Beyond Weber and Kafka: Conceptualizing a Critical Realist Model of Bureaucracy

• DOI: 10.1177/00953997211024953
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211024953

Administration & Society

2022, Vol. 54(3) 500 –521

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997211024953

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Perspectives

Beyond Weber and

Kafka: Conceptualizing

a Critical Realist Model

of Bureaucracy

Yi Yang1

Abstract

Max Weber and Franz Kafka are seminal writers on bureaucracy and

administration. While Weber suggests the technical superiority of a

bureaucratic “iron cage,” Kafka speaks from within that cage, seeing its

repressive rationality as being confounded by recalcitrant citizens searching

for freedom. However, if individuals are embedded in a bureaucracy that

limits the parameters of actions from which they can choose, how could

they ever defy structural control? Articulating the conditions for human

liberty, this article uses critical realism to reveal the potential emancipatory

nature of bureaucracy as a way out of Kafka’s powerlessness and Weber’s

iron cage via citizen engagement.

Keywords

Weber, Kafka, critical realism, ontology, theories of bureaucracy, public

administration

Max Weber (1864–1920) and Franz Kakfa (1883–1924) as contemporaries

are among the most important writers who have inspired countless amount of

research on bureaucracy and administration. Organizations governed under

1Peking University, Beijing, China

Corresponding Author:

Yi Yang, Assistant Professor, School of Government, Peking University, Leo KoGuan Building,

Beijing 100871, China.

Email: yy2017@pku.edu.cn

1024953AAS0010.1177/00953997211024953Administration & SocietyYang

research-article2021

Yang 501

Weber’s hierarchical model of administration have been identified by schol-

ars as demanding calculability, predictability, competency, and impersonality

for effectiveness and efficiency (Centeno et al., 2016; Engster, 2001; Evans

& Rauch, 1999).

In contrast, via novels like The Castle, Kafka is known for reading through

Weberian formal-rational spectacles, by identifying how people experience

such labyrinthine, nightmarish, and even inscrutable work settings. For

instance, by linking Weber to workforce conformity with hierarchy, distinct

jurisdictions and exhaustive written rules, Hodson et al. (2012, p. 269) pres-

ent human disconformity with Weberian top-down forces as a key feature of

Kafka’s vision of bureaucracy——such Kafkaesque elements often include

alienation, deceit, patrimonialism, chaos, uncertainty, and rule breakings,

all of which are individual responses to the exercise of domination by struc-

tural forces in the Weberian bureaucratic “iron cage” (Jennings et al., 2005;

Jørgensen, 2012; Warner, 2007).

Is the bureaucratic world more Weberian or Kafkaesque like? This article

argues that both views are typical of our work lives as their portraits of

bureaucracy examine the same phenomena from different positions——

Weber works from a top-down perspective with an overview of this repres-

sive authority, whereas Kafka supplies us with a lived experience from the

bottom-up, just as they share a similarity that suggests individuals cannot

alter this mammoth iron cage no matter what happens inside.

For example, by simultaneously portraying workforce conformity (e.g.,

how managers discipline themselves according to hierarchical expectations)

and nonconformity with structural forces (e.g., how subordinates discipline

their bosses), McCabe (2014, p. 257) suggests that for Kafka, both confor-

mity and nonconformity constitute the dark side of bureaucratic organizing,

whereby we all are victims to work regimes that we “have not created, and

may disagree with, but required to enforce.”

Yet refusing to be pessimistic, McCabe (2014, p. 260) adds that for Kafka,

“there is always the potential for finding space through which to escape or

evade control,” seeing human free will as “light” in such darkness, and

believing that through “education, political will and struggle,” people could

resist Weberian formal-rational control (McCabe, 2015, p. 75).

Is it really possible? Scholars studying Weber and Kafka should wonder

whether individuals are embedded in bureaucracy and subject to its regula-

tive, normative, and cognitive processes that trim their cognitions, define

their interests, and produce their identities (Holm, 1995), and how are they

able to defy such structural forces? In other words, if structures set a limit

to the parameters of actions from which the agent can choose, we will find

it difficult to understand how individuals might defy or change such