Conceptualizing the 'Iron Cage': Bureaucracy in Modern America

Abstract

This dissertation explores how the concept of bureaucracy developed in the modern United States. Looking to discourses in social science, politics, business, and popular culture, it considers how Americans’ ideas about bureaucracy changed over time and contributed to the major political economic shifts of the twentieth century. More than merely an organizational form, bureaucracy was a concept at the heart of Americans’ efforts toward democracy, fairness, and efficiency and their attempts to create institutions that reflected those values. In the early twentieth century, Americans embraced bureaucracy for its impersonal standards of governance and claims to rationality-driven efficiency – a faith which supported the building of the New Deal state, large Fordist corporations, and powerful labor unions. But this all changed after World War II, when the Nazi and Soviet states were interpreted by Americans as demonstrative of bureaucracy gone awry. New critiques arose about bureaucracy’s dehumanizing and undemocratic qualities and were applied to institutions in labor, business, and government. They had dramatic consequences: unions found themselves under unrelenting critique, corporations shed their prewar form in pursuit of “leanness,” and governmental bureaucracy became politically untenable. Ideas about bureaucracy, the dissertation shows, determined the imagination and creation of the structures that continue to define American life.