The Corporate Reality

The surreallistic transition from the study of complex organizations from an academic perspective to actually participating in such structures can take on truly Kafka-esqe proportions.

Max Weber, in his seminal esay, mentioned some of the irony of the way that power is located and exercised within bureacracies. He stated that, by necessity, detail of knowledge is more closely concentrated at the lower levels of the organization.

In other words, people who do the real work have far more knowledge of the subject matter than those who tell them to do it. This gives people some bit of power over the actual functioning of a company. However, this power is extremely limited... managers (in other words, those who simply move the pawns) have control over those who know more than they do. This can create a situation wherein a few individuals at the bottom can hold the organization hostage to their individual whims (at least at the micro-level). The problem is that this power is limited, and in direct contrast over the decisions made by management which often has no clear understanding of how actual work is produced.

In reality this can get in the way of the very efficiency that bureaucratic structures are designed to create. Individuals at the lower levels carefully guard their knowledge, both to maintain some sense of individual power, as well as to maintain some sense of job security. Meanwhile managers are continually finding ways of exercising their power for similar reasons

All of this may be very amusing from the academic perspective, however when caught in the midst of this, it ceases to be so. It can be downright hellish for many people... add in the lucidity of having observed from the outside first, it can feel like something right out of Dante's Inferno.