In this talk, I’ll address a subject Americans love to hate, tracing how the concept of bureaucracy developed in the modern United States. Looking to discourses in social science, politics, business, public administration, and popular culture, I’ll show how Americans’ ideas about bureaucracy changed over time and influenced the major political economic developments of the twentieth century. More than merely an organizational form, bureaucracy—a symbol of the instrumentality, impersonality, and rationality of the modern world—was a concept at the heart of Americans’ efforts to navigate tensions between self and society, organize and govern themselves democratically, and build fair and effective organizations in the public and private sectors. By tracing rhetoric about bureaucracy and its influence, the talk reveals how a famously boring subject determined Americans’ horizons of political possibility and the trajectory of the modern United States.
