Bureaucratic Opposition

Bureaucratic Opposition: Challenging Abuses at the Workplace focuses on bureaucratic oppositions that reveal the “informal” dimensions of behavior within bureaucracies. This book is an attempt to show that contemporary bureaucratic organizations are not only administrative entities but are also political structures in the sense that power, conflict, and domination are normal within them. This text is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the myth of neutral administration and proposes the alternative political interpretation of organizations. The grounds or “good reasons” for oppositions and their normative justifications are systematically detailed in Chapter 2. The third and fourth chapters discuss the “empirical” dimension, detailing the barriers that oppositions confront in getting underway and the strategies that they employ once they have been initiated. The last chapter analyzes some of the responses to oppositions by the official hierarchy and some of the policies that have been proposed to eliminate the abuses uncovered by dissidents. This publication is a good reference for students and specialists interested in bureaucratic oppositions.