Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 84

Harvard University affords a glimpse into the inner workings of a professional bureaucracy. As in other organizations that employ large numbers of highly educated professionals, Harvard's operating core is large relative to other structural elements, although the technostructure has grown in recent years to accommodate mandated programs such as gender and racial equity. At the operating sphere, each individual school has substantial autonomy to chart its own course. Procedures for things like teaching evaluations that are typically campus‐wide at other universities are localized at Harvard. Few managerial levels exist between the strategic apex and the professors, creating a flat and decentralized profile.

Control relies heavily on professional training and indoctrination. Insulated from formal interference, professors have almost unlimited academic freedom to apply their expertise as they choose. Freeing highly trained experts to do what they do best produces many benefits but leads to challenges of coordination and quality control. Tenured professors, for example, are largely immune from formal sanctions. At Harvard, that has often protected senior faculty who were guilty of serial sexual harassment (Bikales, 2020). In the case of a professor whose teaching performance was moving from erratic to bizarre, a Harvard dean did the one thing he felt he could do—he relieved the professor of teaching responsibilities while continuing to pay his full salary. The dean was not disappointed when the professor quit in anger (Rosovsky, 1990).

A professional bureaucracy responds slowly to external change. Waves of reform typically produce little impact, because professionals often view any change in their surroundings as an annoying distraction. The result is a paradox: individual professionals may be at the forefront of their specialty, whereas the institution as a whole changes at a glacial pace. Professional bureaucracies regularly stumble when they try to exercise greater control over the operating core; requiring Harvard professors to follow standard teaching methods would produce a revolt and might do more harm than good.