Bureaucracy Is Dead, Long Live Bureaucracy: A Review for Taking Stock and Moving Forward

The present review aims to redress the growing gap between the receding discourse on bureaucracy and bureaucracy’s persistent reality by clarifying conceptual issues. In doing so, we aim to renew and expand our understanding of bureaucracy as a dominant feature of our organizational landscape. First, we review the organizational research and find three main perspectives of research on bureaucracy, which emerged in succession but persist in parallel. Turning to the state of contemporary research, we note several factors that help explain the shrinking scholarly attention devoted to bureaucracy and the resulting difficulty in making sense of new trends like uberization and holacracy. We conclude by offering four strategies for overcoming these shortcomings.