Bureaucracy, Scientific Management and Informal

¶ … Bureaucracy, Scientific Management and Informal Organizations

The organizational concepts and resulting strategies of bureaucracies, scientific management and informal organization practices each contribute to the unique cultures criminal justice organizations develop over time. In addition, these three managerial concepts are continually changing within each of their own areas as well. This contributes to a constant state of change both within organizations that rely on these three managerial concepts, and significant changes occurring in the management concepts themselves. Synchronizing criminal justice organizations' broader objectives is discussed in this paper as is the origins of the three organizational concepts themselves. As each criminal justice organization is significantly different due to major differences in their people, processes, performance to objectives, and needs, there is no specific optimal mix of these three concepts across all justice organizations. Instead there needs to be a tailoring of these concepts to the specific strengths and weaknesses of each criminal justice organization of interest.

Origins of the Concepts

The origins of bureaucracy are first recorded during the Middle Ages when feudal kingdoms began to resemble modern-date states or nations. The use of bureaucracy was widely relied on for enforcing the specific laws and requirements of the ruling parties of a kingdom or state. The Catholic Church is considered to be one of the most powerful early bureaucracies both from a political and financial standpoint. In his many writing Max Weber defined bureaucracy in modern terms (Weber, 1946). His key tenets of bureaucracy include the following: that these organizational structures are in jurisdictional areas that are defined by specific rules and regulations; that regular activity of enforcement of policies by paid officials is necessary to bring order and continuity into the organizational structure; that the officials of a bureaucracy have the authority to give commands and have them obeyed is another aspect. Finally a bureaucracy is a lifetime employment endeavor where bureaucrats' progress form lesser-responsibility positions to increasingly higher profile and therefore higher levels of authority. Despite bureaucracy having a negative connotation today, Weber found it as critical for organizations to grow globally. Bureaucracy Scientific management, the second concept of the three covered in this paper, is attributed to the research and theories of Frederick Taylor (Taylor, 1911). Scientific management is also called Taylorism, and is considered the foundation of defining empirically based approaches to defining worker productivity.

Taylor's contribution to scientific management also centers on selecting the best possible worker for a job, training on the standardization of key tasks, and an implied belief that the higher the wages, the higher the productivity. Taylor is considered one of the major contributors to today's approach to business process improvement, an approach to streamlining processes in companies by first looking for wasted time in inefficient steps (Hammer, 2003). Michael Hammer's work in business process improvement and business process management is heavily influenced by Taylor's work on scientific management. Taylor also envisioned scientific management as being critical for measuring the performance of organizations by professional managers, not necessarily the owners of the enterprises. This is a critical foundation of modern management practices that nearly very organization relies on today.

Informal organizations are defined as the formal network that exists in a company outside of the firms' formal organizational structure (12Manage, 2007). The informal organization is also characterized by the complex of social interrelationships that habitually define patterns of collaboration and information sharing throughout any organization as well (12Manage, 2007). The collective research in informal organizations has within the last two years centered on social networking theory and the role of consumer-generated media including blogs and Wikis. Social theories of collaboration are forming the foundation of defining informal organizations.

Applying These Concepts in Organizations

Depending on the goals and objectives of organizations, it's culture and own balance of bureaucracy, scientific management and the strength of its informal organization. In choosing which approach works best in general however, there needs to be a minimal level of bureaucracy to ensure employees have a high level of ownership in their jobs. The use of scientific management is critical to allow employees to measure their contributions. Giving employees and associates the opportunity to measure their contributions over time is one of the most powerful motivators there are. The synthesis of scientific management and informal organizations can serve as the catalyst for lasting change and high performance within organizations over time. Bureaucracy and its implied top-down control over activities needs to be avoided. Today's organizations thrive on ownership and informal organizational flow of information, not on hierarchical organizational structures.

In terms of using these three concepts within a critical justice organization, the need for infusing ownership and accountability throughout the informal organization just as much in the formal one is critical. The use of scientific management approaches to allowing employees to have a say in the metrics that are used for managing them and how they are calculated further increases ownership in tasks and job roles. Bureaucracy and its definition of formal roles does have a place in criminal justice organizations, yet the agility necessary to bring both relevant measures of performance through scientific management, and the infusion of ownership possible using informal organizations also must be used. In short, all three aspects of organizations needs to be synchronized with one another to ensure the highest level of organizational performance is achieved.