Book Review: Hyper-organization: Global organizational expansion

• Author: Mark Addleson
• DOI: 10.1177/0275074016687845
• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017
• Subject Matter: Book Review

American Review of Public Administration

2017, Vol. 47(5) 615 –616

© The Author(s) 2017

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Book Review

Robert Strange McNamara, as U.S. Secretary of Defense,

played a major role in escalating the Vietnam War. On the

premise that the outcome of war depends on the numbers

killed on either side, he used body counts to establish whether

the United States was winning or not. Relying on “the num-

bers” and this statistic in particular, though utterly inhumane

and fatally flawed, might have seemed entirely logical to

him. He had come into the Pentagon as a “whiz kid” from the

Ford Motor Company. He went on to head the World Bank.

What enabled McNamara to move, at the highest level,

among these three organizations, apparently with different

interests, customs, and “customers”? The answer is that they

are all organizations, “run” (i.e., managed) in essentially the

same way; relying on numbers, formal structures, processes

and procedures, and rules and regulations. Each is a prime

example of what the authors call “hyper-organization.”

“Hyper-organization” is intended to convey the idea that

there is, today, more than at any time in the past, a near-uni-

versal form of organization across the private (business),

public (government), and not-for-profit spheres. So much so

that Bromley and Meyer say we should speak about “ratio-

nalized formal organizations” (RFOs) simply as “organiza-

tion,” without the need for a qualifying term. This book

explores that “organization,” which I will refer to as the

RFO. McNamara’s résumé, by the way, includes an MBA

from Harvard, where he later taught accounting, a short stint

at a consulting firm, and military service during World War II

(WWII). As each of these institutions and practices shaped

and now reinforces the way RFOs operate, he became an

ideal candidate to lead three.

Noting early on that, while the study of organizations is a

vast enterprise today, “there are few intellectual tools to help

us understand why these structures exist and grow,” the

authors adopt a “sociological institutional” approach, which

highlights “cultural sources of social structures.” There are

two threads to their narrative. The main one identifies and

explores three “cultural foundations” behind the emergence

of the RFO, “science, [individual] empowerment, and educa-

tion.” The other thread, unfortunately, only really gets atten-

tion in the penultimate chapter, “Dialectics.” This has to do

with the deep contradictions between the rhetoric of “ratio-

nality” that frames widespread organizational practices and

the practices themselves, which are anything but rational.

Organizations, as much shapers of their cultural environ-

ments as shaped by them, embrace such an enormous range

of goals and responsibilities, from “efficiency” to “risk man-

agement” to “personal empowerment” to “minimizing their

environmental impact,” that many of these are either incon-

sistent or, unequivocally, contradictory (i.e., far from “ratio-

nal” when taken together). The authors argue that

these complexities . . . are inherent characteristics of the

organization . . . rather than a pathology . . . to be corrected.

Organizations embody much internal conflict and have

dramatically non-rational qualities, not despite their rationalistic

goals orientation but because of them. (p. 6).

I am with the authors on this point. In Chapter 6, they offer

an interesting and plausible account of the institutionalized

means of handling and hiding these contradictions, including

“decoupling” activities and creating a “mystique” of manage-

ment, but they don’t take a stand on the question of rationality

per se. Without putting too fine a point on it, according to a

decades-long, postmodern narrative, with various branches

and many more contributors in recent years, the very idea of

a rational organization is a con job. The word “rationality,”

referring to how well suited are means to ends, is irrelevant in

human affairs outside a narrow domain of technical prob-

lems, such as establishing why your car won’t start.

To get anything done, whether it is taking kids to school

or holding a departmental meeting, people organize. When it

comes to the human, social of activities of organizing, the

only practical way of doing things – borrowing from Charles

Lindblom’s well-known 1959 article on policy – is by “mud-

dling through.” A discourse of “wicked problems,” “emer-

gence,” “improvisation,” and “clumsy solutions” makes

nonsense of the social construction of “the organization as a

rational actor”—a largely unfathomable idea. At the same

time, the emphasis on formulating comprehensive strategic

plans and using algorithms and forecasts to obtain optimal

results distracts us from what matters in organizing: how

various people make meaning of the situation at hand—what

they think, believe, and learn—as well their different values,

attitudes and, not least, their relationships.

The main thread of the book begins with a short chapter

substantiating the expansion of organization as a post-WWII

701225ARPXXX10.1177/0275074017701225American Review of Public AdministrationBook Review

book-review2017

Book Review

Bromley, P., & Meyer, J. W. (2015). Hyper-organization: Global organizational expansion. Oxford University Press. 225 pp. $35.00. ISBN:

978-0-19-968986-6.

Reviewed by: Mark Addleson, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA.

DOI: 10.1177/0275074016687845