What is a Bureaucracy?

To take an interest in bureaucracy is not to look back at the past, but towards the future. The central hypothesis of this book is that the end of bureaucracies, as they will be defined in a few moments, is the number one hell to face in the transformation of companies and organizations in coming years. It is no secret: there is not one management textbook or analysis of world trends that is not keenly interested in the end of bureaucracies, regardless of the author’s point of view: ‘Today in the realm of organizations we see and suffer from cumbersome bureaucracies which, more than ever, are signs of the poor management of meaning.’1 To which Waterman adds a more precise definition: ‘The problem is as follows: the bureaucracy, our most traditional form of organization, was created to manage the dayto- day problems of organizations: the sales department sells, manufacturing manufactures, and so on. So long as economic activity does not change tooquickly, bureaucracies get along fairly well.