Managerial strategies of domination. Power in soft bureaucracies

This paper discusses the emergence and reinforcement of organizational political regimes based on domination and centralization in French organizations. Domination and power are old concepts in organizational sociology, but the confrontation of two well-known approaches to politics in organizations, that of Weber and that of Crozier, suggests that an 'archaic' notion such as domination is still very useful for understanding how business leaders 'govern' organizations today. Based on empirical studies, the paper proposes that organizations should be seen as 'soft bureaucracies', in which centralization and entrepreneurial forms of governance are combined. Thus, choosing a Weberian point of view, this paper simultaneously describes organizations as 'structures of domination' and as 'structures of legitimacy'. It defends the idea that, in spite of the success of the network form utopia, the re-emergence of bureaucracies is a sign that organizations are more and more politically centralized and governed.