Where the State of the Art Meets the Art of the State: Traditional Public-Bureaucracy Controls in the Information Age

This paper discusses how the leading technologies associated with the ‘information society’ affect four traditional methods of control over bureaucracy. The four traditional controls, identified from grid-group cultural theory, are oversight, mutuality, competition and contrived randomness. It is assumed that such control systems are central to the shaping of behaviour, accountability and expectations in government organizations. The argument is that, while the technologies of the information society alter the operation of public organizations in a number of fundamental ways, these four basic approaches to control do not change or at least tend to reappear in new guises. Each of the four basic control approaches is capable of being supported by the technologies of the information age, though in the case of contrived randomness that effect may be largely unintentional. The same can be argued to apply to the six pairwise hybrid types of control that can be drawn from the four basic types. It seems likely that culture is the critical ‘switch’ that determines how technologies are used and the organizational impact of their use.