Bureaucracy Re-Enchanted? Spirit, Experts and Authority In

Bureaucracy Re-enchanted? Spirit, Experts and Authority in Organizations articles Catherine Casey School of Business and Economics, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract. Bureaucracy is challenged and examined from almost all quarters in organizational analysis. As part of wide debate over postmodern cultural theorizations there is now much debate over the viability and retention of bureaucratic forms of organization. It is often argued that bureaucracies have been displaced by more rapid-response entrepreneurial and strategic conﬁgurations. Yet we can observe examples of bureaucracy that deliberately select, repress, discard or restore elements of bureaucratic norms and values. This article proposes that there is emergent evidence of a raft of new activities occurring in contemporary bureaucratic organizations, which challenge our conceptions of bureaucratic organization. The article draws attention to some unconventional practices, many of which involve the invocation of alternative sources of authority and legitimacy. It raises questions for the implications of an apparently counter-rational, counter-bureaucratic, re-enchantment impulse. The analytic, interpretive exploration of these questions draws bureaucratic organization back into society and social analysis. Key words. bureaucracy; contested authority; counter-rationalities; expressivism; society

Bureaucracy as an eminent ediﬁce of rationalizing modernity endures. Defended by some, reviled by others and widely relied on by most to keep the myriad practical matters of everyday life routinely running, bureaucracy seems to be a social accomplishment regarded with ineluct- able ambivalence. Bureaucracy is challenged and examined from almost

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Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Organization 11(1) Articles all quarters in organizational analysis, and regularly tested and negoti- ated by practitioners within bureaucratic organizations and consumers alike. In the classical Weberian view, modern bureaucratic production and administrative organizations manifest in their everyday processes and enactments the forms of rationalization and secularization characteristic of societal modernization. The modern bureaucratic organization epitom- izes the systematic, methodical, rational-legal instrumentality of industrial society. Its central task is to stand steadfast against contrary forces of unreason, disorder and disorganization. But profound changes in the social institutions of work and production in recent decades include contestations to the institutionalized practices and assumptions of modernity and modern bureaucratic organization. As well as wide debate over postmodern cultural theorizations and other social critiques of modernity there is now much debate over the viability and retention of bureaucratic forms of organization. Indeed, it is often argued that bureaucracies have been displaced by more rapid-response entrepreneurial and strategic configurations thriving, it is said, not on order but on chaos. Technological developments (especially in electronic communications, financial systems and e-commerce), changes in societal practices, (significantly the rise of networks of markets, neo-liberalism and communalism) and new theories of knowledge, notably those arising out of critiques of Enlightenment thought such as postmodernism and complexity theory, have, many argue, surpassed modern notions of organization, authority and rationality. Yet at the same time we can observe examples of bureaucracy practised on a range from its classically conventional forms, to hybridized functional forms, and to strategically adaptive forms (as Crozier predicted) which select, repress, discard or restore elements of bureaucratic norms and values on strategic occasions. Among the many representations of and challenges to bureaucratic forms of organization, a raft of new activities which our Weberian-derived conceptions of bureaucratic organization find unexpected are evident. As a consequence, in part, of detraditionalization and institutional decline, as well as modern societal rationalization, a heightened individualism in the West fuels a number of counter-institutional impulses. Among them is a disillusionment with monological rationality and a growing current of interest in alternatives to rationalization and disenchantment. These trends have important implications for bureaucracies as systems of rational power and authority. Organization studies is long familiar with critiques of bureaucracy from critical sociological and liberal managerial perspectives. But despite much discussion and promotion of organizational change and bureaucratic reform in recent decades, the reforms have resulted in an intensification of modern organizational rationalities rather than their transformation. A corresponding increase in the fallout of this 60

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Bureaucracy Re-enchanted? Catherine Casey intensiﬁcation presents in increased cynicism, ethical erosion and neurotic over-adaptation. Through the 1990s these outcomes led many organization analysts to think in terms of a critical defeatedness—an acceptance, for many, of a postmodern dissolution of the acting subject. Some retained a Marxist interest in resistance but many accepted a Foucauldian shift to identity as remnant, incorporated, resistance. Still others celebrated a strategic entrepreneurialism of homo economicus in a marketized society. Common to each of these differing perspectives is an inattention to criticism and contestation of rational bureaucratic organization expressed through neither intellectual nor political means. In this article I draw analytic attention to some unconventional practices now being experimentally explored in organizations in Western countries. In addition to, if not contrary to, the instrumental rational intentionality of bureaucratic organizational process and production activity, an apparently growing number of employees and managers pursues counter-rational interests, individualistic intentions and altered career trajectories. These interests, which de-privilege homo economicus, include diverse individual pursuits of spirituality and mystical experience. Importantly, they involve the invocation of alternative sources of authority and legitimacy, including, controversially, among some employees, invocations of traditional authority from communalist and ethnic identity sources. Discussion of the latter trend, perhaps more evident in post-colonial Western countries, is deferred in this article. Of the two particular trends in unconventional challenges to bureaucratic organization I focus here on what are called, for want of a better term, ‘New Age’1 explorations among organizational employees—including once conventional bureaucrats and technical experts. These explorations include various experiential activities in spirituality, soul-seeking, meditation, mysticism, divination, mind/body therapies, and Eastern religious traditions and practices of yoga, feng shui, and so forth. There is evidence that many seekers of a contemporary spirituality are demanding an outer expression of their inner experiential discoveries—in both new rituals and altered social practices—against those conventionally practised. They present, for instance, demands for ‘spirituality at work’ and demands for greater ethical correspondence between an inner world and the outer world. As well as individuals (defying Weber) openly pursuing these activities in their workplaces many corporations (for example, IBM, Apple, NYNEX, Ford, Telecom, Deloitte and Touche) support and encourage staff participation in various programmes of ‘spirituality at work’. A proliferation of literature, seminars and conferences on these matters is widely available to managers, employees and MBA students in the West. These activities raise a plethora of questions. Are these activities signs of a widening institutional crisis evident even in administrative and economic bureaucratic organizations? What are the implications of this apparently counter-rational, counter-bureaucratic, 61

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desecularizing impulse? Does the organizational response indicate the strategic, entrepreneurial, counter-social turn in organizations in which, as part of a market displacement of society, a heightened individualism among professional and elite employees poses new demands on organizations? Or does a spectre of Weber surround these efforts to re-enchant bureaucracy? Are bureaucratic organizations, in tolerating or encouraging these unconventional at-work pursuits, responding to a deep crisis of their own making in exclusively privileging an intensiﬁed, singular modern instrumental rationality? Have the disenchanted, dispirited managerial and technical expert employees defected, or might they be accommodated in a revised bureaucracy? The analytic exploration of these questions in this interpretive article draws bureaucratic organization back into society, and social analysis. In considering whether bureaucracy might accommodate contestation from heightened or idiosyncratic individualism, and from desecularist and communalist authorities as competing rationalities at work, the article considers the bureaucratic crisis as part of a wider crisis of modernity. The ﬁnal section draws on the work of Alain Touraine (1995), and it considers these activities as signs of ‘actor-subjects’, which may indicate a regenerative and revitalized social and organizational practice or a regressive communalism. It is pertinent at this point to reconsider our widely held understandings of authority and bureaucracy.

Authority and Bureaucracy Weber’s theory of bureaucracy, elaborated most fully in Economy and Society (1978 [1922]), developed out of a general theory of power and domination. Domination is a special type of power relation in which the ruler believes he has the right to exercise the power of his own will, and the ruled believe that it is their unquestioning duty to obey the demands of the rulers and their administrative class. Out of Weber’s typology of three ideal types of domination—charismatic, traditional and rational- legal—Weber singularly emphasized the rational-legal type as the legitimate authority within bureaucratic organizations. Indeed, its pres- ence is a deﬁning characteristic of bureaucracy. The rational-legal rules structure the hierarchy of the organization and impersonally separate the rules from the person administering them. Both sides of the ruling relationship recognize the legitimacy of the procedures of conduct established within a rational-legal framework. Legitimate action is strictly deﬁned by the rational-legal framework, and neither rulers, adminis- trators nor clients can exercise legitimate power outside it. For Weber, the modern organization differed from previous and other forms of organization precisely because of its rationalization of authority and legality. The rational-legal bureaucrat was similarly characterized by technical and professional expertise, and by (ostensibly) a non-partisan cosmopolitanism. Impersonality, strict adherence to the rational-legal 62

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Bureaucracy Re-enchanted? Catherine Casey rules, and even-handed treatment of staff and clients are fundamental features of bureaucratic human behaviour. This, for Weber, ‘is the spirit in which the ideal ofﬁcial conducts his ofﬁce’ (Weber [1922] 1978: 225). Of course, these features were always those of an ideal type, and variability in their practice is readily evidenced. Weber reminded

. . . that it should be kept clearly in mind that the basis of every authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, . . . The composition of this belief is seldom altogether simple. In the case of ‘legal authority’, it is never purely legal . . . it is partly traditional. (Weber [1922] 1978: 263 [emphasis added])

The enduring relevance of Weber’s brilliant insight is perhaps less often recalled in preference for a prevailing emphasis on rationality and formal knowledge: ‘bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. This is the feature which makes it specifically rational.’ (Weber [1922] 1978: 225). Theorists of organization after Weber, initially Parsons and Merton, in the mid-20th century favoured a functionalist sociology of organizations in which Weber’s rational actors are seen as behaving within a greater societal complex of functional social system. Functionalist sociology of organizations described organizations, whether pursuing economic, administrative or social goals, as applications of instrumental rationality. Functional imperatives and rules could establish a correspondence, as Parsons and Merton elaborately argued, between organic system needs and individual and collective roles and behaviour. A grand edifice of evolutionary rationalization is erected in this overarching functionalist schema. But in a disruption to that widely held view the work of theorists such as Herbert Simon, James March, Michael Crozier and Alain Touraine revealed that organizations in practice do not exhibit a central principle of rationality, which both functionalism and classical sociology assume. On the contrary, organizations are really fragile, unstable and weakly coherent sets of social relations. Any organization is an ensemble of conflicts and adjustments between constantly challenging pressures and constraints. An efficient organization is not one in which stability and ordered functioning prevails, as functionalism holds, but one in which complexity, conflict, constant change and uncertainty are more or less managed or in which compromise is reached. Simon’s ([1945] 1976) notion of ‘bounded rationality’ and Crozier’s (1964) emphasis on power as the central problem of organization analysis launched a new emphasis on the management of uncertainty. These notions, which in the 1960s became associated with ‘contingency theory’ in organization theory, emphasize the strategic movement between competing forces. A notion of a central, unified and total governing rationality—notwithstanding its widespread presumption—must be rescinded. The logic of domination unfolding through mechanisms of repression and exploitation which 63

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Marxist and neo-Marxist criticism of bureaucratic organizations emphasized is, or might be, thoroughly interrupted. The idea of modernity as progressive rationalization, and of bureaucracy as its practical epitomy, is considerably challenged by these views. These observations of ‘bounded rationality’ and weak, always contingent coherence, open up possibilities for organized relationships to be practised according to different value stakes and towards different ends. Organizations, though privileging an instrumental rationality and bureaucratic control, can now be seen as relationships produced and challenged by human actors in the relations of production, a view long proposed by Alain Touraine (1972, 1988). Yet, ironically, despite the considerable disruption to system theories and classical notions underpinning management theory posed by these theories, stronger views, whether those of Parsonian-influenced functionalism or Marxist-influenced structuralism, prevailed. Although functionalism has been theoretically surpassed, its normative appeal endures. More commonly held now is a preference for a less troubling hybrid view in which functional systems, including bureaucracies, are upheld as desirable and achievable, and managers and experts act as agent in determining and maintaining the structures, roles and goals of organizations. Neo-rationalist theory in organization and management studies and practice emphasizes, above all, the notion of strategy. This approach endeavours to strategically integrate functionalist imperatives towards rational order and behaviour, and simultaneously to manage innovation and change while firmly directed towards the accomplishment of rational goals. Neo-rational strategic organization theory and management practice recognize that instability, uncertainty and disintegration portend at any moment, but the rational organizational managerial actor must pre- vail. Moreover, despite the dynamism and contingency recognized by strategic management, the assumptions and conventions of rational-legal bureaucratic authority, in which subordinates and superordinates accept and reproduce the rational rules and procedures, are firmly upheld.

Rational Contestation Expected forms of contestation to bureaucracy have more overtly taken the form of protestation and some resistance to the bureaucratic logic of domination and repression from Marxist-inﬂuenced trade unions and workers’ groups. As well, some professional contestation over professional expert knowledge and authority against bureaucratic ofﬁcials and bureaucratic circumscription of expertise remains evident in contemporary organizations. Although the early workers’ movement opposition to bureaucratic domination initially included opposition to the singular rationality of capitalist production and management, the even- tual rationalization of their movement largely ensured their opposition took a rational form. Both the workers’ and professionals’ opposition to 64

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bureaucratic rationalization and expert culture displayed not a counter- rationality but at best a reasoned delimitation of, and accommodation to, its pervasiveness. Philosophical irrationalism and the competing meaning-making systems of religion, affectivity and sensuality, which Weber recognized as socially operative, continued to play an inﬂuential role, but modern capitalist society favoured only the economic and instrumental forms of rationalization, and insisted on the subordination or incorporation of traditional or contrary rationalities. More recently, notably since the 1990s, a rise of a counter-modern rationality, which is not simply that of a neo-traditional or romantic form, in the form of a heightened individualist expressivism has emerged. The rise of individualist expressivism poses, in part, an opposition to the modern institutions of rationalization. A deregulated marketization, as successor to both bureaucratic organization and societal participation, also indicates a turn away from forms of rationality privileged in modernity. Under these turbulent conditions of institutional crisis, an organizational response to the turn toward heightened individualist expressivism has sparked unusual initiatives in strategically promoting, and accommodating, spiritual and sensual sympathies and expressivism. I discuss these organizational responses later, but I ﬁrst provide some illustrations of a turn to some unconventional practices being assertively pursued by many formally educated, highly skilled, bureaucratically disciplined white-collar employees.

Counter-rational Contestation: Spirituality at Work In quintessentially modern organizations one’s adherence to a religious tradition or sensibility, once again as Weber observed, is relegated to private life and is ofﬁcially omitted or denied effectivity in the prevailing rational practices of bureaucratic and professional work. For Weber, societal rationalization encompassed secularization—a process of disper- sion of religion and its meaning-making repository into a private realm of individual need and choice. Weber’s views on this were scarcely unequivocal. Indeed, his prognosis is succinctly expressed in his renowned lecture, ‘Science as a Vocation’: The fate of our age, with its characteristic rationalization and intellectual- ization, and above all the disenchantment of the world, is that the ultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life, either into the transcendental realm of mystical life or into the brotherhood of immediate personal relationships between individuals. (Weber [1918] 1989: 30) Weber, already anticipating the crisis of hyper-rationalization, foresaw a turn to meaning-seeking and value reconstruction after the crisis of modernity and its social fragmentation. Expressions of the interests I describe here have been evident throughout the 20th century (at least) but since the 1990s a more overt wave of interest in things spiritual, as in bodily well-being, and meaning-making, has inﬂuenced even middle- 65

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Organization 11(1) Articles class expert professionals, and not just the remnantly pagan,2 working classes in modern industrial societies. This new turn of interest is, as observer Wuthnow (1998) emphasizes, an ‘unchurched’ interest: one in which the new spiritual explorers demand a personal freedom to explore and express their often idiosyncratic spiritual tastes and experiences. Contrary to Weber’s observation, these new professional middle-class seekers endeavour to place new demands on their corporate, bureaucratic organizational workplaces. These demands include the freedom to explore diverse New Age spiritual and meaning-making activities, and to invoke counter-bureaucratic sources of authority. Many of these explorations include idiosyncratic cobbling together of fragments of traditions as well as magic, and counter-rational belief practices. Observing the goings-on within diverse organizations at the current time it is not difficult to see signs of new forms of self-expressiveness, meaning-making and spirituality. Although these trends are seldom reported in ethnographies of organizational life, I contend that these new tendencies raise important implications for organizations and for expert culture. In the first instance, these explorations compete with the continued display of expected modernist resistance in political contestations through trade unionism, humour and quiet dissent—forms which are by no means obsolete. But in addition, there appear to be new, or desublim- ated, beliefs—as Weber emphasized, and described a century ago ([1904–05] 1958). The interest in the kind of pursuit I have observed and which are described below indicates another domain, or resource, for resistance or alternative organizational practices. At first glance, many of these things may seem mildly amusing to the rational social scientist. But a closer analytical scrutiny dissuades of their ready dismissal as silly and inconsequential. The following discussion utilizes a few selected empirical illustrations which are drawn from a larger international research project which I conducted during 1995–2000 (Casey, 2002). The overall project sought to investigate the effects of widespread changes in organization, production and work practices, especially technological, structural and cultural changes. A two-fold interest in both the organizational trajectories ema- nating from, and constituent of these developments, and their effects on workers’ experiences of and action at work oriented the research project. The research involved first-hand observation of organization and management practices; examination of organization practitioner, popular and emerging academic literature; and interviews with employees in medium to large organizations including finance institutions such as banks and insurance companies, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, public relations and consulting companies and research laboratories in the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Australia and New Zealand. Excerpts from the data which are cited below focus on a central aspect of my findings, which I consider to be a trajectory of responses to 66

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Bureaucracy Re-enchanted? Catherine Casey a perceived intensification of modern economic and technological instrumentalities in organization and working life. The data indicate a dynamic juxtaposition of expected bureaucratic rationalities, and employee desire and demand for additional or contestational rationalities as sources of meaning-making and self- expression. The following few illustrations indicate the kinds of things senior, expertly skilled, successful organizational employees are exploring and doing at work alongside the duties of their typically well-paid job. These explorations are disclosed, not only in the privacy of a research interview, but in their focus groups and conferences. I have observed, for instance, crystals, Native American ‘dream-catchers’, and statuettes of the Buddha displayed, oftentimes together, in corporate cubicles. I have also seen pictures of Sai Baba, yoga gurus and Hindu goddesses deliberately displayed in workspaces, as well as artifacts of pagan traditions, alchemy and Wicca. And I have witnessed professional and technical expert employees consulting tarot cards, astrological charts and other divination devices. I have seen them sitting on corporate floors meditating and listening to exponents of Eastern or ethnic traditions offering organizational behavioural guidance. Practitioners of these and other activities such as reading spiritual or self-help ‘healing’ literature and joining ‘spirit at work’ discussion groups report that these activities draw attention to dimensions of their lives which they consider to have been neglected in their workplaces and companies. Participants in a discussion group on spirituality at work reported, for instance, that these activities ‘allow the soul to find expression here [at work], and to help [one] stay in touch with what really matters’. ‘They feed the soul at work’ and they ‘bring spiritual interests out in the open’ at work. These activities, once wholly illegitimate and actively suppressed in rational and secular bureaucratic organizations, beg interpretive questions. I posed questions of the corporately dressed practitioners: what does it mean to bring soul to work? In response, one of them, John, aged in his 50s with a career in financial management in different companies in Australasia and the United Kingdom currently working as a consultant, explained:

‘It means that you encourage people to bring their real values out in the open, you build more open communication and spiritual awareness. You listen to each other, really listen, and you build compassionate leadership by caring and listening, and a strong sense of purpose and community . . . It means that you start getting in touch with your own soul, your real purpose in life.’

Another respondent, Martin, aged in his 40s and with a career back- ground in medical science and presently working for a multinational pharmaceutical company as a team manager of a product development project which includes geographically dispersed professional employees, 67

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Organization 11(1) Articles explained the role of ‘soul’ in the recent changes in his life and in his company experience. ‘I’ve been with B&G for about four years now, and when I came in I think I wanted things to be different to the way they were in my previous company. Things were very competitive and very tough, and everyone was on the make in their own way . . . everything was so bottom line driven . . . You could say that it’s just the way business works everywhere . . . that was in Germany . . . but it could’ve been anywhere . . . But it wasn’t satisfying to me . . . I thought, why is there so much aggravation in the organization? . . . so much stress? . . . When I came to B&G I took the opportunity to go on seminars and workshops, executive management and leadership training . . . I was reflecting on my values and . . . the need to feel my soul, like what’s really important, at work . . . I realized that I wanted my spirituality to be part of my work and let it influence our decisions and our culture here in B&G . . . It’s my opinion that paying attention to your soul, or your spirituality makes a difference . . . it’s about values . . . and how we should do things on our team and as an organization.’ Another respondent, Paul, a former senior executive and now leadership consultant, expresses his belief in the soul at work more evangelically: ‘We need to do something serious about the soul being marginalized in organizations. We need a wake-up call. We need to start coming home to ourselves. When we allow soul to be expressed and nurtured in the workplace we learn to understand the world differently—not as a frag- mented place or irreconcilable differences, but see the world relationally, holistically, collectively, as flowing motion.’ Jen, an accountant, works as a finance manager in an insurance firm. She reports that she has attended a workshop on spirituality at work in California. For Jen, ‘bringing soul to work is about making work serve the soul, serve the spirit within us. If the organization can’t lead from soul and allow people to have soul at work it’s an unhealthy place to be. People won’t do this for much longer, they want to be where their soul is nurtured and valued, and where others seek that too. A spiritual transformation of organizations is seriously needed.’ As well as practitioners’ comments of this nature on the emergence and role of spirituality in organizations, I have witnessed some of the ways in which such various expressions are put into practice. Employees in various organizations practise meditation, yoga and quiet time out at work. A number of companies provide opportunities for these pursuits including quiet rooms, meditation times, and opportunities for ‘soul moments’ which may include taking a bike ride or having a massage on company time (as I have observed in multinational telecommunications and public relations companies). As well as these gentle arts other forms of spirit seeking, magic and divination occurring in organizations are observable. Employees have reported ‘listening to their angels’, pursuing ‘journeys of shamanic healing’ and attending company-sponsored work- 68

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Bureaucracy Re-enchanted? Catherine Casey shops on these arts, as reported in popular business publications (for example, Business Week, 22 November 1999). Through the course of my research I have listened to reports of the consulting of fortune-tellers, numerologists and spirit guides, by highly skilled, rational corporate employees—from scientists to stockbrokers—in order to gain knowledge to discern direction and aid decision-making in their organizational work and in their lives. I have witnessed senior managers encourage employees in reading self-discovery and spiritual literature, and company-fund middle managers’ participation in mind/body spiritual and personal growth programmes. I have listened to managers and their consultants, often at very expensive seminars, invoke and advocate the language of openness to alternative or competing rationalities. At first glance this ‘openness’ to alternative rationalities presents an apparently ironic contradiction to encouragement of the practice of bureaucratic authority and rational expertise in production. It adds another complexity to the usual management tasks of managing disruptive counter-rationalities and errant affectivity, and facilitating production. The invocation of spirituality and, as one CEO put it, ‘the L-word (love)’, is apparently in some corporate organizations no longer considered a threatening competing rationality. It is instead regarded by those actively encouraging these sensibilities as an ‘energy source’ which is increasingly vital to organizational production. Now, diverse forms of spiritual exploration and the availability of popular forms of cultural practices may be drawn from virtually anywhere around the globe and apparently brought into organizations, eroding bureaucracy and promoting institutional uncertainty. I witness a growing interest in an ancient Chinese divination practice of feng shui in regard to ‘energy flows’ and auspicious alignments with the fields of energy. Popular management literature frequently carries stories on the design and arrangement of working spaces according to the precepts of feng shui (for example, King, 1999). I have observed organizational consultants including these arts in a repertoire of alternative organizational advice offered to diverse corporate clients in private companies and public organizations. Spiritual and divination practices include a considerable range of activities in which practitioners may or may not submit to some form of regulation through adherence to a group or association of similar practitioners. One of the favoured, entirely unregulated, practices of New Age explorers is the art of ‘aura reading’ of one’s companions or associates. Tara, who is English, in her late 30s and holds an MBA degree, works in a public relations and consulting company. She reported that she and some of her colleagues were proficient, as she puts it, in ‘reading the aura of the person we’re with . . .’. She and some of her co-workers had taken a course in this art, and now put it to use for their company: ‘It’s hard to explain. Basically, it’s about getting a reading of the person from the light or heat around them . . . We do this with clients or with people wanting to work for our company. I think we’re pretty good at it . . . 69

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You can tell by the colour and shape of the aura if they’ll be suitable for us.’ While my informant laughed at that point, expecting a sceptical if unspoken response, she later added more seriously that: ‘It has worked for us and I don’t see why we shouldn’t use these things if they help . . . You might be surprised, but in ﬁrms like ours with a lot of creative people and a lot of competition out there that a lot of people are doing these sorts of things . . . We have to be open, and we say that we encourage out-of-the-box thinking. And I believe that it works.’ From a conventional analytical vantage point these illustrations could be dismissed as idiosyncratic and frivolous, so absurdly counter-rational as to pose little threat or relevance to the continued business of rational organizational life. If these activities bespeak a critical disaffection with conventional rational organizations and their privileging of technical expert knowledge, the individualism and idiosyncrasy of these critical expressions and their apparent intent undermines any current of political effectivity or serious counter-authority. Moreover, employees’ seeking of the spiritual world while at work might also be readily dismissed as a neurotic desire or desperate impulse to make meaning in a condition of institutionalized compartmentalization of self and rationalized alienation. Such pathological conditions among workers have long been observed and conventional individual psychological treatments might effectively manage such maladaptation. If it were not for the considerable interest shown by increasing numbers of organizations, and the burgeoning popular management literature and conferences address- ing these same matters, such conventional modernist analytical responses might more readily sufﬁce.

Spirit and Bureaucracy: Strategic Organizational Responses The present decade has seen a proliferation of management and organization texts and applications in workplaces that expound various new theories of strategic advantage through restructured, culturally reformed organizations and employees. These activities are not new. But the content and direction of the latest among the corporate cultural design programmes indicate a new trend. The programmes currently extolled by organization culturalists and management motivators—among the most inﬂuential organizational consultants promoting bureaucratic reform— now overtly encompass the utilization of religio-affective, desecularized impulses. Wittingly or not, these programmes encourage a turn to non- economic and non-scientiﬁc rationalities now emerging among even the mainstream professional middle class. Religious and affective dimensions of human experience so long omitted from the rational institutions of production and work are, it appears, now welcome. As Business Week (1999) observes: ‘Today, a spiritual revival is sweeping across Corporate America as executives of all stripes are mixing mysticism into their 70

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Bureaucracy Re-enchanted? Catherine Casey management, importing into office corridors the lessons usually doled out in churches, temples and mosques.’ A New Age-influenced management literature targeted at corporate executives as well as middle-ranking employees in the English-speaking West proliferates. From the emotional appeal of titles such as Getting Employees to Fall in Love With Your Company (Harris, 1996) and Heart at Work (Canfield and Millar, 1996) to the more soothingly spiritual Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work (Canfield et al., 1999), Bringing Your Soul to Work (Peppers and Briskin, 2000) and Liberating the Corporate Soul (Barrett, 1998), to the more mystical Zen at Work (Kaye, 1996) and The Corporate Mystic (Hendricks and Ludeman, 1997), a stirring of interest in activities conventionally excluded from management practice and organizational analysis is widely evident. Moreover, in addition to popular publications, prominent organizational academics, such as the European writer Charles Handy in Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism—A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World (1997) and Mitroff and Denton in A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America (1999), are similarly exploring and advocating the incorporation of spiritual and ‘post-capitalist’ values to the workplace. Roger Lewin and Birute Regine’s The Soul at Work (2000) argues that ‘a wind of change is blowing through the business world, bringing with it a new hope and a potential for a deep human resonance within organizations, which we all seek deep in our hearts’ (Lewin and Regine, 2000: 15). This shift in the world of business is one . . . where valuing people and relationships is not just a good or espoused idea, but a conscious management action that has a positive outcome on the economic bottom line . . . by genuinely caring about people in the workplace, the bottom line often benefits as well. (Lewin and Regine, 2000: 14) The authors argue that there . . . continues to be a denial in the business mind, a stark omission of the importance of people and valuing them for not only the revenues they bring in, but simply as human beings . . . when people are treated as replaceable parts, as objects of control, are taught to be compliant, are used as fuel for the existing system . . . inevitably you are going to have an organization that is fraught with frustration, anger, and isolation, which ultimately is detrimental to the business. (2000: 22) The antidote to this condition, the authors argue, is the recognition of people and organizations as complex adaptive systems in which interconnectedness and meaningful engagement are vital. Recognizing the ‘soul at work’ points to ‘future horizons and challenges for a different way of working’ (Lewin and Regine, 2000: 26). Examples of management and organizational consulting firms (operating in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, South America, Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere) offering training seminars 71

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Organization 11(1) Articles and courses in, for example, ‘Spirituality in the Workplace’, ‘The Inner Life of Business’, ‘Igniting Purpose and Spirit at Work’, ‘The Transformed Organization’ are readily found. The impulse for these new consultancy offerings arises from the perceived need for organizations to address their values and cultures of relationships and purpose. One consultancy company explains the summative rationale for their spirituality programmes: ‘Spiritual consulting and training honors the whole of each person within the whole of the company so individual and corporate needs and goals are honored and fulfilled.’ A Hollyhock Spirit and Business Conference in September 1998 promoted its purpose as seeking to encourage ‘business as a vehicle for social change and integrating spirituality and business’. At an international ‘Spirituality in the Workplace’ conference in Toronto in 1998, the Chairman of Aetna International, gave a keynote address on ‘The Dollars and Sense of Spirituality in the Workplace’ in which he encouraged companies to make space for the spiritual needs of employees. Such attention would simultaneously reap dividends in the conventional manner for the company. A now well-known International Conference on Business and Consciousness meets annually in Mexico. In partnership with the Business Spirit Journal Online this, with similar large conferences, has sparked other conferences all around the world. A Spirit at Work Conference in New Zealand in October 2000 sought to ‘build workplaces that capture the hearts of those who work within them, where . . . spiritual awareness and interconnectedness . . . are explored to enhance life and uplift organizational synergy and productivity’. Moreover, a number of very large corporate organizations including IBM, Xerox, AT&T, Nike, Forbes, Apple, Pepsico and General Electric fund in-house or off-site employee participation in retreats which include yoga, meditation, mind-body work and the like. Yoga establish- ments in several countries offer regular programmes of ‘corporate yoga’ to companies and individual corporate executives. Yoga, which often includes chanting to Hindu deities, is selectively adapted to corporate consumer needs. Business Week (1999) reports that in addition to yoga, shamanic healing and divination, and Native American-styled quests for meaning, soul and truth, prayer meetings and the study of sacred texts of the Talmud, the Bible and the Baghavad Gita are offered in companies such as Deloitte and Touche, Xerox and Pizza Hut. These illustrations of corporate involvement in non-traditional activities of this nature, the literature appearing on managers’ desks, and the expressions of spiritual seeking and experimentation with counter-scientific rationalities among professional organizational employees, suggest an apparent convergence of interest between a significant number of employees and organizations in alternative, non-modern or post-bureaucratic rationalities. In addition to, and competing with, rational-legal authority and professional and technical expertise, organizational expert employees express a counter turn in a heightened pursuit of self-interest not meas- 72

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ured solely by rational ends. For employees, these pursuits are under- taken for personal interests in enhancing well-being and developing knowledge or consciousness precluded by their performance of rational, scientific, professional roles and identities. Their activities are responses to experienced lackings in overly rationalized, instrumentalized and dispirited bureaucratic organizations and industrially disciplined workplaces. They indicate efforts, initially, to oppose the constrictive rationalities of the bureaucratic organization, and they may indicate efforts at re-enchantment and revitalization of their lives at work. As technological developments (especially in communication) in organizational work in recent years have blurred boundaries between at-work and not-at-work life, trends toward individual consumer interests in a marketized society are less able to be kept outside of the industrially disciplined workplace. Bureaucratic organizations are less able to rely on self-sacrificing, depersonalized, rationally compliant expert employees. In more typical modern conditions, conventional religious identities and other idiosyncratic interests were expected to be kept out of modern industrial organizational practice. Acceptance of, and compliance to, rational-legal authority maintained necessary order and cohesion against counter- productive irrationalities and idiosyncratic subjectivities. Bureaucratic domination conducted through a singular privileging of rational expert knowledge, as Weber argued, meets unexpected challenges from expert employees. The contemporary challenges to bureaucratic authority from the sources described above in contemporary organizational life pose considerable implications. The intensification of rationalization evident in production organizations in the West in recent decades, which has been recognized by management consultants, trade unionists, and academic analysts of organizations, of a totalizing emphasis on instrumental ends and economic efficiency, is generating a growing oppositional voice and alternative practices. While these contestations in the first instance indicate yet further aspects of wider institutional and legitimation crisis, they may point to a new form of critical organizational practice which competes with, or circumvents, more typical modern contestations in political and economic demands. They may even pose possibilities for the practice and reinvention of organizations as social institutions.

Strategic Neo-rationality Over recent years there has been much theoretical debate over the crisis of modernity (Habermas, 1987; Toulmin 1990; Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992; Touraine, 1995; Offe, 1996). The crisis of modernity deepens as purely instrumental rationality intensiﬁes. As Touraine (1995) points out, a separation of the socio-cultural ends to this form of reason has led to a condition in which social systems, including organizations, have become 73

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on August 11, 2016 Organization 11(1) Articles only technical apparatuses. Yet this condition of postmodernity ultimately weakens instrumental rationality and action, even as it first intensifies it. While rational organizations continue to intensify technocratic rationalization, they generate the conditions of their crisis and fracture. In the wider social institutional arena, we see this in the rise of various counter-rational, counter-modern (including ethnic and traditional religious) movements, from minority groups to powerful national- ist movements, in post-colonial contexts now raising new demands of the socio-cultural sphere. Organizations operating in these social and cultural conditions must find means to circumscribe or manage the effects of these pressures on organizational business. The successor to conventional modern organizational science and bureaucratic practice emerges as a strategic response. The dominant forms of organizational management practice, including the incorporation of postmodernism, display an intensification of meas- ures designed to counter the ‘radical doubt’ (Beck, 1992) and routinized uncertainty which now permeate Western culture. The deepening doubt and distrust people experience toward modern expert (and remnant traditional) authority systems and bureaucratic depersonalization encourages a turn of heightened individualism, self-expressivism and consumption manifesting in hyper-modern capitalism. In implicit recognition and response to this, as Bell predicted in the 1970s (1976), neo-rational organizational management intensifies efforts to manage the contradictions of capitalism in contemporary conditions of ‘risk society’ (in Beck’s 1992 term). Organizations, with their manifestly limited and challenged rationality, despite bureaucratic aspirations of singularly rational-legal legitimacy, confront diverse contestational practices. The strategic corporate organization endeavours to intervene in the bureaucratic rationalization of power and authority. The dominant, apparently embedded, rationality of bureaucratic systems undergoes a risky accommodatory move. The strategic management of a bureaucratic organization endeavours to make a calculated intervention into the bureaucratic belief (in Weber’s term) of impersonality, singularly privileged technical expertise, and rational-legal authority. It permits, even encourages, some of the counter-scientifically rational, neo-religious, practices described above to the extent that these practices serve, at least indirectly and ultimately, the conventional rationalities of organizational production and profitability under globalizing economic conditions. While the corporate appropriation and application of current New Age spiritual and bodily interests in popular culture to encourage more spirited and devoted employees in service of established rational organizational goals presents as a strategic management manoeuvre, a sophisticated postmodern strategy, it also poses unpredictable risks to the maintenance of bureaucratically controlled expert knowledge. Weber’s bureaucracy, predicated on ‘domination through knowledge’, may take an unexpected turn. 74

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Bureaucracy, Belief and Authority The institutional crisis deepens. Evidence drawn from my research data and that of other research in organizations and among their senior managers and consultants (Handy, 1997; Mitroff and Denton 1999; Lewin and Regine, 2000) indicates that many organizational managers and other once-quintessentially bureaucratic experts are themselves variously exploring some of these new-style interests. In addition there is evidence of altered-career trends among both mid-life organizational employees and organization-resistant young people (Ehrenreich, 1995; Laabs, 1996; Casey, 2000) which outrightly challenge the role and legitimacy of bureaucratically organized work in the service of a market economy abstracted from substantive socio-cultural ends. The strategically managed organization, retaining many essential elements of the bureaucratic form, now faces currents and pressures from sources conventionally expected to have been compliantly socialized as modern industrial rational producers and organizational employees. Productivist-consumer society predicated on heightened individualistic interests and impulse also fuels demands for greater opportunities for other forms of self-interest, self-directedness and relationality with others. That same heightened individualism and self-interest, which generates challenges to the beliefs underpinning bureaucratic authority, may also challenge acceptance of domination by economic rationality and organizational instrumentality. The new organizational benevolence, toleration, even encouragement of religio-affective interests and beliefs— contrary to conventional bureaucratic beliefs—represents a strategic neo- rationalist managerial response. The management effort to contain, incorporate and utilize these emerging impulses and demands from dispirited, disaffected, highly paid employees manifests efforts to pre- empt the potential of these impulses—which are evident in wider social practice—to more seriously disrupt the meta-rationality of capitalist production and economy. But at the same time, permitting the inﬂuence of employee beliefs in new or competing authorities fundamentally affects the basis of authority and domination over knowledge in bureaucratic organizations. Ironically, and unintentionally, it may indicate a facilitation of a signiﬁcant opposition. Employees bringing their spiritual explorations and counter-rational knowledge to the workplace pose a potentially disruptive counter- position to bureaucratic and neo-rationalist organizational management. This new opposition, expressed in religio-affective sensibilities and demands, challenges the constitution of bureaucratic organization and the singular legitimacy of rational-legal authority. It poses a non- instrumentally rational, counter-movement to bureaucratic organization, but as well its incipient demands for a reconsideration of the socio- cultural ends of instrumental bureaucracy and rationality challenge more generally a distorted modernity of productivisim. 75

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Critical sociology has generally tended to overestimate the system integration and totality of society and organization, and notions of a system without actors—or a non-social realm of strategizing consumers— are often now resignedly accepted. But the evidence, once again from production organizational practice, shows up the contested and always limited rationality of social systems and, simultaneously, the competition between instrumental rational achievements and cultural and identity demands. Employees in organizations exploring new sources, elements and configurations of identity, meaning and value outside those of the conventionally modern, may be understood, I propose, as signifying what Alain Touraine (1988, 1995) theorises as a return of the ‘subject-actor’. Many theorists of the latter decades of the 20th century, especially those of structuralist and poststructuralist persuasions including influentially Michel Foucault, have rejected an idea of the acting subject. The rejection of the notion of an acting subject because of its apparent identification with reason and normalization has gained much influence in postmodern organizational studies. But Touraine’s theorizations refute that elision of the subject. Touraine’s subject and its process of subjectivation (by which one becomes a subject) is clearly differentiated from subjectification, which is the basis of Foucault’s criticism of the subject; and from the naive individualism that does not recognize social determinants and that emphasizes a singular rationality of economic choices. For Touraine, the subject is always a ‘dissident idea’. It is an ethical demand. Becoming a subject is achieved through ‘an individual’s will to act and be recognized as an actor’ (Touraine, 1995: 207). The subject-actor is formed in a struggle against rationality degraded to instrumentalism. The subject- actor constructs a personal project through the events of his or her life and tries to create spaces for autonomy and freedom. The current of spiritual and self-expressivist explorations and demands among bureaucratic organizational employees, reveals, I propose, signs of persons striving for subjectivation—for the accomplishment of becoming an acting subject. Their efforts of soul-seeking, spirituality, sensual re-enchantments and self-expressivism are efforts toward a freedom not reduced to an instrumental rationality of economic choice. The return of the actor to even the most rationalized and systemically dominated practices of everyday life, production organizations, is in the first instance, practically significant. If social and organizational analysts seriously consider the evidence for this ‘return’, a considerable shift beyond both postmodernism and the theoretical paradigm of rationalizing modernity are possible. The return of the employee subject-actor in organizational life, not just as an economic unit or rationally choosing consumer, but as identity and meaning-maker who seeks new significa- tions of value ends, may pose new demands upon the utilization of diverse cultural resources and activities, including production and bureaucratic organization. The activities of the returned acting subject 76

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may contribute, not only to the institutional crisis in modern industrial society, but to a reinvention of institutions and renegotiated socio- cultural ends. But there remains the risk that these explorations of competing rationalities and invocations of alternative authorities to those privileged in bureaucratic organizations will express and develop not the ethical subject-actor of Touraine’s formulation, but regressive communalist fundamentalisms or asocial individualism. Again, Touraine’s theor- ization provides an interpretive guide. He proposes that the subject-actor may be recognized in its rejection of both a neo-traditionalist repression on the one hand and a rationality degraded to instrumentalism on the other. The subject-actor offers an appeal to consciousness and social recomposition.

Conclusion The elevation of counter-bureaucratic authorities and the overt invocation of counter-bureaucratic rationalities that present in the demands of soul-seeking, potentially dissident, expert employees generates a strategic neo-rational management response. The neo-rational bureaucratic organization moves to accommodate the diverse demands for meaning- making, self-expressivism, or greater ethical congruence presenting among a wide sector of organizational workers. The eminent strategic response endeavours, not to repress or deny as in a more conventional bureaucratic response, but to capture and reauthorize the re-enchantment and spiritualizing turn. A sympathetic accommodation of various spiritual, affective and bodily well-being pursuits both diffuses their disruptive current and seeks to direct their energies into renewed organizational creativity, innovation and productivity in service of instrumentality as end in itself. But notwithstanding this contemporary, innovative response the energies or spirit of re-enchantment fundamentally defy the ‘spirit of bureaucracy’, as Weber recognized. Whether or not they escape, too, the neo-rationality of a sophisticated strategic management is too soon to tell. At the very least, though, the unreasoned sources of these new employee demands and energies provide the turn of religio-affective actions with a potential for counter-practice that modern forms of political resistance do not grasp. Employees spiritually questioning the modus operandi of contemporary production organizations may use their dissident spiritualizing practices and ‘charisma’ toward new demand-setting in organizational life. The evidence discussed above suggests many such practitioners are already making such demands in emergent, not yet fully articulated forms. The disembedding of the bureaucratic rationalized form of organization from substantive socio-cultural ends has produced, in its manifest crisis, a turn, in the ﬁrst instance, to re-enchantment and emergent imagination of other cultural demands. Dissident spiritualization and 77

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resistance to subjectiﬁcation and self-dissolution by hyper-capitalist technocratic instrumentality, now aided by selected postmodern cultural practices in organizations, may indicate a new constitutive action in a contested ﬁeld of forces in which organizations are formed and reformed. These constitutive actions of subjects may herald generative movements of organizational, and social, transformation.

Notes 1 For discussion of the ‘New Age’ movement and spirituality see, for example, Heelas (1996), Lewis and Melton (1992) and Wuthnow (1998). ‘New Age’ practices may be understood as: ‘an internalized form of religiosity . . . it is at heart all about Self-spirituality . . . about developing a new consciousness . . .’ (Heelas, 1996), and ‘A spiritual seeking . . . outside established religious institutions’ (Wuthnow, 1998), or as ‘Revitalization of the experience of organic, bodily well-being’ (Wexler, 1996). 2 Of course this comment requires fuller discussion, beyond the conﬁnes of this article. My point, though, is to draw attention to the remarkable retention of counter-rational and counter-Church spiritual or religio-magical beliefs and folk practices readily evident among industrial workers in modern societies. My own observations and conversations with such workers reveal a variety of these interests animating daily workplace life. For instance, the dangling of a wedding ring over a pregnant workmate’s belly convinced many of the sex of the unborn child.

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Catherine Casey is Associate Professor in the School of Business and Economics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She holds a PhD from the University of Rochester, New York. Her current research interests are in the social analysis of work, economy and organizations, and in critical social, cultural and political theory. Dr Casey teaches graduate and undergraduate students in organization studies, work and industry studies, and employment relations. Her recent publications include: Critical Analysis of Organizations: Theory, Practice, Revital- isation, London: Sage 2002. Address: School of Business and Economics, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. [email: [email protected]] 79

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