Every now and then in these posts I have mentioned, or quoted others who mentioned, the importance of developing a professional bureaucracy. What I’ve not yet touched on are the academics of bureaucracies—formal studies and theories and research about the different types of bureaucracies, their characteristics, and the work they are suited for. And not suited for. This post starts to break that ground, and also inaugurates the Resource Library. That’s a new area of this blog site in which I will post links to good information about bureaucracies and ways to deal with them and change them.

That said, I’ll now point you to an Arkansas State University slide presentation that starts out with the idea that organizational change of the sort I and others envision is impossible, or at least so improbable as to be essentially impossible. To be fair, however, this ASU College of Education presentation deals specifically with schools and problems of change in schools, and the difficulties as they identify them are well noted. For my current purposes, though, I point to the presentation for its clear explanation of important features of both professional bureaucracies and machine bureaucracies. To be sure, there is much else out there in the world about all this, and I’ll be adding to the Library as time goes by. For now, however—

Peace.

Deborah Alicen