The Vulnerable Fortress: Bureaucratic Organization and Management in the Information Age

Paul D. McEwan is a chartered accountant in Toronto.

This book sets out to explain why the remarkable advances in information
technology in the past 30 years now threaten the existence of the
conventional bureaucratic organizational structure. The authors argue
that the organization can no longer be conceived as “an army of
workers to be run from a central command headquarters,” and suggest
that the future (successful) organization will be less concerned with
formal structure and more focused on effectively interacting
communication networks.

In Part 1 the authors review the historical reasons for the development
of the traditional hierarchical organizational form and discuss the
appropriateness of the organization-as-machine model (which has
generally guided the study of organizations). In Part 2 they assert that
bureaucratic management styles will fail because of the information
processing power of “knowledge workers,” who will have both access
to, and the ability to interpret and disseminate, vast quantities of
information.

The purpose of the book is not to provide helpful hints on office
automation or to predict exactly what will replace bureaucracy when it
falls. Rather, it posits the abstract but intriguing idea that in the
information age, an organization is communication—that the
communication revolution has forced managers to abandon the machine
metaphor in favor of a model of an information network that is
infinitely complex and fraught with ambiguity.

The book does not simply prophesy a senseless anarchy spearheaded by
computer specialists. Instead, it astutely predicts that authority,
influence, and decisionmaking in organizations, traditionally granted by
virtue of bureaucratic hierarchy, will be accomplished by individuals
who can effectively manage the transactions of information in their part
of the communication web.