Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer
in Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart micromanages inventory, allocates work hours to regional managers, and even controls the temperatures in its stores across the country. Its efficient use of technologies, such as barcode scans to track inventory, helps Walmart calculate what products it needs in its stores and predict restocking needs for specific items. Walmart has vertically integrated its operations, which means it manages the production and distribution of many of the products it sells. This allows it to exert precise control over its supply chain and keep its prices lower than most of its competitors.
However, bureaucracies are not always efficient, and as Reich and Bearman’s study of Walmart stores demonstrates, they may even be irrational. The daily experiences of Walmart workers are unpredictable due to the irrationality of consumers and arbitrary authority of store managers. To maximize profits, work schedules are determined by the minimal staff level needed to meet consumer demand. Store managers use algorithms of hourly sales data to set work schedules. However, consumers do not always conform to the algorithms. This results in Walmart employees being pulled, in a matter of minutes, from one task, such as stocking shelves, and pushed into another task, like checking out customers. Many workers resent managers who appear to have indiscriminate authority over when they work and the tasks they perform after they punch their time cards. This lack of job stability angers many workers, who feel like they lack autonomy and respect. Reich and Bearman (2018, 146) suggest that Walmart workers and other employees in the retail sector, who are paid notoriously low wages, “care more intensely about dignity than wages.” ●
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Learn more about Reich and Bearman’s research findings, including how they involved their students in their study of Walmart workers.
Each type of authority can spawn its own organizational form. However, rational-legal authority is most associated with bureaucracy. In comparison to the bureaucracy, organizations based on traditional and charismatic authority are generally less rational (IS’s organizational structure may have been, at least for a time, an exception). They are, for example, less efficient than is the highly efficient bureaucracy.
Rationality and Irrationality
Much sociological research on organizations in the twentieth century took Weber’s highly rational model of a bureaucracy as a starting point for the study of the ways in which bureaucracies actually worked. However, much of that research found Weber’s ideal-typical model to be unrealistic. For one thing, there is no single organizational model. The nature of the organization and its degree of rationality are contingent on such factors as the organization’s size and the technologies it employs (Orlikowski 2010; Pugh et al. 1968). For another, researchers found Weber’s ideal-typical bureaucracy to be overly rational. This is not surprising because for Weber ([1903–1917] 1949, 47), it was “not a description of reality.” Weber purposely exaggerated its degree of rationality. The ideal-typical bureaucracy is a fiction designed to serve as a reference point for the study of real-world bureaucracies. However, researchers often overlooked the fact that this ideal type is a methodological tool and mistook it for an attempt to accurately describe bureaucracies. They concluded that, at best, real-world organizations exhibit a limited form of rationality, or what is called bounded rationality (Simon [1945] 1976; Williamson 1975, 1985). That is, rationality is limited by the instabilities and conflicts that exist in most, if not all, organizations and the domains in which they operate (Scott 2014). It is also restricted by inherent limitations on humans’ capacities to think and act in a rational manner. Some members of the organization are capable of acting more rationally than others are. However, none are able to operate in anything approaching the fully rational manner associated with Weber’s ideal-typical organization (Cyert and March 1963).
The military is an example of an organization with bounded rationality. One source of instability in the military is the cycling of personnel in and out of it, especially in combat zones. Newcomers to the battle zone rarely know what to do. Their presence in, say, a platoon with experienced combat veterans can reduce the ability of the entire group to function. Another larger source of instability lies in the conflicts that exist between branches of the armed forces, as well as between central command and those in the field. In addition, military actions are often so complex and far-reaching that military personnel cannot fully understand them or rationally decide what actions to take. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the “fog of war” (Blight and Lang 2005).
A good deal of sociological research on bureaucracies has dealt with how the rational (that is, what is efficient) often becomes irrational (or inefficient). This is often referred to as the “irrationality of rationality”—the irrationality that often accompanies the seemingly rational actions associated with the bureaucracy (Ritzer 2019). For example, Robert Merton ([1949] 1968) and other observers (Gupta 2012) found that instead of operating efficiently, bureaucracies introduce great inefficiency due to, among other things, “red tape.” Red tape is a colloquial term for the rules a bureaucracy’s employees are needlessly required to follow, as well as the unnecessary online and offline questions to be answered and forms to be filled out by the clients of the bureaucracy. Bureaucracies generally demand much more information than they need, often to protect themselves from complaints, bad publicity, and lawsuits. Red tape also includes the telephone time wasted by keeping clients on hold and forcing them to make their way through a maze of prerecorded “customer service” options.
Parkinson’s law was conceived as a humorous attempt to point to another source of irrationality in bureaucratic organizations. It was formulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1955), who worked in the British civil service and thus was intimately familiar with the ways in which large bureaucratic organizations functioned. Parkinson’s law stated that work expands to fill whatever time is available for it to be completed. Thus, if a bureaucrat is assigned three reports to complete in a month, it will require a month’s work to complete all three. If that same employee is assigned two reports during that time, it will take a month to complete two. And the task will still take a month even if the assignment calls for completing only one report.
Robert Merton is considered to be the founder of the sociology of science. His work, mostly in the structural-functional tradition, was influential in public policy. For instance, his research on successfully integrated communities was a key element in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate public schools. His conceptual contributions to sociology include the bureaucratic personality, unintended consequences, and the self-fulfilling prophecy, among others.
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Another source of irrationality is that described by Robert Merton ([1949] 1968) as the bureaucratic personality, someone who follows the rules of the organization to such a great extent that the organization’s ability to achieve its goals is subverted. For example, an admissions clerk in a hospital emergency department might require incoming patients to fill out so many forms that they do not get needed medical care promptly.
In these and many other ways, the actual functioning of bureaucracies is at variance with Weber’s ideal-typical characterization.
The Informal Organization
A great deal of research in the twentieth century focused on the informal organization, that is, how the organization actually works as opposed to the way it is supposed to work as depicted, for example, in Weber’s ideal-typical formal bureaucracy (Blau 1963). For instance, those who occupy offices lower in the bureaucratic hierarchy often have greater knowledge of and competence in specific issues than do those who rank above them. Thus, fellow employees may seek the advice of the lower-level bureaucrat rather than the one who ranks higher in the authority structure. The informal organization can help make up for inadequacies in the formal organization (Gulati and Puranam 2009). It might lead employees to take very useful actions that are ignored by the formal organization. For example, students constitute an