The Timeless Behaviours of Corporate Bureaucracies

The business use of technology must undergo a significant change in how technology is ultimately applied to business processes in order to create a condition that enables a fundamental rethinking of how a business works. How organizations apply technology is a trait inherited from the firm’s knowledge of the limits of the previous generations of technology. This inherited understanding of the use of technology within an organization is called ‘the organization’s technology culture’. The relationship between people and technology is sometimes counterintuitive to our perception of progress when viewed holistically in the context of an organizational culture steeped in bureaucracy, as observed by Sean Cooney. In his words: Bureaucracy, whether as an arm of government, or of big industry, became wedded to this paradigm of promoting the growth of the trading economy and the expansion of wealth. The revenues of government and industry which provide bureaucracy with its power and social relevance depend on the generation of more and more monetary ‘value added’. Given a means of promoting such growth, which appeared to be available through new technology, bureaucracy promises much and encourages people to become dependent on it.47