Post Bureaucracy and the Politics

Post bureaucracy and the politics of forgetting
The management of change at the BBC,
1991-2002
Martin Harris
University of Essex, Colchester, UK, and
Victoria Wegg-Prosser
Bournemouth University, Dorset, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the imputed “fall” and subsequent
“reinvention” of the BBC during the 1990s, relating a managerialist “politics of forgetting” to the broader ideological narratives of “the post bureaucratic turn”.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, combining case study analysis with long-term historical perspectives on organisational change.
Findings – The paper shows the ways in which public sector professionals contested “post bureaucratic” pressures for marketisation and organisational disaggregation.
Originality/value – The paper shows the ways in which large-scale technological, regulatory and organisational change was mediated by cultural continuities and recurrent “surges” of managerial control. Keywords Television, Organizational change, Bureaucracy, United Kingdom
Paper type Case study
Introduction: recent debate on post bureaucracy
Comment on the “end” of bureaucracy is derived from the view that bureaucratic rationalisation can no longer provide a viable basis for organising in the current context of radical uncertainty and turbulent change (Harvey, 1989; Kumar, 1995;
Castells, 2000). Advocates of post bureaucracy argue that organisations are becoming more decentralised, loosely coupled and likely to foster the empowerment of employees
(Kanter, 1989; Heckscher, 1994; Osborne and Plastrik, 1997; Child and McGrath, 2001).
The overview provided by Power (1997, p. 43) shows that there is a very considerable overlap between the “post bureaucratic turn” and “the new public management”
(NPM). The latter emphasises:
. . . cost control, financial transparency, the atomisation of organizational sub-units, the

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