Abstract:
Modern management theory often forgets more than it remembers.
'What's new?' is the refrain. Yet, we suggest, there is much that we
should already know from which we might appropriately learn, 'Lest we
forget'. The current paper takes its departure from two points of remembrance
that bear on the sustained assaults on bureaucracy that have been
unleashed by the critiques of recent years. These critiques include the
new public management literature as well as its inspiration in the new
literature of cultural entrepreneurialism. Both promise to dissolve
bureaucracy's iron cage. We explain, using the classical political themes
of oligarchy, democracy, and the production of elite power, why we
should consider such transubstantiation alchemical by confronting contemporary
discussions with the wisdom of an earlier, shrewder knowledge,
whose insights we need to recall to understand the complexity of
the hybridizations between supposedly opposite models of organizations.
