If you work in an organization which has written job descriptions, think about whether there are two employees with the same job description who, in fact, do different things as their job. Either of these conditions would indicate that impersonal administration of written rules and policies is not occurring. For all of their formality, bureaucracies also have their informal side. But that informality does not solve a significant number of problems that have come to be associated with bureaucracies. Bureaucratic alienation is a big problem for most of the same reasons that Marx identified 150 years ago which we already looked at in Chapter 4.
Bureaucratic ritualism is also a big problem.
Robert Merton first identified this problem and applied the term to an administrator s preoccupation with its rules and regulations to the point of thwarting organizational goals. What this means is that an employee will continue to be a candidate for promotion until he gets a job he cannot do well. Another large problem is bureaucratic inertia, the tendency of bureaucratic organizations to resist changes in procedures or structure because it is used to doing certain things in certain ways. Bureaucracies can be both inhumane and dehumanizing. Work rules are often designed in such a way as to fail to account for the real needs of employees in terms of time, other parts of their lives, etc.