Bureaucracy for the 21st Century : Clarifying and Expanding Our View of Bureaucratic Organization

This review aims to redress the growing gap between the receding discourse on bureaucracy and bureaucracy’s continuing presence as the predominant organizational form. Reviewing a century of organizational research on bureaucracy, we find three main perspectives, which developed in succession but persist in parallel: bureaucracy as an organizing principle, as a paradigmatic form of organization, and as one type of structure among others. We argue that these three perspectives should be brought into closer dialogue and expanded, so we can overcome the de- contextualized, reified, and atomized ways in which bureaucracy is often viewed. To that end, we offer three pathways to stimulate future research on bureaucracy in its wider context, bureaucracy in action, and bureaucracy’s interdependencies and configurations. Finally, we discuss how we can better understand the various guises in which bureaucracy continues into the 21st century