The design of public organizations for the 21st century: why bureaucracy will survive in public management

If one were to bet on the design of public organizations in the twenty-first century, it would seem foolhardy to gamble that bureaucracy has a future. Virtually all prognoses suggest that bureaucracy is a model whose time has passed; its demise will occur in the new century, if it is not extinct by then. Reformers thus speak of ‘%banishing bureaucracy”’ and “breaking through bureaucracy” to conform to the “post-bureaucratic paradigm.”’ The call to go “beyond b~reaucracy,”~ in other words, is both prescriptive and predictive. In the Canadian context, the norm for the future of or anizational design is universally described as “altema tive service delivery”’; and while this means different things to different people, at the very least it means alternatives to bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has no future, it is widely assumed, because we have supposedly concluded that its three chief characteristics hierarchy, specialization and standardization are highly dysfunctional in an age and global environment where well-performing organizations must be characterized instead by empowerment and self-managed teams, horizontal policy development, integrated service delivery, and management discretion and flexibilities tailored to the particular circumstances of each organization. In contrast to this ideal, bureaucracy is taken to mean centralized decision-making as well as command and control systems; organizational fragmentation and turf protection; and rules, regulations and procedures imposed on those who manage the operations of government by armies of program and functional specialists in both central agencies and line organization headquarters. In order to overcome these perceived organizational pathologies, ,‘bureaucratic systems” must be replaced with ”entrepreneurial system^."^ Or so the script reads. If we take “bureaucracy” to mean unnecessary, self-serving or outdated