The Bureaucratic Experience
Hummel, Ralph P. The Bureaucratic Experience. Second Edition. New York City: St. Martin's Press, 1982.
• First edition NYC: St. Martin's 1977. Fourth Edition subtitled A Critique of Life in the Modern Organization. NYC: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1994. Fifth Edition subtitled The Post-Modern Challenge. London, UK: Routledge, 2007. As of March 2024, full bibliographic information can be found here.[1]
Wikipedia article linked above gives this: "Hummel's most famous work was the book The Bureaucratic Experience which went through five editions (1977, 1982, 1987, 1994, and 2008). The book contends that bureaucracy is dehumanizing; for example, it deals with cases instead of people, and it focuses on efficiency at the expense of other human values."
Very useful for contrasting bureaucratic rationality, in Max Weber's phrase, sin ira ac studio — "without hatred or passion" — with the appeals to emotion of charismatic leadership, and ordinary human social interaction, for "Two Cultures" (pp 9 f.). Cf. such classic works as Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Bureaucracy and the highly useful Organisation and Bureaucracy: An Analysis of Modern Theories; other works in this wiki, listed here.[2]
NOTE: This book intersperses Hummel's work with ideas and words of others or paraphrases, and in some cases we may be quoting them below, not strictly Hummel. For the purposes of indicating the usefulness of The Bureaucratic Experience, it's generally immaterial who the speaker or source is.
Early in the Second Edition, we get this passage:
The bureaucrat has a will, but it is an impersonal will, and it cannot transcend his or her role. It is a will whose origins lie, not in personal conscience, but in machinery set in motion by a superior, the work rules, or the understanding of one's jurisdiction.
The psychological limits of a bureaucrat are already indicated when we speak of a functionary of a system. Ideally, from the point of view of their bureaucracy, bureaucrats are highly reliable cogs in the machine. [...] But to the extent that bureaucrats are cogs in a machine, they cease being free agents — the human beings of social action who freely orient themselves to other human beings and engage in social projects with them. Bureaucrats lose their own power and become instruments of power. It is in this sense that Weber wrote, "... bureaucracy was and is a power instrument of the first order for one who controls the bureaucratic apparatus." The use of the term "apparatus" cannot be accidental. (p 6)
In "Trapped in the Bureaucratic Pinball Machine" and elsewhere, Richard D. Erlich has suggested that 20th-c. visions of dystopia fairly frequently literalized the figure of speech of the bureaucratic apparat; the idea is not particularly original, but he thinks it useful. In The Bureaucratic Experience, "machine," "apparatus," and similar terms become a motif; reinforced by the more individualized, smaller-scale image of the mechanized person, e.g., "The complaint that bureaucrats are robots, not human beings, is commonly voiced by disappointed clients" (p. 39).
Mechanized environments are handled in Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF; smaller machines such as robots in the earlier: The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction.
For an early fictional and comedic use of the idea of a person in a bureaucracy reduced to a "file" or "case" — or IBM card — see Robin Scott Wilson's "For a While There, Herbert Marcuse, I Thought You Were Maybe Right About Alienation and Eros" (1973).
Hummel has written on Sigmund Freud, and Freud and others figure more in this book, but B. F. Skinner is named directly in the discussion of "These new techno-psychologies" applied to bureaucracy and society, and to individual bureaucrats and "their lack of personal psychic integration and their psychic dependence on the environment." Among other works, the footnote to "techno-psychologies" mentions Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which see at link. Hummel notes the decline of the idea of the individual and "problems of individualist psychologies in the face of the bureaucratization of the world" (p. 115).
On information retrieval ca. 1982, preCyberpunk, but at the birth
"A bureaucracy does not rely on personal memory. In this lies its great strength: the impersonal files don't lie, don't forget, and are difficult to 'bribe' — their interests are not human interests; the biases of a machine storing data are not human biases." Well: the programmers are human. Footnote here: "So only experts can corrupt them, which opens interesting scenarios for those fascinated by the potential of modern organizations themselves to become victims of a knowledge elite. In passing, the entire question of the psychological impact on personality of specific organizational structures such as information systems has hardly been explored" (p. 124, 124n.).
In Bruce Bethke's" Cyberpunk (story)" (1980 [composition] / 1983 [publication]) and William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are various knowledge elites, most of them otherwise marginal (young punks, console cowboys).
On computer language, in a very general sense of interacting with a computer, not the technical sense of "computer languages."[3]
The language of society was causal ("Would you start the fire? I'm cold.") and two-directional ("But there's no wood.") The language of bureaucracy is one-directional (Manager: "Turn up the thermostat!") and acausal (Manager again: "So what if it's 90º outside! Do what you're told!") Try to find the reason why. Try to talk back. Try to find somebody to talk back to. * * * One-directionality and acausality are the two major characteristics not only of computer language but of bureaucratic language in general, of which computer language is an advanced case. (pp. 152-53)
Once we recognize this function of language, it is only one further step toward recognizing the ultimate function of bureaucratic language: a bureaucracy's language is usually so constructed as to prevent both bureaucrats and outsiders from ever formulating questions that might attack the underlying assumptions of the bureaucracy itself. (p. 154; cf. Nineteen Eighty-Four.)
The office, after all [a sales office in the specific case here] is the attempt to mechanize and automate both perceptions of what goes on in the sales process and instructions based on such inputs. Lacking human experience, the office as such can never become, under Wittgensteinian concepts of language, a partner for mutual agreement about a language game called "sales." Because the office is inhuman, it can only treat me as a thing like itself. I, who think of myself as a human being, and am "thought of" and treated as an analog to the machine — another machine. (p. 164)
Hummel examines the idea that "what characterizes" and in a sense constitutes "the bureaucratic office" is "frozen decisions" that remain even after the deciders are gone (p. 164).
Nowhere does this become more clear than when people freeze business or public-service decisions into a computer and then make other people subject to the computer's instructions. […] The computer provides us with an especially clear-cut example of the difference between communication and information precisely because the last human element has been squeezed out of the computer, seen as an organizational structure into which decisions are frozen. An office, on the other hand, still seem to be occupied by a human manager, giving the impression of a man-machine symbiosis. In general, computer-man exchanges can no longer be understood in terms of how language used to link humans because a computer is not part of the human species. (p. 165)
For dehumanization in the office in the age of the wholly mechanical typewriter, note "Josef K.’s workplace" in Orson Welles's 1962 film of Franz Kafka's The Trial, "where 850 secretaries banged typewriters at 850 office desks." These are striking images.[4][5]
More on Bureaucracy, language, and "the computer":
A computer can […] replace a large section of a business's or civil-service institution's accounting or payroll office, and it is, in effect, the accounting or payroll office, and it is more bureaucratic in Max Weber's sense than any structure that preceded it. Precomputer structures are mixtures of people and machines in which people still visibly dominate even if, for the sake of bureaucratic control and stability, they are supped to act like machines. For the segments that the computer takes over, this duality is resolved: the structure in which formerly twenty accountants performed calculating operations on a payroll is now a computer; the compute is the structure. When such a structure speaks […] the speech seems very strange to us — because all human components have been removed. What is left is myself and the IBM card, myself and the printout. (p. 168)
RDE, finishing, 5-20Mar24 f.
