Indulgency patterns and negotiated orders

In Gouldner’s (1954) study of a Gypsum plant that underwent an aggressive program of bureaucratic reform, he observed a range of ingrained pre-bureaucratic cultural rationalities and practices in everyday work. He noticed a high degree of ‘informal social cohesion’ (ibid., p.150) or what Ritter (1948) called ‘irrational solidarity groups’. Such groups, Gouldner observed, were organised along kin relations

and geographical belonging to one town and one European homeland from which their ancestors migrated. As Gouldner highlighted “supervisors and workers developed

personalized informal relations on the job that reflect their community relations.” (1954, p.39).

Such informal relations produced a distinctively pre-bureaucratic pattern of practice that Gouldner called the ‘indulgency pattern’ (1954, p.45). Under the ‘indulgency pattern,’ most of the bureaucratic principles Weber discussed such a separation of the office from the person and the ‘objective discharge of business’ were

their personal use. Also, formal rules regarding hiring and the day to day functioning of the plant were frequently sidestepped. There was ingrained favouritism in hiring decisions where managers favoured applicants they knew from the local community over other applicants. After the death of the plant manager ‘Old Doug’, who was a local man, a program of bureaucratisation was introduced by a new plant manager, who came from outside the local community, to curtail such pre-bureaucratic practices. As Gouldner reported, such reform efforts led to power struggles and the persistence of pre-bureaucratic practices under what he called a ‘mock bureaucracy’ pattern where rules are honoured only selectively and without commitment from workers.

Strauss’s et al., (1963) study introduced the notion of the ‘negotiated order’ to

explain the situated cultural character of everyday work in formal organisations. They

observed personnel and patients in two psychiatric hospitals, for everyone seemed to be negotiating about something. So central did this negotiation seem to the events being studied that when writing up the conclusions…[they]… made negotiation a key concept, along with several others, and coined the term

negotiated order. (Strauss, 1978, p.5, original emphasis).

Through their observations of everyday work in these hospitals, Strauss and his colleagues found that formal bureaucratic rules “are continuously negotiated in interaction” (Manning, 1977, p. 45). In other words, “[r]ules and roles are always

breaking down—and when they do not, they do not miraculously remain intact without some effort, including negotiations effort, to maintain them.” (Strauss, 1978, p. ix).

Hospital staff exercised discretion in not only negotiating the application of rules but also in fashioning alternative ones in interactions with other members and groups.

Hospital employees:

[T]herefore interpreted “scripture” to suit their own needs and purposes. Nurses frequently appointed themselves “defenders” of the hospital against “inappropriate” demands of certain physicians. The doctors, on to the game,

sometimes accused them of more interest in their own personal welfare and comfort than of that of the patients. (Strauss, 1964, p. 13).

Strauss’s notion of the negotiated order, like Gouldner’s ‘indulgency pattern’,

strongly brought to the fore the pre-bureaucratic in everyday organisational life in the guise of cultural relations and social interactions that shaped the conduct of everyday work (Hallett, Shulman, & Fine, 2009). It explains how pre-bureaucratic practices melded with bureaucratic ones in the conduct of everyday work through a process of negotiations and unofficial arrangements (Strauss, 1978). The negotiated order posits that organisations are “complex and highly fragile social constructions of reality which

are subject to the numerous temporal, spatial, and situational events occurring” (Day & Day, 1977, p. 132). The central thesis of Strauss’s work, therefore, is that formal

bureaucratic structures do not necessarily coercively determine in a linear fashion the patterns of everyday work (Bishop & Waring, 2016; Fine, 1984; Maines, 1982; Watson, 2015). Instead, formal rules and policies “are interwoven into the working arrangements of doctors, nurses, and administrators, who alternatively draw on and ignore them as they go about their work” (Bechky, 2011, p. 1160). In other words, “patterns of interaction constitute negotiated orders that shape how work is accomplished” (Hallett

et al., 2009, p. 6). In this regard:

The negotiated order on any given day can be conceived of as the sum total of the organization’s rules and policies, along with whatever agreements,

understandings, pacts, contracts, and other working arrangements currently obtained. These include agreements at every level of the organization, of every clique and coalition, and include covert as well as overt agreements. (Strauss, 1978, p.6).

This definition of the negotiated order indicates that the pre-bureaucratic in the guise of negotiated unofficial arrangements is combined with the bureaucratic through exercises of discretion and social interactions between workers (Bechky, 2011; Fine, 1984). Like classic organisational ethnographies such as Gouldner’s (1954), Strauss’s nuanced elucidation of the pre-bureaucratic is based on ethnographic fieldwork that reveals the detail and complexity of everyday work (Bechky, 2006; Watson, 2015).

There are two common themes amongst these seminal ethnographic studies that help to clearly define the pre-bureaucratic. First, informal cultural relations and how they come to imbue everyday work in formal bureaucratic organisations. This is evident in the community relations that Gouldner (1954) highlighted as well as Strauss’s

notion of the negotiated order. Second, exercises of discretion that deviate from the formal bureaucratic rationality; such exercises of discretion are indeed evident in these studies as highlighted earlier. These two themes (informal cultural relations and exercises of discretion) are hence essential to defining the pre-bureaucratic.

These two themes are also evident in a wide range of other studies within the field of organisation studies more broadly. For example, Dalton (1959) in the classic ethnographic study ‘Men Who Manage’ of four US companies observed that while such

organisations had a formal structure, it was the informal web of relations in the guise of ‘cliques’ that were central to the day to day work. One interesting type of clique is what

he called the “Vertical Parasitic Clique” (1959, p.59) which was organised along kin

relations, mutual friendships, and exchanges of favours. He described this clique saying:

[T]his is the clique of popular thought, the one that writers of supervisory manuals have in mind when they make such statements as, “No person may

work under the direct or indirect supervision of an officer to whom he is related by blood or marriage.” […] This clique need not be a family affair. It may be

based on a friendship developed earlier in the plant or elsewhere. (1959, p. 59).

Such cliques can be easily seen as pre-bureaucratic forms of solidarity (Ritter, 1948) as they deviate from the strictly formal and depersonalised ethos of bureaucracy that Weber discussed.

Crozier’s (1964) work on two bureaucratic organisations in France, for instance,

revealed how favouritism, power relations, conflicts, informal arrangements and everyday politicking took precedence over formal rules and policies in the conduct of bureaucratic work (see also d’Iribarne, 1994). Similarly, Blau’s (1963) study of two US public bureaucracies showed how everyday work was governed by unofficial arrangements and practices between bureaucrats instead of the formal rationality. Additionally, Ouchi’s (1980) notion of clans as efficient modes of organising work in

manufacturing organisations stemmed from Japanese cultural relations and is a distinctive form of pre-bureaucratic organisational practices.

Even recent studies such as Casey’s (2004), which reports on how spiritual

practices imbue everyday work and influence exercises of discretion in bureaucratic organisations in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US, reveal the continuing relevance of the pre-bureaucratic. Moreover, studies on ‘organisational misbehaviour’ can also be seen to epitomise pre-bureaucratic practices (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999;

Knights & McCabe, 2000a). Additionally, it can be argued that the pre-bureaucratic is salient in how managers’ exercises of discretion in deciding to adopt managerial fads

and fashions are guided by superstitions and irrationality (see Abrahamson, 1991, 1996; Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; Clark & Salaman, 1998). These studies demonstrate the continuing relevance of the pre-bureaucratic even in Western developed contexts. Most of these studies have not been explored in the debate on bureaucracy versus post- bureaucracy.

This thesis, nonetheless, cannot exhaust all the literatures on the pre- bureaucratic in the field of organisation studies. The thesis, therefore, will specifically focus on the work of Gouldner (1954) and Strauss (1978), as expressions of the pre- bureaucratic, because these two studies provide valuable theoretical insights that help to vividly elucidate the pre-bureaucratic in the thesis’s findings. Next, I will review studies that demonstrate the significance of local cultural practices indicative of pre- bureaucratic/pre-modern social relations (e.g., wasta, guanxi) that imbue the operation of work in contemporary organisations.

2.2.2 Wasta, Guanxi and Jeitinho as pre-bureaucratic cultural