increasingly true of the organization as a whole.
In short, the organizational geography of super-industrial society can be expected to become increasingly kinetic, filled with turbulence and change. The more rapidly the environment changes, the shorter the life span of organization forms. In administrative structure, just as in architectural structure, we are moving from long-enduring to temporary forms, from permanence to transience. We are moving from bureaucracy to Ad-hocracy.
In this way, the accelerative thrust translates itself into organization. Permanence, one of the identifying characteristics of bureaucracy, is undermined, and we are driven to a relentless conclusion: man's ties with the invisible geography of organization turn over more and more rapidly, exactly as do his relationships with things, places, and the human beings who people these ever-changing organizational structures. Just as the new nomads migrate from place to place, man increasingly migrates from organizational structure to organizational structure.
Something else is happening, too: a revolutionary shift in power relationships. Not only are large organizations forced both to change their internal structure and to create temporary units, but they are also finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their traditional chains-ofcommand.
It would be pollyannish to suggest that workers in industry or government today truly 'participate' in the management of their enterprises – either in capitalist or, for that matter, in socialist and communist countries. Yet there is evidence that bureaucratic hierarchies, separating those who 'make decisions' from those who merely carry them out, are being altered, side-stepped or broken.
This process is noticeable in industry where, according to Professor William H. Read of the Graduate School of Business at McGill University, 'irresistible pressures' are battering hierarchical arrangements. 'The central, crucial and important business of organizations,' he declares, 'is increasingly shifting from up and down to 'sideways.'' What is involved in such a shift is a virtual revolution in organizational structure – and human relations. For people communicating 'sideways' – i.e., to others at approximately the same level of organization – behave differently, operate under very different pressures, than those who must communicate up and down a hierarchy.
To illustrate, let us look at a typical work setting in which a traditional bureaucratic hierarchy operates. While still a young man I worked for a couple of years as a millwright's helper in a foundry. Here, in a great dark cavern of a building, thousands of men labored to produce automobile crankcase castings. The scene was Dantesque – smoke and soot smeared our faces, black dirt covered the floors and filled the air, the pungent, choking smell of sulphur and burnt sand seared our nostrils. Overhead a creaking conveyor carried red hot castings and dripped hot sand on the men below. There were flashes of molten iron, the yellow flares of fires, and a lunatic cacophony of noises: men shouting, chains rattling, pug mills hammering, compressed air shrieking.
To a stranger the scene appeared chaotic. But those inside knew that everything was carefully organized. Bureaucratic order prevailed. Men did the same job over and over again. Rules governed every situation. And each man knew exactly where he stood in a vertical hierarchy that reached from the lowest-paid core paster up to the unseen 'they' who populated the executive suites in another building.
In the immense shed where we worked, something was always going wrong. A bearing would burn out, a belt snap or a gear break. Whenever this happened in a section, work would screech to a halt, and frantic messages would begin to flow up and down the hierarchy. The worker nearest the breakdown would notify his foreman. He, in turn, would tell the production supervisor. The production supervisor would send word to the maintenance supervisor. The maintenance supervisor would dispatch a crew to repair the damage.
Information in this system is passed by the worker 'upward' through the foreman to the production supervisor. The production supervisor carries it 'sideways' to a man occupying a niche at approximately the same level in the hierarchy (the maintenance supervisor), who, in turn, passes it 'downward' to the millwrights who actually get things going again. The information thus must move a total of four steps up and down the vertical ladder plus one step sideways before repairs can begin.
This system is premised on the unspoken assumption that the dirty, sweaty men down below cannot make sound decisions. Only those higher in the hierarchy are to be trusted with judgment or discretion. Officials at the top make the decisions; men at the bottom carry them out. One group represents the brains of the organization; the other, the hands.
This typically bureaucratic arrangement is ideally suited to solving routine problems at a moderate pace. But when things speed up, or the problems cease to be routine, chaos often breaks loose. It is easy to see why.
First, the acceleration of the pace of life (and especially the speed-up of production brought about by automation) means that every minute of 'down time' costs more in lost output than ever before. Delay is increasingly costly. Information must flow faster than ever before. At the same time, rapid change, by increasing the number of novel, unexpected problems, increases the amount of information needed. It takes more information to cope with a novel problem than one we have solved a dozen or a hundred times before. It is this combined demand for
A radical speed-up could have been effected in the foundry described above simply by allowing the worker to report the breakdown directly to the maintenance supervisor or even to a maintenance crew, instead of passing the news along through his foreman and production supervisor. At least one and perhaps two steps could have been cut from the four-step communication process in this way – a saving of from 25 to 50 percent. Significantly, the steps that might be eliminated are the up-and-down steps, the vertical ones.
Today such savings are feverishly sought by managers fighting to keep up with change. Shortcuts that by-pass the hierarchy are increasingly employed in thousands of factories, offices, laboratories, even in the military. The cumulative result of such small changes is a massive shift from vertical to lateral communication systems. The intended result is speedier communication. This leveling process, however, represents a major blow to the once- sacred bureaucratic hierarchy, and it punches a jagged hole in the 'brain and hand' analogy. For as the vertical chain of command is increasingly by-passed, we find 'hands' beginning to make decisions, too. When the worker by-passes his foreman or supervisor and calls in a repair team, he makes a decision that in the past was reserved for these 'higher ups.'
This silent but significant deterioration of hierarchy, now occurring in the executive suite as well as at the ground level of the factory floor, is intensified by the arrival on the scene of hordes of experts – specialists in vital fields so narrow that often the men on top have difficulty understanding them. Increasingly, managers have to rely on the judgment of these experts. Solid state physicists, computer programmers, systems designers, operation researchers, engineering specialists – such men are assuming a new decision-making function. At one time, they merely consulted with executives who reserved unto themselves the right to make managerial decisions. Today, the managers are losing their monopoly on decision-making.
More and more, says Professor Read of McGill, the 'specialists do not fit neatly together into a chain-of- command system' and 'cannot wait for their expert advice to be approved at a higher level.' With no time for decisions to wend their leisurely way up and down the hierarchy, 'advisors' stop merely advising and begin to make decisions themselves. Often they do this in direct consultation with the workers and ground-level technicians.
As a result, says Frank Metzger, director of personnel planning for International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, 'You no longer have the strict allegiance to hierarchy. You may have five or six different levels of the hierarchy represented in one meeting. You try to forget about salary level and hierarchy, and organize to get the job done.'
Such facts, according to Professor Read, 'represent a staggering change in thinking, action, and decision-making in organizations.' Quite possibly, he declares, 'the only truly effective methods for preventing, or coping with, problems of coordination and communication in our changing technology will be found in new arrangements of people and tasks, in arrangements which sharply break with the bureaucratic tradition.'
It will be a long time before the last bureaucratic hierarchy is obliterated. For bureaucracies are well suited to tasks that require masses of moderately educated men to perform routine operations, and, no doubt, some such operations will continue to be performed by men in the future. Yet it is precisely such tasks that the computer and automated equipment do far better than men. It is clear that in super-industrial society many such tasks will be performed by great self-regulating systems of machines, doing away with the need for bureaucratic organization. Far from fastening the grip of bureaucracy on civilization more tightly than before, automation leads to
