Post Bureaucratic Era Essay

In this essay, I am going to argue that management of culture in the post-bureaucratic era has a strong emphasis on using culture as an effective means of soft-power form managerial control. Bureaucratic approaches to management ignored culture as an important concern; this has changed significantly in the post-bureaucratic era where managers assume that they can engineer organisational culture. However, it is difficult to achieve at the deepest levels of an employee 's assumptions and values, and frequently achieved only with artefacts as demonstrated in Schein (1985). From a critical management studies approach there are serious issues concerning the desirability, possibility, and ethical use of culture as a form of soft power with reference to Knight and Roberts (1982). A differentiation perspective to organisational culture claims that are more honest, healthy, and ethical to acknowledge …show more content…
Management practices in the bureaucratic era did not focus on culture. It was about domination and the hard approach of power. Taylorist bureaucracy management systems and code-based authoritarian management systems led to domination of employees as suggested by Morgan. Management in the bureaucratic era used power and domination as a form of motivation. Maslow stated that the humanoid drive “must be understood to be a channel through which … needs may be … satisfied” (Maslow A. H., 1943, p. 1).
Relating to Maslow’s hierarchy, domination motivates on a base level. The sense of purposelessness consequential from separate value bases and strips subjugated employees of the capacity to satisfy complex necessities through the work, waning this management system’s effectiveness in rousing loyalty, and, therefore,