plant with the harvest.
As it is not easy to shake a traditional tomato from its vine the technologists had to develop a variety that could easily be shaken loose.
For fresh tomatoes, rather than those used for canning or sauces, there were additional problems. Because they were to be shipped all over the country from California, they had to be picked green and then gassed in the packing plant so as to turn red during shipping.
It should also be pointed out that all this problem solving created additional problems for people as well. Because mechanical pickers replaced a lot of manual labor, thousands lost their jobs. Because the machine required large fields and economies of scale to own and operate a mechanical tomato picker, many growers had to sell out or go under. Finally, because California could now supply fresh tomatoes year round for millions of people, the growers entered into long-term contracts with grocery stores throughout the country, thus creating national producers and closing markets for local producers who could only supply tomatoes in season.
In other words, simple problem-solving without placing this problem solving in the context of the whole, led to the production of year round tomatoes that have sacrificed a large number of farmers and workers, destroyed many local markets, and sacrificed the tenderness and taste of the tomato itself. Other than that, it has been a complete success. While problem solving is invaluable, it must be done in a context of values, traditions, and emotions.
Critical thinking attempts to analyze situations and solve problems within the context of the whole, within the context of the system. Critical thinking is not really something parents, educators, or religious leaders can teach directly, it has to be modeled, encouraged, and developed over time and experience. However, critical thinking is not conducive to the smooth operation of bureaucracies and is therefore not widespread in hyper-industrial societies.
Wendell Berry illustrates how the pursuit of technocratic rationality can often undermine the very goals of the bureaucracy itself.
American agriculture, Berry writes, has become an extractive industry in which values of productivity and profit have replaced maintenance and care for the land and animals. Farms have progressively become rationalized operations throughout the 20 th century. In crop production this rationalization include s a high degree of specialization of farms to the production of a single crop; the use of oversized and ever more specialized mechanical equipment that till, sow, irrigate, and harvest thousands of acres of land; the application of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides to increase productivity; the use of large amounts of water for irrigation; the scientific manipulation of seeds for their resistance against disease and pests and attributes that will increase yield as well as the profits of the seed companies themselves.
Their marketing and widespread use worldwide would make farmers even more dependent upon agribusiness. In the last 30 or 40 years rationalization of the farm has been extended into the area of animal husbandry in which animals are specially bred for desirable characteristics such as rapid maturity, heavy weight and large breasts on turkeys and chickens, or resistance to disease and pests.
Raised in large concentrations—chicken sheds, intensive piggeries, and cattle feedlots containing thousands—the process is aided by mechanized feeding and waste removal, as well as the liberal administration of drugs to prevent the spread of disease. Further rationalization of agricultural practices can be expected as genetic engineering continues to advance.
This rationalization of agriculture has been done at the expense of farm families and their communities, as well as the wider society. Based on huge amounts of capital for machinery, land, chemicals, seeds, and fuel, industrial agri culture promotes the growing concentration of farmland in order to achieve economies of scale.
These attempt to describe, explain, or understand the world in terms of models that are constructed from observation and reasoning. These forms of rationality need not be associated with social action but are more a part of logical structures and theory. Substantive rationality. Individuals might consider a range of possible values or actions, and attempting to make them consistent.
Weber termed this substantive rationality and considered it problematic in modern society in that rationalization of social life makes it difficult for people to pursue particular values.
For example, pursuit of family or religious values may be difficult in modern society, given economic pressures and dominance of bureaucratic organizations. Formal rationality is a broader form of rationality that characterizes organizations, especially bureaucratic ones.
This leads to "universally applied rules, laws and regulations that characterize formal rationality in the West Rational-legal forms of authority such as the contemporary legal and judicial systems are examples of formal rationality.
Weber notes that formal rationality developed as capitalistic forms of organizations emerged and its expansion is associated with the development of formal organizations and methods. This formal rationality, and the organizational features associated with them, tend to crowd out other forms of rationality and limit the possibilities of creative social action.
Weber argues that capitalism is a rational system in the sense of being calculating, efficient, reducing uncertainty, increasing predictability, and using increasing amounts of non-human technologies. Accompanying the development of capitalism has been a decline of magic and religion, and there has been increased secularization. Weber notes that there are several preconditions that must be established before capitalist methods can become dominant.
In order for capitalism to work, it is necessary to have a means by which a balance can be created, where various possible alternative lines of action can be considered, and where decisions can be made concerning how to organize production so that the balance at the end exceeds the balance at the beginning.
Weber lists six factors that he considers essential to the development of capitalist techniques see Hadden, p. Note how each of these can be connected to the development of formal rationality. The appropriation of all physical means of production as disposable property. This provides the possibility that the resources necessary for production can be bought and sold on a market. Where land or resources are not available as private property, or where they are subject to traditional uses, it is not possible to compute the costs of production.
In earlier societies land may have been held in common or by feudal lords, making them unavailable for capital accumulation, thus retarding the development of capitalism. Market Freedom. Limits to the development of markets, such as traditional rights and barriers to trade, restricted the possibility of the development of capitalistic methods, and limited their application geographically. Chances for expansion and a wider development of trade and markets are thwarted. Weber notes how status groups or class monopolies may result in such restrictions.
Rational Technology. Mechanization and other forms of rational technology allow methods to be more efficiently organized and costs to be reasonably accurately computed. Where handicraft and other traditional forms of production dominate, costs of production vary and predicting profits is difficult. In these circumstances, conditions of production may be different from region to region and this can retard the application of uniform methods. Calculable Law. This means fewer arbitrary rules and laws which can be applied to some and not to others, with limited special favours.
This permits for the administration of law and justice to be understood and implies fewer arbitrary or unforeseen developments. Free Labour Markets. These permit employers to obtain the labour required for enterprises and they also mean that labour costs can be reasonably accurately determined. That is, the employer makes an agreement before the production process, concerning how much is to be paid for how much labour, and has some certainty concerning what will be produced from this labour.
While Weber notes that the whip of hunger may be essential for this, "rational capitalistic calculation is possible only on the basis of free labour" Giddens and Held, p.
Commercialization of Economic Life. This is a development which allows capitalistic methods to be pursued on a more widespread basis using economic means such bonds, shares, finance, banking, and stock markets. These permit capital to be more mobile and allow owners of capital to pursue maximum profits in any commercialized area.
This leads to the progress of capital in all areas of economic life, and promotes the development of market mechanisms. In order for the modern corporate form to emerge and become dominant, these features had to become well developed. Capitalistic enterprises initially begin as businesses under individual or family control but there is a strong tendency to develop a bureaucratic form of management in order for the company to continue past the lifetime of the individual entrepreneur and survive in competitive markets.
The separation of ownership from management developed in most corporations, and this separation promotes the increased rationality of the capitalistic corporation. In summary, Weber had mixed view on the development of capitalism and western forms of formal rationality.
One the one hand, they created the possibility for the development of modern, western society, with its wealth and efficient forms of economic and social organization. The development of formal rationality was necessary for modern economic life and corporate organization to emerge and become successful. At the same time, Weber feared that formal rationality, associated with organizations, bureaucrats, and capitalists would come to dominate in Western society.
The autonomous and free individual, one whose actions had continuity by reference to ultimate values, would be less able to exercise his or her substantive rationality Ritzer, p. Many areas of life and social action, as well as organizations, would become dominated by rationality and rationalism, according to Weber. Whether this would also create a rational society as a whole is not so clear.
The irrationality of the market, and the unplanned nature of social organization may mean that there is no tendency toward overall rationality. It may have been that Weber hoped that there would be enough different sectors of life that were not tied together by an overall rationality, that formal rationality would not govern the whole system.
Charismatic individuals, social movements, and forms of countervailing power are approaches that Weber might have encouraged. Perhaps such a rationality would emerge in a socialist system, as both the economy and society became more and more under the control of the same authority.
Weber looked on this rationality as further reducing human freedom. The official would increasingly be able to exercise legal authority in a wide range of areas. One major type of organization that has emerged in modern, western society has been bureaucracy or bureaucratic administration.
This is the primary way that rational-legal authority has developed in formal organizations. The dominance of bureaucratic organizations in modern society shows the effectiveness of formal rationality as a way of organizing society.
Hadden notes that "bureaucratic administration is generally capable … of efficiency, precision, and fairness" p. The ideal type of formal bureaucracy has a continuous and hierarchical organization of official functions or offices, with rules that govern each postions and relationships in the organization.
Ten characteristics are associated such an ideal type Hadden, p. Personally Free. People in such an organization are not bound to others in a servant-master, slave-master, or family relationship.
Offices or positions within the bureaucracy are organized into a hierarchical system, where some have more power than others. But the power is associated with the position, not the individual.
Clearly Defined Sphere of Competence. The office or position carries with it a set of obligations to perform various duties, the authority to carry out these duties, and the means of compulsion required to do the job. Office Contractual. Positions are not associated with particular people who have inherent rights to them, but are associated with a particular contract governing duties, expectations, rights, and other conditions associated with doing the job.
Technical Qualifications. The offices may carry with them technical qualifications that require that the participants obtain suitable training. Selection and promotion is on the basis of ability to perform the technical requirements of the job.
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