Introduction: Bureaucracy and innovation

Social scientists have long attempted to understand the social and organizational forces that enhance or undermine innovation in corporate settings. The products of such investigations, their proponents claim, may be implemented by managers in order to enhance corporate performance (Kanter, 1988). In particular, many programmatic texts on the nature of R&D and other organizations have claimed that “bureaucracy” undermines the conditions necessary for individual and organizational innovativeness (Ritti, 1971; Rothman & Perucci, 1970; Shenhav, 1988). In this view, widely propagated by both academics and popular writers, and supported by broadly held commonsensical beliefs, rigid hierarchical structures bolstered by rules and regulations, formalized procedures, and “red tape,” constrain the social environment of professional work and suppress the intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1975; Shapira, 1989) and innate capacity for creativity (Amabile, 1988) that individuals are capable of bringing to it. Bureaucracy, the argument goes, encourages conformity and particularism and discourages playfulness, exploration, and risk taking. Such environments produce cautious, conservative, and uninspired “organization men” for whom “playing it safe” and “cover your ass” are the primary rules of organizational survival, whereas innovation and its consequences pose a continuing threat (see Perrow, 1986). These pathologies of bureaucracy are particularly detrimental to the performance of R&D organizations in which technological foresight and oversight are crucial factors (see Garud, Nayyar, & Shapira, this volume, chapter 1): bureaucratic culture enhances the probability that technological foresights are suppressed and facilitates those processes that encourage oversight and allow it to become the norm; anything else, in this view, threatens the stability of the existing order and the particular interests that support it.