Expanding Gouldner’s Theory of Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy: Looking Back and Moving Forward

Anand Chand ()
Additional contact information
Anand Chand: University of the South Pacific

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2018, vol. 137, issue 1, No 15, 317-334

Abstract: Abstract Although there is adequate literature on the topic of state-employer collusion, this literature is barely underpinned in any theoretical framework. This article attempts to fill this theoretical lacuna by revisiting Gouldner’s (Patterns of industrial bureaucracy: a case study of modern factory administration, The Free Press, New York, 1954a) pioneering theoretical framework on patterns of bureaucracy, and extends his concept of mock bureaucracy to develop a new concept called ‘mock state bureaucracy’ to illustrate state-employer collusion in controlling workers in plants in developing third world economies. The article revisits and extends Gouldner’s (1954a) unit of analysis from the ‘firm’ level to the ‘state’ level and argues that the new concept mock state bureaucracy provides a better illustration of the state-employer collusion. The article argues that both ‘state’ and ‘employer’ are important units of analysis and they should be brought back to the centre stage of any discourse on employment relations of developing countries.

Keywords: Developing countries; Gouldner’s Patterns of Bureaucracy; Mock State Bureaucracy; State-Employer Collusion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-017-1583-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:137:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s11205-017-1583-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-017-1583-7

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().