"BUREAUCRATIC" ELEMENTS IN ORGANIZATIONS: SOME RESEARCH FINDINGS.

During the course of a general comparative study of work organization in nonindustrial society, the data under analysis quite unexpectedly yielded a highly consistent pattern of relationships between certain "bureaucratic" organizational characteristics. If these relationships prove to have general validity, they imply a possibly highly fruitful reformulation of the Weberian model of "rational bureaucracy." Therefore they are presented here, despite the small number of cases on which they are based and the peripheral, "accidental" nature of the findings. The analysis is based on 25 examples of bureaucratic production organizations in 19 different societies, using data collected from the Human Relations Area Files, supplemented by additional ethnographic materials. The 25 cases utilized here represent a portion of a larger sample of 321 nonindustrial production organizations, used in the broader study referred to above. Owing to gaps in the data, as well as to the fact that bureaucracy is in any case fairly rare in nonindustrial production systems, only 38 of the original 321 cases could be definitely classified as bureaucratic according to criteria which we shall presently discuss. And only 25 of these 38 examples offered sufficiently complete data on all relevant points to enable their use in the present analysis.