Page 112 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Bureaucratic Conception of Pluralism
between bureaucrats and managers must be organized in a hierarchical
system that emphasizes knowledge and skill over personality or identity.
The classical Weberian conception of bureaucracy is a body of arrange-
ments for organizing information and communication into a system for
rational decision making and administration. He believed that the suc-
cessful pursuit of efficiency and expert administration leads naturally to
bureaucracy: well-delineated and fixed jurisdictions and functions, with
layersofclerk-likeworkershavingspecificknowledgeoftheall-important
files, the bureaucracy’s system for preserving information.
There is an important premise implicit in this familiar conception,
namely, that the information necessary for efficient administration is not
easy to come by. Weber’s argument assumes that information is scarce
and costly to assimilate and manage over time. Locating the right infor-
mation, storing it, and making it available within an organization at the
right time and place to people with the skill or expertise to use it is a
difficult task. Coordinating the activities of workers and decision makers
and communicating the results of their activities outside the organiza-
tion is also challenging. What Weber calls “the rational specialization of
functions and the rule of expert knowledge” is a system for organizing
information and bringing it to bear on decision making and the exer-
8
cise of private or public authority. The challenges associated with costly,
scarce information and effective communication are important reasons
why the pursuit of efficiency in administration leads to bureaucracy.
For Weber, then, bureaucracy is associated with the opposite of infor-
mation abundance: scarcity and costliness. Weber did not consider what
forms organizations might take if information were no longer scarce and
costly, because he and his contemporaries could observe no such exam-
ples. Contemporary scholars, on the other hand, have addressed that
question more directly. Sociologist Manuel Castells is one. In The Infor-
mation Age, an interpretation of economics, society, and culture in in-
formational terms, Castells argues that a new sociocultural system called
9
“informationalism” is replacing “industrialism. He interprets social fab-
ricsandculturesasregularized,“crystallized”patternsofcommunication
and information exchange. In this view, flows of information and com-
munication among human actors and institutions represent a kind of
historical variable with patterns and features that are distinctive to spe-
cific places and times. These may be a function of available technologies,

8
Ibid., p. 237.
9
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996).
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