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Managerial Strategies of Domination. Power in Soft Bureaucracies

David Courpasson
Organization Studies 2000 21: 141
DOI: 10.1177/0170840600211001

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 Managerial Strategies of Domination. Power in
Soft Bureaucracies*
David Courpasson

Abstract

David Courpasson This paper discusses the emergence and reinforcement of organizational political
Ecole de regimes based on domination and centralization in French organizations.
Management, Domination and power are old concepts in organizational sociology, but the
Lyon, France confrontation of two well-known approaches to politics in organizations, that of
Weber and that of Crozier, suggests that an 'archaic' notion such as domination is
still very useful for understanding how business leaders 'govern' organizations
today.
Based on empirical studies, the paper proposes that organizations should be seen
as 'soft bureaucracies', in which centralization and entrepreneurial forms of gov-
ernance are combined. Thus, choosing a Weberian point of view, this paper simul-
taneously describes organizations as 'structures of domination' and as 'structures
of legitimacy'. It defends the idea that, in spite of the success of the network form
utopia, the re-emergence of bureaucracies is a sign that organizations are more and
more politically centralized and governed.

Descriptors: power, domination, legitimacy, control, governance, bureaucracy

Introduction

How can more flexible, organic, decentralized organizations be governed?

This is the same old question organization scholars have been asking for
more than twenty years. More precisely, their question was: How can orga-
nizations be both simultaneously innovative ('organic structures work best')
and yet be able to implement and even control these innovations ('bureau-
cratic structures work best')? One classical answer to that question can be
found in a liberal version of organizational governance, derived from a
'managerial tradition' (Hardy and Clegg 1997). If we follow Crozier, for
instance, we can conclude that organizations are governed informally
through the micropolitics of gaming and through multiple decentralized
negotiations concerning power, creating an 'entrepreneurial' form of gov-
Organization
Studies ernance (Friedberg 1993).
2000, 21/1 However, there is also another answer deriving from Weber's framework:
141-161 micropolitics of gaming, when they exist, are necessarily influenced by pre-
© 2000 EGOS
0170-8406/00 vailing authority. Therefore, the essence of governance lies on a structure
0021---0009 $3.00 of legitimacy. Thus, the problem of organizational leaders is to elaborate

from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

142 David Courpasson

and reproduce specific resources of legitimacy within a 'bureaucratic' form

of governance.
Today, most organization scholars assume that soft controls, soft manage-
rial practices and policies have supplanted hierarchical and bureaucratic
control, and that the entrepreneurial form of governance is pervasive (du
Gay 1996) - but is that really the case?
This article aims at showing and illustrating that the real explanation is not
so simplistic. The hypothesis it will defend is that contemporary tools and
strategies of ·soft' control and coordination are not the opposite of hierar-
chical and bureaucratic governance. To some extent, we can even assume
that this soft governance is fused with and is itself governed by legitimate
authority. In other words, existing legitimate authority perpetuates itself by
incorporating soft practices and articulating these with hierarchical and for-
mal bureaucratic practices. This is the consequence of the fact that games
and soft controls are influenced by prevailing authority. This prevalence is
what we could call 'domination'.
To develop this hypothesis, we proceed in three stages. First, we propose
a brief view on the theoretical opposition existing between Weber and
Crozier concerning the topic of organizational governance. This opposition
illuminates the debate between 'bureaucratic' and 'entrepreneurial' systems
of governance. Second, we propose to analyze two case studies illustrating
the logic of incorporating soft methods of governance within a general
framework of political domination. In the first case study, we tackle the
question of the decision of redundancy, showing that business leaders mix
an authoritarian centralized decision with a soft argumentation and with
soft methods of managing the effects of redundancies. In the second case
study, we analyze the ways used by business leaders to control professional
elites, and to legitimize the organizational fact that experts have to be
controlled. exactly like others, and sometimes more so. In both cases,
the difficulty of strategies of domination constrains business leaders to
elaborate complex structures of legitimacy to perpetuate their centralized
authority.
Third, we propose the concept of 'soft bureaucracy' to gain an under-
standing of how organizations are evolving towards an ambivalent struc-
ture of governance, within which domination is not essentially exerted by
means of, for example, violence, direct punishment or local hierarchical
supervision, but through sophisticated managerial strategies.

Weber vs. Crozier : Structures of Domination vs. Structures of

Games

For Weber, organizations exist because 'certain persons will act in such a
way as to carry out the order governing the organization' (Weber 1968:
49). Organizations are sustained by an expectation of confidence in the obe-
dience of other members. The organizational order is based on the couple
[confidence-obedience], which creates the structure of domination.
Managerial Strategies of Domination 143

In a Weberian way, power occurs within the order governing the organi-
zation, i.e. the structure of domination: 'Without exception, every sphere
of social action is profoundly influenced by structures of domination. In a
great number of cases, the emergence of a rational association from amor-
phous social action has been due to domination and the way in which it
has been exercised. Even where this is not the case, the structure of dom-
ination and its unfolding is decisive in determining the form of social action
and its orientation towards a "goal"' (Weber 1968: 941).
Power is the instrument of 'structures of domination', whose objective is
to construct, justify and stabilize the obedience of people. In Weber's con-
ceptual framework, domination is never assimilated to enslavement or even
to mere subordination. It is a political means of building a social order pro-
ducing efficiency both for those in power and for subordinates. That is why
organizational centralism is not a priori rejected by Weber, because this
political form of organization can be legitimate.
Legitimacy, in the political Weberian sense, is the 'recognition of the right
to govern' (Coicaud 1997: 13). Following Aron in his interpretation of
Weber (1976: 52), legitimacy is the capacity, at the same time, to justify
that some individuals hold the power to govern (which may include coer-
cion and violence) and that other individuals give their consent and submit
to authority. Acceptance by the latter is the essential condition of the right
to govern. Legitimacy, then, implies action on the part of individuals, as
Coicaud argues: 'to consent is to accept a situation including some renounce-
ment, which is shown through a duty of obedience' (1997: 17).
The most solid grounds for domination are not so much in power as in the
belief of the legitimacy of power: '[ ... ] all dominations seek to awaken and
maintain the belief in their legitimacy' (Weber 1995: 286). Here, the implicit
conception of action is very clear: the belief in legitimacy is neither the
result of passive obedience, nor the result of internalization of norms com-
ing from nowhere. It comes from the assessment of the 'conscious validity'
of a domination, based on a set of criteria. Judgements of validity engage
the reflexive capacity of individuals (Weber 1995: 72). Domination is rooted
in pragmatic action, not in passivity and not in internalization, as in a
Durkheimian way. For Durkheim, 'constraint' [he does not use the term
'domination'] cannot be reduced to coercion or external obligation.
Durkheim's 'moral constraint' and its 'obligatory characteristic' (Durkheim
1967: 49) is an authority that imposes respect, and that people internalize
more than they undergo: 'at the same time it goes over our head [it] is
within us' (Durkheim 1967: 62).
In short, three main ideas derive from the Weberian tradition:
1. Organizations can be centrally governed, i.e. organizational governance
can correspond to a political structure stimulating intentional and deliber-
ate strategies of domination.
2. Domination can be, under some conditions [especially under conditions
of legitimacy], the most efficient mode of governing organizations, both
for people and for 'dominators'.
3. Thus, because of this efficiency, obedience is always rational, and can
144 David Courpasson

even be considered as the most desirable way of living and acting within
organizations. Roughly speaking, there is a capacity both to govern and to
be governed.
This tradition, even if not prevalent today in organization studies, is still
alive, for instance in Giddens's framework. Giddens defines power as 'the
capacity to achieve outcomes' ( 1984: 257). In this sense, he is close to a
'productive' view of power (Bourricaud 1977: Clegg 1989). Thus. power
is not an obstacle to emancipation; on the contrary, it can mediate it. In
the context of 'structuration theory', Giddens admits that power has simul-
taneously constraining and emancipating properties: 'Action depends upon
the capability of the individual to "make a difference·· to a pre-existing
state of affairs or course of events. An agent ceases to be such if he or she
loses the capability to "make a difference", that is to exercise some sort of
power' (Giddens 1984: 139).
According to Giddens, power is engendered by structures of domination.
and by their reproduction. However, (in a Weberian way), Giddens never
analyzes domination as enslavement: 'a situation of "absence of choice'',
within which an individual can be socially constrained, must not be assim-
ilated to a dissolution of action as such' ( 1987: 63). Domination is a nec-
essary structural medium which renders power necessary. That is why
domination is the very condition of the existence of codes of signification:
power and domination cannot be analyzed only in terms of asymetry of
distribution. They are incorporated in human action. and are subject to indi-
vidual interpretation. i.e. to legitimization. Domination, therefore, implies
action rather than submission. Where there is room for discretion. it is pos-
sible to resist, and to contest the interpretation of both the rules and the
game. The control of organizational order over subordinates can never be
total.
On the one hand, in the Weberian framework, domination appears to be a
social construction corresponding to intentional strategies developed by
groups of people aiming at concentrating power. However, this concentra-
tion is always a 'project' which has to be permanently sustained by legit-
imacy, under pain of contestation. On the other hand, domination and action
are intertwined: individual action is a condition for the success of domi-
nation. Action may signify that domination has to be accepted and obedi-
ence consciouslv analyzed, as a rational decision.
For Crozier - The Bureaucratic Phenomenon ( 1963, 1964) - and Crozier
and Friedberg ( 1977) - The Actor and the System - domination corre-
sponds to a very different set of mechanisms. Crozier conceptualized power
as a resource in the face of uncertainty. The major stake for people in orga-
nizations is to control uncertainty, and uncertainty is a source of power and
an opportunity for hidden struggles. Any person in a system can exploit
uncertainties and create rules in his/her own interest: so each individual
may "have' power. For this game to be possible, there has to be a 'liberal
organization' where all individuals are able to negotiate their positions in
a relatively 'free market' of rules and power resources. In this situation.
people can be defined as actors, who are capable of playing with the exist-
Managerial Strategies of Domination 145

ing rules of the organization, of taking risks and of making decisions. For
Crozier and Friedberg, the issue is to deal with ineluctable constraints, and
the solution is a sort of compromise between action and constraint:
' ... even in the most extreme situations, men always keep a minimum of liberty
that they cannot help using to "beat the system" .... Indeed, the autonomy of the
subordinate in his work and the social and technical traditions of his job ... defines
relatively strictly the field of the negotiation .... Not only do people not adapt pas-
sively to the circumstances, but they are capable of playing with them .... ' (Crozier
and Friedberg 1977: 42-44)
These games tend to structure the system of action and thus the temporary
system of power within the system of action. In Crozier's framework,
workers are indefatigable in defending their autonomy, privileges (such
as maintenance workers of the 'tobacco monopoly', 1963-1964), and
power.
Nevertheless, Crozier maintains that games to control uncertainty take place
within a constraining power structure that is already in place. He does not
take the possibility of domination into account. In his view, domination is
partly linked to the abstract form of bureaucratic rules, but it is not ana-
lyzed as such. Crozier and, more recently, Friedberg (1993), refuse to think
in terms of domination, because it is equivalent to centralization and the
concentration of power, and this does not fit their view of power. For them,
people can play with constraints and rules, but not with an abstract and ter-
rifying form of domination. Thus, especially for Friedberg, who reinforces
this point, domination ignores action. This theory, therefore, ignores the
question of legitimacy, and it is not useful to integrate it, because power
is considered a 'technology of manipulation exercised by men as decision
makers, with respect to the effectiveness of such decisions' (Clegg 1975:
52). People manipulate their situation, by using strategies to protect their
specific interests, as they perceive them. Legitimacy is not included in the
model, because such perceptions are always local, contingent and situa-
tional; organizations are political entities, not because of the existence of
a structure of domination, but because of the existence of permanent local
strategic games for autonomy (and self-protection), micropolitical games
that Friedberg calls 'social entrepreneurship' (1993).
For Crozier and Friedberg, the system of organizational governance is
produced by a set of local games, and not by a political centralization
capable of ruling and imposing people's stakes and people's strategies.
In this sense, we can consider this conception to be opposed to that of
Weber.
However, the 'projects of domination' presented below show that systems
of governance are not produced 'from the bottom' nor by views imposed
by an abstract group. Rather, they result from specific managerial strate-
gies, the legitimacy of which have to be built up in line with Weber's
theory.
146 David Courpasson

Ways of Governing Through 'Soft Domination': Two Case Studies

We analyze two cases of 'strategies of domination' observed in French

organizations in relation to two political decisions: planned redundancy
schemes, and strategies of control over professional elites. In such situa-
tions, several challenges have to be tackled.
Case Study 1: How can redundancy decisions be legitimized, especially
those involving mass redundancy? Some studies conducted recently in
France give insight into managerial rationales of redundancy, viewing them
as political decisions whereby those in power become involved in a com-
plex process of legitimization. These studies show that the legitimacy of
managerial authority is founded on a complex combination of 'hard' cen-
tralized decisions and sets of 'soft' arguments and practices aimed at avoid-
ing contestation.
Case Study 2: How can rules be imposed on members of professional elites,
whose system of rules is based largely on autonomy? How can individu-
alistic groups be governed, when (in Crozier's terms) they have very strong
resources of their own for coping with uncertainty and for negotiating their
own personal positions within (and outside) the organization? This situa-
tion allows us to confront both frameworks, the Weberian and the
Crozierian, to find out if bureaucratic rules and strategies have been
replaced by an entrepreneurial conception of governance.
The first case study is borrowed from two surveys conducted in French
organizations, the first, by Chevalier and Dure, in 1994. and the second,
by Colin and Rouyer, in 1996. Survey l is founded on an analysis of the
influence of different managerial ratios on the systems of governance. It
uses a redundancy decision to demonstrate the power of impersonal figures
in these systems. Survey 2 is founded on an analysis of the application of
the law concerning planned redundancy schemes in France (the objective
of the "Aubry' Law of 27 January 1993, named after the then French min-
ister of Labour, was to avoid or at least limit the number of dismissals).
The authors conducted interviews with different actors in the redundancy
process (local unions, labour administration, consulting firms specialized
in outplacement ... ), and analyzed documents concerning 56 cases of
planned redundancy schemes.
The second case study is taken from three surveys conducted between
1996 and 1997 in large French organizations, by the author of this article.
Table I summarizes the main features of the methodology and objectives
of these studies.
The organizations investigated in this second case study were all engaged
in profound changes in their systems of governance: project management,
transversality, decentralization of profit centres, and the rapid implantation
of logics of merit and of individualized performance. Bureaucracy was
apparently disappearing from their political landscape and being replaced
by ·enterprise', to use Du Gay's (1996) terms.
 Managerial Strategies of Domination 147

Table I
Summary Study 1 (realized in 1996): insurance company - 25 semi-structured interviews of about
Presentation of 2 hours with risk managers.
Case Studies Interview Themes: How do risk managers consider the notion of 'calculated risk' in the tire
insurance sector? How can senior managers control the quality of decisions made by these
experts 'J

Study 2 (realized in 1997): distribution of energy; international development department:

27 semi-structured interviews of about 2 hours with project managers and project engineers.
Interview Themes: What are the major changes in jobs in the international sector? Is it possible
to implement performance appraisal tools in departments ?

Study 3 (realized in 1997): building trade; 50 semi-structured interviews of about 2 hours

with project managers. managers and senior managers in the commercial sector.
Inten-iew Themes: forms of hierarchy. careers and competence models in the face of new
business constraints.

Case Study 1 : The Power of Managerial 'Indicators' and Impersonal

Systems of Governance

In France, an influential current of research, exammmg the influence of

management tools on decisions and on individual and collective behaviour,
has developed during the last two decades. The original and quite provoca-
tive idea of these studies, was that management tools could mechanically
generate 'choices and behaviours that escape men's will, sometimes even
their consciousness' (Berry 1983: 4). Although this view of management
tools as invisible pilots of managerial and individual behaviour has been
moderated recently (Moisdon 1997), it nevertheless maintains that there are
endogeneous instrumental determinants of managerial decisions in organi-
zations.
In that way, Chevalier and Dure (1994) have suggested that the rationality
of a decision such as massive dismissals does not only rely on an economic
view of organizations, but also on the 'domination' of different norms and
ratios explicitly shared by business leaders.
• One ratio concerns the average cost of a job, which is estimated at
around FF 200,000 (approximately £20,000). In other words, their study
clearly shows that senior managers decide to initiate a planned redun-
dancy scheme from the moment that they can objectivate the link
between the losses presented at the last board meeting, and the amount
of people that they are obliged to make redundant. The magic figure of
FF 200,000, which becomes an institutionalized managerial indicator,
is systematically invoked to explain and justify, not only the political
decision of redundancy, but also the exact amount of people to fire.
Thus, it becomes an instrument of legitimation, based on the power of
an amount that is understood, more or less similarly, by every senior
manager and by every human resource manager who deals 'reasonably'
with this kind of problem.
• An implicit norm of 'managerial virility' implies that 'good' senior
managers must make violent decisions in their careers to demonstrate,
148 David Courpasson

particularly to shareholders, that they are competent. strong and reli-

able. This norm often plays a powerful role in senior managers' careers
in France. A human resource manager in the pharmaceutical industry
helped us to confirm this hypothesis by showing how prevalent it is for
managers to demonstrate their capability to 'close a factory under good
social conditions', (E.M., Lyon 1998, confidential research report).
• Another norm concerns the distribution of job suppressions among the
different parts of the organization (departments and factories). In most
cases, Chevalier and Dure discovered that business leaders adopt an
egalitarian approach when deciding on 'who' and 'where· will be
directly affected. This approach tends to facilitate the general legitima-
tion of the main dismissal decision, because it is based on a social rather
than an economic view point. Business leaders then use an argument
of corporate solidarity to avoid contestation.
• Lastly, business leaders appear almost systematically to use the argu-
ment of external threat and pressure to explain their decision. The cen-
tralization and power of this decision are simultaneously justified by a
prevailing external authority, whose business leaders are the legitimate
representatives.
In the same way, senior managers can also dissimulate their personal deci-
sion behind the legitimate domination of the ratio and of the implicit norm,
because it is generally accepted that they are constrained to obey this relent-
less external logic. They are not fully responsible for the decision. but they
are legitimated (in the shareholder's eyes at least, but also progressively in
organizational members' eyes) by the decision. This is a first example of the
paradoxical legitimacy we are speaking about: the legitimacy of senior man-
agers constrained to make violent decisions, in other words a legitimacy
based on powerlessness. Paradoxically, powerlessness helps to impose a cen-
tralized decision, and a centralized legitimation of the decision, because it
is accompanied by powerful instrumental norms. To a certain extent, this
study reveals the persistence of an impersonal and centralized system of
governance in organizations.
This is partly confirmed by Survey 2, where Colin and Rouyer observe that
in each of the 56 cases they have analyzed, senior managers have refused to
negotiate the dismissal decision, because they consider it as being their exclu-
sive responsibility: 'the right of trade unions to interfere in the management
of organization and their competence is questioned by senior managers ....
The second kind of argument, more systematically used, is the ineluctability
of dismissals .... dismissal is thus presented as the only possible solution,
alternative solutions being considered as already explored .... The economic
constraint is considered as external and therefore, dismissals are not nego-
tiable' (Colin and Rouyer 1996: 9).
These cases confirm the existence of a liberal legitimacy, based on ineluct-
ability and on powerlessness. This external fate tends to increase the inter-
nal managerial power.
They also show that the only aspect of dismissal that business leaders are
prepared to negotiate is outplacement. Political centralized dismissal deci-
Managerial Strategies of Domination 149

sions are all the more acceptable as they are accompanied by specific 'soft'
measures which minimize the social effects of the dismissals. Managerial
power can therefore be shared, once the decision is made and legitimized.
Thus, the initial bureaucratic decision, founded on economic and social
norms produced partly outside the organization, is progressively combined
with a system of internal and partly decentralized negotiation concerning
the concrete consequences of the decision.

Case Study 2 : The Domination of Subordinates Who Belong to an Elite

In French organizations as elsewhere, new kinds of 'professional elites' are

represented. In order to define the concept of elite, we refer to Aron's analy-
sis of Pareto's theory of elites: 'the elite is made up of those who have
merited good marks in the competition of life, or who have drawn a win-
ning number in the lottery of "social" existence' (Aron 1976: 460). There
is also an organizational way of defining elites, according to Crozier (in a
very French style): elites are 'milieus of managers gathered by a network
of cooperative relationships and of rivalry based on complicity and pro-
tections' (Crozier 1970: 158). In this conception, elites are like communi-
ties, grounded on similar stakes of power and of destiny, thus characterized
by an ambivalence between solidarity and competition. In elite groups, indi-
viduals face the same kind of threats and the same fragility against the
'struggle for positions of privilege'.
The way these populations are dominated raises interesting questions. They
are legally in a subordination relationship, but they hold resources of power
which make them apparently less disposed to obey and accept organiza-
tional rules as their own rules. They appear to develop a sort of 'self-
governance' based on self-designed rules of action. But it is not so simple.
Our studies reveal the existence of four main kinds of 'self-governing rules',
which can be connected with two strategies of domination developed by
business leaders.

The Self-governing Rules Created by Professional Elites

Responsibility Rules
The elites we have observed are often active in transversal projects involv-
ing different departments of the organization. The diversity of interfaces in
the management of projects and business affairs often confronts the elite
with a wide variety of vested interests; thus, their action is essentially com-
posed of negotiations and power games to reach compromises.
Such professional actions are always based on demands from other units
within the firm. This position often makes professionals unpopular in the
organization. Moreover, their assignments in teams modified with each new
contract or business affair, tend to minimize the responsibility of individ-
uals in the case of failure. Who can be held legitimately responsible for
projects involving decisions that are hard to identify, locate and attribute,
because they are often made within temporary networks? The individuals
150 David Courpasson

whom we interviewed were quite open in recognizing this as a way of

avoiding personal responsibility:
'nobody is responsible alone, so nobody is responsible, because it is too difficult
for management to divide the process.' (a risk manager)
'From the moment when several persons are involved in the process, the level of
risk is smaller for each of us.' (a business engineer)

One can always find a reason why a project or a commercial relationship

failed: the failure of a consulting project in a foreign subsidiary can be
explained, for example, by problems with the local management or with
the unpredictable behaviour of a local client:
'as the local culture is very particular, one cannot always know what an Indonesian
or a Chinese will come up with.' (a project manager)

The power of professional elites, then, comes firstly from the difficulty of
assessing complex and sometimes vague working processes. In Crozier's
terms, the power of the elite stems from their control of an area of uncer-
tainty.

The Rule of Personal Reputation

Members of elites are frequently in charge of projects or contracts where
much is at stake for the organization. Thus, organizational elitism is also
related to the level of individuals who interact. Each direct interaction with
senior managers (within and outside the organization) involves a personal
risk; the individual is seen in action and can use this implicit control on
his/her competence as a springboard. But this risk can also become an irrev-
ocable verdict from business leaders. This was the case of an international
business engineer who was required to study the investment capacity of his
firm in a foreign business. He found himself at the forefront of a dossier
concerning international managers, several departments in different sub-
sidiaries and also the future manager of the subsidiary which was to be cre-
ated. The business engineer had power during the process, actually
becoming the manager of the subsidiary during the first few months. The
tandem (business engineer-future subsidiary manager) was thus directly
influenced, not only by a good interpersonal relationship, but also by the
evaluation of risks concerning the business engineer's personal future. He
knew that the future manager could judge him and that he might one day
find himself in this manager's direct hierarchy, or that the manager could
become a key decision-maker in his career. In this situation, the reputation
of the business engineer was at stake and could lead to a constrained care-
fulness, so as not to appear an 'awkward customer' or an uncontrollable
expert.
Therefore, the dominant behaviour of members of elite groups is not only
guided by the constraint of innovation and by an 'entrepreneurial' spirit ;
it also tends to be based on a rational combination of rewarding initiatives
and personal reputation that promises to open up possible fields of pro-
fessional development. As a result, it tends to reinforce the power of the
Managerial Strategies of Domination 151

hierarchy of elite groups, because it can appear as legitimate protection in

case of problems.

A Subtle Usage of Management Tools: 'Subjectivized Objectivation'

The professional elites we observed demonstrate a capacity for making
strategic use of instruments at their disposal; they combine the right
amounts of intuition and management tools (standard criteria) to manage
their activity. In this respect, it is important for them to preserve a vague,
grey area around success and failure, thereby making any performance
appraisal difficult and above all, hardly credible.
For instance, risk managers in insurance companies put forward either the
rigidity of the methods of risk evaluation (fire risks), or the 'kind of client',
or bad luck, to explain a problem. They often use the argument of luck to
explain events which may lead to a failure. According to them, failures
cannot be formalized and sometimes they cannot even be identified; the
members of professional elites restrict access to the rational explanation of
success and failure to a small circle, which they often call 'the return of
experience':
'We are in activities which oblige us to discuss together to explain why some pro-
jects are successful and others not; we agree among ourselves. Even if we know
who is efficient and who is not, nobody should know that. It is a normal protec-
tion due to the very complexity of our jobs.' (a project manager in the building
trade)
Thus, specific norms of performance are self-produced, and the norms are
not easily controllable by business leaders. The acknowledged principle is
to make sure that nobody from outside the group can legitimately compare
the individuals who belong to the group. The argument which legitimizes
this containment is the following:
'In our profession nothing can be standardized. Everyone knows that very well.'
(project manager in the building trade company)
However, this strategy is only efficient when hierarchy is part of the
game.

Hierarchical Complicity : The Rule of 'Flexible Corporatism'

To be effective, the professional regulation we are trying to describe needs
to be supported by a particular form of hierarchical authority. Professional
elites tend to promote the 'best' professional as head of department. Thus,
managers conform with the normative system produced within the elite
group. What, then, is the exact role of the hierarchy?
The main aspect is what we call 'flexible corporatism'. The hierarchy of
professional elites is based on the general objective of defending the inter-
ests and power of individuals who belong to the group. Managers are asked
to permanently legitimize autonomy as the core condition of professional
effectiveness. Legitimacy is supposed to come from a necessary con-
vergence between organizational interests (efficiency) and the interests of
the elite (maintaining autonomy). When autonomy is considered as an
152 David Courpasson

ingredient of organizational efficiency, legitimacy is durable. The corpor-

atist behaviour of professional elites is flexible, because theoretically, they
agree to recognize that if someone proves that centralization is a more effec-
tive way of governing than autonomy, individuals will be constrained to
give up their autonomy, in the name of organizational interests:
'We have to demonstrate permanently that we are actually functioning in the best
conditions; that is why failures have to be softened, even hidden. If they are too
clearly identified, our autonomy is no longer justified, and the boss cannot justify
it; his arguments come from our successes, not from his imagination.' (an inter-
national business engineer)

Thus, the hierarchical complicity is dependent on the resources of legit-

imization that the group can generate.
At this stage, we can conclude that the power of professional elites is char-
acterized by two types of mechanisms. First, their autonomy is accepted
by the organizational governance, in exchange for an implicit contract based
on effectiveness. The consequence of this acceptance is the weak govern-
ability of the elites, and a 'constraint of trust': business leaders have to
trust the loyalty of individuals and the arguments they put forward to jus-
tify their hardly measurable efficiency.
However, secondly, the power of elites is limited by the necessity to cal-
culate personal risk, for individuals, because any visible mistake may poten-
tially justify an organizational demand for a complete explanation. Power
is therefore dependent on the actual solidarity between individuals, who
promise not to reveal mistakes and failures.
Here we have an example of a constrained regulation, within which the
main stake is the (personalization-depersonalization) of responsibility. The
result is the existence of a limited, fragile, solidarity between individuals.
Its strength depends on the level of interpersonal trust within the profes-
sional elite, and on the fact that the organization does not explicitly put
them in competition with each other.
The possibility of an organizational centralized domination over profes-
sional elites lies, then, in the weakness of solidarity and in the objectiva-
tion of personal successes and failures through the centralization of
managerial decisions concerning the professional elites. In spite of the
games and strategies we have identified, domination remains possible and
efficient, providing it is combined with the soft acceptance of a limited
autonomy of the experts. We will try to explain this.

Strategies to Dominate the Elites

Our observations suggest that senior managers develop two types of strate-
gies to control elite groups.

Proving and Normalizing Professional Success

The first strategy is to instrumentalize the assessment of success and fail-
ure, and impose the rationalization of important professional events.
Managerial Strategies of Domination 153

Assessment grids and refined criteria for the definition of success were
developing rapidly during the time of our empirical studies.
Interestingly, the new tools for appraisal are very similar to those applied
in other professional groups, who do not belong to the elite: the similarity
of criteria demonstrates the deliberate normalization of expected perfor-
mance in the whole organization (whatever the job). As a result, elites are
being integrated into the general system of governance through tools of
performance appraisal. This change is based on a new balance of power
between elites and senior managers. The new balance comes from the
declining legitimacy of elites to remain outside a general movement towards
the centralization of career management. This is why this system of con-
trol is soft: it is based on a legitimate standardization of performance con-
trol. In other words, the central rule of the structure of domination is
henceforth founded on reversibility: nothing is established any longer as a
matter of fact, everyone has to prove, to demonstrate that they are more or
less valuable than their colleagues or counterparts. Such reversibility
imposes a difficult constraint on individuals, and confirms that solidarities
are more and more temporary and, above all, rational. However, this con-
straint has to be applied systematically, and signifies to some extent the
end of illegitimate privileges. Moreover, the reversibility of individual sit-
uations and positions depends on managerial decisions, which are often
centralized in the hands of senior management. For instance, because they
are symbolically important, decisions of promotion or demotion concern-
ing highly skilled experts or professionals depend more and more on senior
managers, and this centralization is often interpreted (even by experts them-
selves) as a means of suppressing discretionary managerial decisions.

Objectivating Personal Responsibility

In the three organizations we have investigated, senior managers tend to
increase their capacity for attributing initiatives, decisions, and therefore
possible mistakes to individuals via credible tools for allocating assign-
ments and objectives. They produce centralized assignment letters that are
clear and relatively exhaustive, and that objectivize the expected activities
of individuals. Then, professional elites can no longer produce their own
rules, and moreover, they can easily be controlled through a number of
very pragmatic and calculable indicators (number of trips abroad for inter-
national business engineers, number of client calls for the risk managers,
the financial value of contracts for business engineers in the building trade,
etc).
To a certain extent, we observe a 'subjectivized objectivation' in the strat-
egy of domination: senior managers are simultaneously trying to personal-
ize missions in order to legitimately attribute unambiguous responsibilities
(which are part of the legitimacy of an expert), and to depersonalize these
missions by instrumentalizing and normalizing activities (we could say
'bureaucratizing'). By doing so, senior managers try to justify their deci-
sions and control, so that they are not perceived as arbitrary by the elite
groups who were used to self-control.
154 David Courpasson

These examples show that senior managers try to establish a centralized

management policy based on a subtle dialectic between differentiation and
resemblance; senior managers play with this ambivalence and sustain their
strategy of domination in two ways:
- differentiation is a power resource for management, because it reinforces
the normative system of competition between people, who either compete
with each other to obtain rewards, or accept that they have to obey the
managerial rules, because obedience is interpreted as a resource of pro-
tection,
- resemblance means the objectivation and instrumentalization of merit and
success in the name of an organizational regulation which is founded on
equitable treatment. Domination by equality is not far distanced, as
Tocqueville (ed.1986) demonstrated a long time ago - in a situation char-
acterized by the powerlessness of management and organizational mem-
bers (faced with diverse threats, either internal or internal), individual
consent can come from a legitimized feeling of similarity in people's des-
tinies. That is why it is more and more difficult to legitimize the existence
of elites and privileges within organizations which are clearly unable to
improve the situation of their members. If powerlessness is legitimate. it
is founded on a rationality of desired equality, entailing everyone's obedi-
ence. This shared feeling is used rationally by business leaders to apply
soft strategies of domination, which create a specific form of governance
which we can call 'soft bureaucracy'.

Organization and Politics : 'Soft Bureaucracies'

The empirical studies reported here show that, even in horizontal, flat, indi-
vidualistic and flexible organizations, domination is the core of manager-
ial strategies. To address our initial research question: To what extent is
this domination bureaucratic?
In this respect, the two case studies rejuvenate Weberian theories, because
Weber does not posit that action is locked into structures of domination,
he sees action as being oriented towards norms that establish the very valid-
ity of domination. In line with Weber, we should reassert that domination
is sustained both by a 'soft coercion' coming from external threats, and by
the reflexivity of actors, who 'choose' to obey because they consider that
it can be the most efficient way of surviving.
Also, these case studies show that Crozierian power games are less easy
in organizations where the neighbour is a competitor for survival. where
working teams are temporary, where mobility is institutionalized and dimin-
ishes possible interpersonal trust, and where latent threats are hanging over
people. In this kind of organization, everyone tends to rely on central man-
agers for conduct: centralization and domination are therefore legitimized
by the political renunciation of most people within the organization.
Our results show the efficiency of most managerial strategies of domination,
and they lead us to propose the concept of 'soft bureaucracy' to characterize
Managerial Strategies of Domination 155

contemporary forms of organizational governance. We argue that in this

political structure, domination and legitimacy are intertwined, precisely
because domination cannot be based only on coercion and violence.
'Soft bureaucracies' are for us organizations containing managerial strate-
gies which are oriented towards the construction of political centralization.
Therefore, legitimacy could be the central stake of organizations and of
those in power in organizations where new forms of centralization are pro-
gressively emerging. Legitimacy is necessary to justify that organizations
need to be governed from their centre, even if they are apparently more
entrepreneurial and decentralized.
Therefore, the concept of 'soft bureaucracy' tries to express the emergence
of a political centralization of organizations, in line with the development
of decentralized ways of conducting their activities: jobs and responsibili-
ties have become more decentralized, but political decisions more central-
ized. That is why we think that soft bureaucracies are an efficient way of
governing decentralized organizations which need to establish a certain
coherence.
The system of governance of 'soft bureaucracies' is characterized by four
components.

A Specific Combination between Impersonal and Personal Obedience

The organizational domination prevailing in soft bureaucracy is both imper-

sonal and personal.
In his theory of legitimate domination, Weber is much concerned by the
degree of personalization of the command relationship. The bureaucratic
type of domination is impersonal, but the traditional type, and especially
the charismatic type, are more ambiguous. In traditions, people obey the
rites and customs of a community, and there are always individuals and
examples to 'illustrate' these habits. The charismatic domination is based
on personalized obedience. For Weber, the structure of domination is thus
either objectivized by impersonal obedience to rules, or by the respect of
norms, or lastly by respect for certain individuals. Bureaucracy seems to
avoid the principle of personalized constraint as the main way of making
obedience and docility acceptable. This is exactly the case illustrated by
the impersonal power of managerial indicators: in the decision concerning
redundancy, power also lies in the ratios, and not just in the hands of peo-
ple personally defending the validity of those ratios.
However, bureaucratic management could also be analyzed partly as a per-
sonalized structure of legitimacy, because the ideal-type does not exist (by
definition), and bureaucracies always consist of impersonal and personal
forms of obedience. In a Weberian way, every form of organizational dom-
ination illustrates the fact that the belief in individual properties of indi-
viduals can secure legitimacy. In that case, personalization needs to be
strengthened by instrumentalization, in an effort to get rid of arbitrary man-
agerial reflexes. The instrumentalization of decisions (as illustrated in the
second section) can instill a feeling of equality within the organization,
156 David Courpasson

because management tools have no feelings and no emotions: tools take

care of the general interest. The impersonal application of indicators and
criteria has two advantages: it clears senior managers in advance of their
hard decisions, and it makes sense for everyone, because of the philoso-
phy of equality that it promotes. We are far away from the contemporary
individualization of management and organization. Organization, as a
structure of domination, is a strange combination of normalization and
differentiation.
The ambiguity stems from the fact that legitimization is carried out more
and more not only in an instrumentalized way, but according to the per-
sons one is dealing with. Managers are in a similar position to the physi-
cian, who can be recognized as trustworthy from a professional or an
individual point of view: in the first case, legitimization comes from knowl-
edge, an impersonal sign of legitimacy, and in the second case, from the
professional' s behaviour, and his/her past and crucial choices. The impor-
tance of the personalization of structures of legitimacy in organizations
recalls the controversial theme of confidence in the face of risk: 'the casu-
alness and the calm affability of the flying staff probably plays an equally
important role in reassuring passengers as all statistics proving the safety
of air transport' (Giddens 1994: 92).
The personalized aspect of organizations as structures of domination and
legitimacy demonstrates that the individualistic and structural aspects of
organizations can be analyzed simultaneously.

Centralization as a Means of Legitimating Political Decisions

As Perrow asserts, several criticisms of bureaucracy are not well targeted.

For him, the flaws of bureaucracy arise from the impossibility of achiev-
ing enough bureaucracy. The main question concerning bureaucracy is
political - that of centralization - because bureaucracy is a means of
centralizing power and legitimating, (even disguising) this centralization:
'Bureaucracy is a tool, a social tool which legitimizes the control of numer-
ous people by the very few, in spite of the formal look of democracy; and
this control generates a social power, not regulated and not perceived'
(Perrow 1986: 5).
Bureaucracy aims at getting rid of particularism, (i.e. discrimination,
according to Perrow). For him, organizational managers often choose par-
ticularism because of laziness. This can have disastrous effects: nepotism,
collusion and power of reputations as universal managerial criteria, for
instance. Bureaucracy aims at securing the legitimate use of managerial
criteria, i.e. in the interests of organization: thus, for Perrow, bureaucracy
is a form of progress.
Bureaucratic rules aim at reducing the discretionary power that some people
have over others. It is also a protection against sanction or blame. Rules
are not good or bad as such; they are often accused of promoting conser-
vatism, but they are simply part of a system: [rules] 'protect as much as
they restrict; coordinate as much as they block; orientate effort as much
Managerial Strategies of Domination 157

as they limit it ... ; allow diversity as much as they restrict it' (Perrow 1986:
26).
The same can be said about hierarchy. According to numerous critics, no
decision can be made in hierarchical organizations, because of the dictato-
rial essence of hierarchy. Nevertheless, successes may be attributed to hier-
archy, but 'if things go well, one speaks about cooperation'; 'if they go
wrong, one puts the stress on the hierarchy', or on this 'confounded bureau-
cracy' (Perrow 1986: 36).
Apart from a defence of bureaucracy, our examples clearly show that con-
temporary managerial strategies try to create new forms of centralization.
In changing organizations, where personnel is always changing and con-
sequently is less reliable, some crucial managerial decisions have to be cen-
tralized - e.g. redundancy, and performance appraisals for key individuals
and experts. Centralization can be the guarantee that some political deci-
sions, involving the whole organization, will be made and sustained by the
same people, i.e. the 'governors' and their representatives.

Governance Based on Soft Coercion and Protection

A 'soft bureaucracy' is an organization where processes of flexibility and

decentralization co-exist with more rigid constraints and structures of dom-
ination. The problem is not to return to, or renounce, the Weberian con-
cept of bureaucracy, viewing the latter as a mix of rational actions,
legitimized by the strict, equal and impersonal character of official rules.
For us, the problem is to define organizations as bureaucracies, and rec-
ognize them as being much more widespread than many (managers and
organizational students) would accept, mainly because of preconceptions
of what is good, efficient or fashionable. Let us remember that a bureau-
cracy is especially designed to reduce the heterogeneity of individual behav-
iour, thanks to a system of legitimate constraints which facilitate the
obedience, even of professional elites.
Bureaucracy does not necessarily imply passivity, as Gouldner (1954) or
Selznick (1949) demonstrated a long time ago; within bureaucracies, action
is largely determined by a context of conformity. Bureaucracy is neither
enslavement, nor permanent negotiations about the rules of action.
The most significant contemporary phenomenon in the three organizations
we have investigated is the concentration of power. In this paper, we have
suggested the existence of strategies of domination based on a soft coercion:
ineluctable decisions, external threat, survival requirements, managerial indi-
cators, increased competition between people and increased discretion of local
managers concerning individualistic forms of repression. Organizations have
not renounced the use of coercion for governing, but they apply it through
different media, whose power is systematically legitimized.
Soft bureaucracy is not only a coercive form, it is also a protective form
which can be tailored to the contemporary problems of individual vulner-
ability: that is why it is softened. The 'utilitarist' worries of people who
face threats, and organizational regulation based on domination have much
158 David Courpasson

in common. To some extent, the organization is a structure of domination

because the subjectivities require and produce norms, routines and instru-
ments to create protection. Certainly, the political coherence between struc-
tures of domination and 'structures of subjectivity' is gained at the expense
of cohesion and solidarity. The price that has to be paid for regulating an
organization considered as an 'individualistic community' (Courpasson
2000) is probably that of durable solidarities.

A System of Governance Fusing External and Internal Legitimacies

Finally, the bureaucracy is called 'soft' because of the specific nature of

its structure of legitimacy. The two case studies enable us to identify three
forms of legitimacy.
First, there is an instrumental legitimacy, based on the power of imper-
sonal indicators, that becomes an institutional tool because it is accepted
and used by the entire managerial community. Second, there is a liberal
legitimacy, produced outside the organization, based on the soft coercion
of credible threats. Third, there is a political legitimacy, based on what we
have called the political renunciation of organizational members, who con-
centrate their efforts on their own personal stakes, extending trust by default
to the governors and their local representatives (middle managers).
Soft bureaucracy is, of course, not an ideal system of governance. For
instance, the domination permitted by the legitimacies it contains is imper-
sonal and very fragile - the fragility of a domination mainly produced in
the environment, the fragility of a paradoxical internal power, increased in
spite of business leaders' own recognition of their lack of sovereignty.

Concluding Comments

Organization studies should re-introduce two crucial aspects of organiza-

tional politics: the responsibility of actions, and the endogeneous legiti-
macy of domination. It seems that both deterministic and deconstructionist
approaches are 'a-political', i.e. they forget almost completely questions
such as 'Who should I blame if I am not promoted; if we do not obtain
this contract; if my project is stopped; if I am fired ... , etc.'; everyone
(including managers, of course) ask such questions several times a year.
The deterministic organization (Donaldson 1996) is an organization with-
out guilt and responsibility, because each decision and action is imposed
by external factors. The postmodern organization and its deconstructionist
translation (e.g. Chia 1996) is an organization without guilt and responsi-
bility, because actions and decisions are disseminated in boundless net-
works and processes, because tools and machines are considered as actors
(equivalent to individuals), because chance and accidents have replaced
intentions and rational actions. This way of 'reading' organizations may be
more attractive than the classical approach and its nai:Ve defenders (includ-
ing the author of this article). However, [neo] Weberian approaches help
 Managerial Strategies of Domination 159

us to understand present managerial strategies which de facto create new

forms of domination and of centralization.
In this paper, we have argued that organizations are both structures of dom-
ination and structures of legitimacy; we have tried to illustrate processes
of centralization and concentration of power, where management by threat
and potential repression evokes an organizational political regime distant
from managerial discourses and current orthodox literature. We should
therefore resist taking a dualist point of view, considering the radical oppo-
sition between bureaucracy and 'enterprise' (Fournier and Grey 1998). On
the contrary, we should admit that the expansion of a liberal management
based on decentralization and the 'marketization' of organizations and
autonomy goes hand in hand with the development of a highly centralized
and authoritarian form of government - a combination that we have called
'soft bureaucracies' .
This political regime probably indicates a greater importance of power in
organizational life, which is not only due to a plethora of new individual
capacities and empowerment schemes, enabling people to act, struggle,
resist and protest in the 'postmodern democratic freedom of the market'
(Clegg 1989: 275), but also to the renewal of 'sovereign' power, based on
relatively fixed, if incomplete, forms of legitimation.
Of course, power does not mean the negation of the power of others, as in
a classical approach to domination. We do not argue that a new manager-
ial hegemony is appearing. In fact, powerlessness is the central political
phenomenon with respect to power within organizations. To a large extent,
sovereignty takes place outside organizations, in abstract forms (the mar-
ket, globalization, etc.) and in more concrete forms (shareholders, the man-
agerial principle of inevitability, etc.). Thus, we do not have to conclude
that organizations produce single and decisive centres of power, in a
Hobbesian view of organizational power, but rather that, because of power-
lessness, they have to produce 'centres of legitimacy'.
Organizations are therefore structures of legitimacy and subjectivity. The
trinity (domination-legitimacy-subjectivity) that we have tried to illustrate,
offers a complex view of power and links individual reflexivity with orga-
nizational structures of domination, in line with neo-Weberian approaches
(Giddens 1984; Di Maggio and Powell 1983).
Organization is an order, and all the more so in times where threat and
survival are the common stakes of individuals at work.

Note * A previous version of this paper was presented at the Academy of Management Conference,
Chicago, August 1999. I would like to thank Roland Calori, Arndt Sorge for his impressive
patience, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
160 David Courpasson
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