Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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СКАЧАТЬ law of oligarchy” (Martin 2015). Those in power manipulate the organization so that the leaders and their supporters can stay in power indefinitely. At the same time, they make it difficult for others to get or to keep power. While oligarchy certainly develops in some organizations, in reality its occurrence is neither “iron” nor a law. That is, most organizations do not become oligarchical. Nevertheless, the tendency toward oligarchy is another important organizational process not anticipated by Weber’s ideal-typical bureaucracy.

      Weber’s model also makes no provision for infighting within organizations. However, internal squabbles, and sometimes outright battles, are an everyday phenomenon within organizations. This is particularly evident in the government and other very large organizations, where one branch or office often engages in pitched turf battles with others. For example, an anonymous official in the Trump administration published an op-ed piece in the New York Times dealing with the systematic resistance to Trump and his policies (Anonymous 2018). In Fear, Woodward (2018) details highly dysfunctional turf battles in the Trump administration. The secretaries of Defense and State not only battled one another but also an array of Trump’s advisers. More striking were the “nasty” and “bloody” battles among those advisers, including Trump’s daughter who had no official position in the administration but who called herself the “first daughter” (Woodward 2018, 145; 237).

      Beyond the battles, bureaucratic principles are routinely ignored in the Trump administration. On several occasions officials, frightened by Trump’s proposed, ill-thought-out actions, took worrisome memos off his desk or “slow walked” actions proposed by Trump so that he would forget them or they would not be implemented. Trump himself undermined the formal organization by, for example, telling an assistant to bypass his chief of staff and come directly to him.

      Contemporary Organizational Realities

      As the social world has changed, so too has sociological thinking about many things, including organizations. New concepts are supplementing the concept of bureaucracy to enrich our understanding of these new realities. These concepts include gendered and network organizations and others that help inform our efforts to deal with organizational challenges such as sexual harassment, outsourcing of jobs, McDonaldization, and globalization.

      Gender Inequalities

      Weber’s model does not account for discrimination within organizations. In the ideal bureaucracy, any worker with the necessary training can fill any job. However, as “gendered organization” theorists, such as Joan Acker (1990), have shown, bureaucracies do not treat all workers the same. Jobs are often designed for an idealized worker—one who has no obligations except to the organization. Women, and sometimes men, who carry a responsibility for child-rearing can have difficulty fitting this model. Women may face the “competing devotions” of motherhood and work (Wharton and Blair-Loy 2006). Some women who face inflexible workplaces due to gendered organizational practices and family obligations opt to become self-employed (Thébaud 2016). Organizations may also discriminate (consciously or unconsciously) in hiring and promotions, with white men (who tend to populate the higher levels of bureaucracies) being promoted over women and minorities. Some women in male-dominated business organizations find that they hit a “glass ceiling”—a certain level of authority in a company or organization beyond which they cannot rise (Gorman and Kmec 2009; Wasserman and Frenkel 2015). This is also true in other contexts, such as medicine and higher education (Hart 2016; Zhuge et al. 2011). Women can see the top—hence the “glass”—but cannot reach it. Within other organizations, particularly female-dominated ones, men can find themselves riding the “glass escalator” (Williams 1995). This is an invisible force that propels them past equally competent, or even more competent, women to positions of leadership and authority (Dill, Price-Glynn, and Rakovski 2016).

      In a global context, American female executives face a “double-paned” glass ceiling. There is the pane associated with the employing company in the United States, and there is a second pane women executives encounter when they seek work experience in the corporation’s foreign locales. This is a growing problem, because experience overseas is increasingly a requirement for top-level management positions in multinational corporations, but corporations have typically “masculinized” these expatriate positions and thereby disadvantaged women. Among the problems experienced by women who succeed in getting these positions are sexual harassment, a lack of availability of programs (such as career counseling) routinely available to men, a lack of adequate mentoring, and male managers who are more likely to promote male rather than female expatriates. Much of the blame for this problem lies in the structure of the multinational corporations and with the men who occupy high-level management positions within them. However, research has shown that female managers’ greater passivity and lesser willingness to promote themselves for such expatriate management positions contribute to their difficulties (Insch, McIntyre, and Napier 2008).

      While most of these ideas have been developed based on studies of American organizations, they likely apply as well, or better, globally. For example, a recent study found that the glass ceiling exists in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (Khuong and Chi 2017). Figure 5.2 shows where women in industrialized nations have the best chance of circumventing the glass ceiling—that is, of being treated equally in the work world. Sweden is best for working women; South Korea is the worst. The United States ranks below the average of other industrialized countries.

      A glass ceiling relates to vertical mobility—and its absence—for women in organizations. The “glass cage” deals with the horizontal segregation of women (and other minorities; Gabriel, Korczynski, and Rieder 2015; Kalev 2009). The idea here is that men and women doing the same or similar jobs operate in separate and segregated parts of the organization. As in the case of the glass ceiling, women can see what is going on in other cages, but, compared with men, they find it more difficult to move between the cages. Although the cage is made of glass, the skills and abilities of women tend to be less visible, and, as a result, stereotypes about them abound. In addition, women have less communication with those outside the cage, are less likely to learn about jobs available there, are not as likely to get high-profile assignments, and are less likely to get needed training. The situation confronting women would improve if there were more collaboration across the boundaries of the glass cage. Of course, the ultimate solution involves the elimination of the glass cage, as well as the glass ceiling.

      The concept of the “glass cliff” describes what can happen to women who experience upward mobility when the organization is going through hard times (Peterson 2016; Ryan and Haslam 2005). The implication is that women who rise to high levels at such times end up in highly precarious positions. Of course, the same would be true of men, but Ryan and Haslam found that women are more likely than men to move into positions on boards of directors in organizations that have been performing badly. This means they are more likely than males to find themselves at the edge of that organizational cliff. A disproportionate number of those women (and minorities) are likely to be demoted or fall off that cliff (i.e., lose their jobs) and be replaced by males (Cook and Glass 2014).

      Description

      Figure 5.2 Glass Ceiling Index

      Source: “The glass-ceiling index,” 15 February, 2018, The Economist. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/15/the-glass-ceiling-index.

      Other Problems

      Beyond the problems associated with gendered organizations, the ideal-typical bureaucracy makes no provision for an array of other problems in the organization or for problematic organizations. СКАЧАТЬ