Rules don’t apply: Kafka’s insights on bureaucracy
指出韦伯的官僚制模型无法解释组织中的非正式行为，提出卡夫卡式的官僚制视角，强调目标分歧、世袭制、不成文规则和混乱等特征，并基于162项民族志数据展示这些特征对规则违反的影响。
Weber’s ideal typical model of bureaucracy constitutes the starting point for most scholarship on organizations. Much organizational behaviour, however occurs outside this formalized model. It is thus somewhat surprising that behaviours outside the formal-rational model are, more often than not, treated as aberrations. In contrast, the emerging critical literature on ‘inhabited institutions’ has identified such gaps in our theoretical understanding as foundational, warranting a more agentic conception of organizational life—a conception more fully acknowledging of and sensitive to the dynamics of power in organizational life. In this regard, we highlight four prevalent (though seldom theoretically incorporated) features of contemporary bureaucracies—divergent goals, patrimonialism, unwritten rules and chaos. These features, which we contend are no less critical to organizational functioning than those identified by Weber, constitute an organizational logic more compatible with a Kafkan vision of bureaucracy than with a Weberian one. Theorizing such attributes allows us to explore elements of bureaucratic life that the formal-rational model of bureaucracy renders largely invisible and is conceptually and empirically ill equipped to incorporate. An illustrative analysis, drawing on narrative data drawn from the population of organizational ethnographies ( n = 162) (1) demonstrates the prominence of such dynamics in organizational life; and (2) highlights their implications for rule breaking as a relatively common yet under-theorized occurrence. A core implication of our analysis and critique is that the social sciences need a fundamentally revised theory of bureaucracy capable of understanding bureaucracy’s power laden and often dystrophic features.