Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 183

In the last several decades, bureaucratic organizations have undergone a number of important changes that do not fit well with Weber’s view of organizations. Indeed, the very notion, if not reality, of a bureaucracy in Weber’s terms is not only changing rapidly but also in some cases disappearing completely. For one thing, contrary to Weber’s thinking on the likelihood of the growth and spread of bureaucracy in organizations, many of the largest organizations, especially industrial organizations and labor unions, have been forced to downsize and, in the process, reduce the size of their bureaucracies dramatically (Hyman 2018). The idea that “bigger is better” is no longer the rule in most organizations. Instead of constantly adding new functions, and more employees, organizations are now likely to focus on their “core competencies.” For example, the Ford Motor Company is no longer making (among many other things) the steel for the frames of its cars and the rubber for their tires. In addition, in 2018 Ford announced that it was in the process of phasing out, or even dropping, the production of conventional cars and was going to focus in the future on manufacturing the more profitable SUVs and trucks. GM announced a similar cutback a few months later.

In essence, organizations have come to concentrate on being “lean and mean” (Harrison 1994). They have also sought to streamline their systems of production—to develop lean methods of production using more automated and robotized systems and fewer employees (Janoski 2015). Many newer organizations, such as Facebook and even Google, have learned crucial lessons from the problems experienced by organizational giants such as Ford. They are smaller and far less hierarchical; they are increasingly flat structures with the characteristics of social networks discussed in Chapter 4. They seek to avoid ever losing their focus or becoming too large and diverse. As a result, it is unlikely that they will ever need to downsize or simplify to the degree that Ford (and GM) has in order to accomplish these goals.

To adapt to a rapidly changing environment, contemporary organizations have also been forced to become more flexible and agile than the ideal-typical bureaucracy suggests. When today’s organizations lack such flexibility, there is a strong likelihood that they will decline or disappear. For instance, the video store chain Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010 (as of 2019 it had only one remaining store in Bend, Oregon) because it failed to adapt to competition from Netflix and, at least initially, its movies by mail. More important, it failed to anticipate the streaming of movies to one’s television or computer (and now to both smart TVs and regular TVs connected through devices such as Roku). Customers are no longer willing to travel to a video store when they can stream movies from the comfort of their homes via a cable provider such as Comcast or online from Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon.