Weber And Kafka. The Rational And The Enigmatic Bureaucracy

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9299.2011.01957 10.1111/j.1467-9299.2011.01957.x .x

WEBER AND KAFKA. THE RATIONAL AND THE ENIGMATIC BUREAUCRACY TORBEN BECK JØRGENSEN Max Weber’s and Franz Kafka’s respective understandings of bureaucracy are as different as night and day. Yet, Kafka’s novel The novel The Castle is Castle is best read with Max Weber at hand. In fact, Kafka relates systematically to all the dimensions in Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy and give us a much-contemplated parody, almost a counter-punctual ideal type, based on four key observations: bureaucratic excesses unfold in time and space; a ‘no error’ ideology generates inescapable dilemmas; inscrutability is a life condition in bureaucracy; civil servants end up walking on the spot, just like the figures in Escher’s painting: Ascending painting: Ascending and Descending. Descending . Nevertheless, Weber and Kafka can both be right. While Kafka looks at the bureaucratic phenomenon through persons who are marginalized, Weber’s perspective is historic-comparative and top-down. Are the observations of the one more correct than the other? The question is meaningless. As two opposite poles, Weber and Kafka ‘magnetize’ each other.

Of those who have written about bureaucracy, two writers will always stand out due to their unique analysis of the bureaucratic phenomenon: German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) and Czech author Franz Kafka (1883–1924). They are both great cultural personalities and have inspired and provoked incalculable amounts of research and social debate. While Weber is known for his scientific analysis of bureaucracy as a form of rationa rationall organ organization ization,, empha emphasizing sizing the advanta advantages ges compared to earlie earlierr forms of publicc administration publi administration,, Kafka is known for his descr description iption of the nightmarish, nightmarish, labyri labyrinthine nthine inscrutability of bureaucracy to such a degree that Kafka has become an adjective – Kafkaesque – associated with the alienating and incomprehensible system control over powerless individuals. The two understandings of bureaucracy are so divergent that we need to ask whether they th ey ar aree ex exam amin inin ing g th thee sa same me ph phen enom omen enon on.. In Inde deed ed,, Kaf Kafka ka’s ’s wr writ itin ings gs ar aree of ofte ten n no nott considered to be dealing with bureaucracy at all. The literary and philosophical readings of Kafka are distinguished by a focus on exile, existence, guilt, punishment, alienation, and father figures – one may say on everything but bureaucrac bureaucracy y (Derl (Derlien ien 1991). Within organizational research, however, we can find examples – although not many – of the comp co mpar arati ative ve an analy alysis sis of We Webe berr an and d Kaf Kafka ka.. De Derl rlie ien n (19 (1991) 91) and Wa Warn rner er (2 (2007 007)) hav havee outlined Weber’s and Kafka’s respective backgrounds, writings and their significance for the development of organizational theory and emphasize the considerable similarities in their respective thoughts on societal matters. Both men were sceptical observers of the breakthrough of modernity after the fin-desiècle period; si e` cle period; both were lawyers with practical work experience; and they possibly had more than indirect relations with one another. Kafka met Max Weber’s younger brother, Alfred Weber, through his friend Max Brod, who was a student of Alfred Weber (Radkau 2009, p. 323). It was Alfred Weber who was later responsible for awarding Kafka his doctoral degree in law. It is also close to being an established fact that Kafka read the works of Alfred Weber (Heinemann 1996; Harrington 2007). Given that interest, it is hardly unlikely that Kafka might even have read the works of Max Weber (see Derlien Torben Beck Jørgensen is in the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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TORBEN BECK JØRGENSEN

1991, pp. 14–15). It is thus worthwhile pursuing how directly Kafka’s understanding of bureaucracy can be related to Weber’s understanding. Derlien and Warner built their analysis on extensive parts of Kafka’s rather heterogeneous writings and were looking for similarities. Doing so entails a risk of wiping out the distinct differences in Weber’s and Kafka’s respective understandings of bureaucracy and how they are possibly related. I therefore delimit my analysis to two central texts: Weber’s classic essay on bureaucracy and Kafka’s novel entitled The Castle. It is my thesis that while Weber’s and Kafka’s respective understandings of bureaucracy are as different as night and day, The Castle represents a very precise commentary on Weber’s understanding of bureaucracy. In that way, The Castle is actually best read with Max Weber at hand. For further, detailed, information on the two texts, see the appendix. WEBER’S MODEL OF BUREAUCRACY

Bureaucracy represents a certain kind of exercise of power; or rather, a certain kind of regulation of the exercise of power. In the modern constitutional state, the relationship between citizen and administrative authority – for example, a tax authority – should be regulated in the following manner (see also T onnies 1887; Parsons 1951): ¨ 1. My basic properties are less important. The tax authorities are not allowed to emphasize whether I am red-haired, overweight or a smoker. What counts is my performances or actions, for example, how much I earn and how I do so. 2. There are limits to how versatile the tax authority can be. For instance, not all of my economic arrangements can be of interest to the tax authority. It is unimportant whether I am an economic spendthrift. The tax authority must emphasize specific matters, for example, my income and deductions. 3. A tax inspector with a thoroughly suspicious disposition cannot reduce my deductions merely on the grounds that he suspects that I have been cheating. Case decisions must be made on the basis of objective – not subjective – criteria. 4. Nor can the tax authority staff treat me highly emotionally. The relationship must be neutral. They cannot write: ‘We are really tired of all your fake expenditures etc’. Instead, they must write something to the effect of: ‘Based on our meeting last week and our further investigations. . .’ 5. Everybody must receive the same treatment following universal criteria. It would be a particular treatment if I were the only one to receive a specific treatment – kind as well as unkind. These five principles – action-orientation, specificity, objectivity, neutrality and universality – can be understood as the essence of modernity and the rule of law. But this specific relationship between citizens and public authorities does not develop spontaneously. The civil servant will often feel great temptation to be subjective, particular, emotional, and so on. Consequently, the exercise of power must be regulated. To ensure this regulation, the bureaucratic form of organization is a meaningful choice. Following Weber, the bureaucratic organization – in short – is characterized by: 1. The authorization to make decisions is established in rules. 2. The civil servant is placed in a hierarchical system, which – at the same time – features a high degree of specialization. Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

WEBER, KAFKA AND BUREAUCRACY

3. 4. 5. 6.

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The work is based on documents. There is a strict separation between the public and private lives of the civil servant. The civil servant has professional/academic training. Holding the office is a full-time job, and the salary is the only or most important source of income.

It is easy to see how the bureaucratic form of organization is well suited to creating and maintaining a relationship between citizen and administration that is characterized by the five principles. For example, specialization promotes specificity; rules, separation and the academic training promote objectivity and neutrality; and written documents combined with the hierarchical principle may ensure action-orientation and universalism. Weber recognized a number of positive features of bureaucracy compared to previous forms of administration (Weber 1957, p. 214): Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs – these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration, and especially in its monocratic form. As compared with all collegiate, honorific, and avocational forms of administration, trained bureaucracy is superior on all these points. However, Weber was no na¨ıve admirer of the bureaucratic form of organization in concreto or of the bureaucratization of society in general. The following citation – highly central to the understanding of The Castle – expresses Weber’s hesitant preference for bureaucracy (Weber 1957, p. 216): Its specific nature . . . develops the more perfectly the more the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation. Weber’s model of bureaucracy is a so-called ideal type that represents the cultivation of certain features of reality, which never can be found fully realized. The ideal type is an analytical tool. We can compare the reality with the ideal type and assess the distance between the ideal type and reality. The main questions in our reading of The Castle are therefore: 1. In The Castle, does Kafka relate to the elements in Weber’s ideal type? 2. If so, what is the distance between the ideal type and The Castle? 3. In The Castle, what are Kafka’s views on Weberian bureaucracy? THE CASTLE:

READ THROUGH WEBERIAN SPECTACLES

The very first lines of The Castle present the basic atmosphere – the pedal point of the entire novel: It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the large Castle. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness. (p. 9) K. believes he has been sent for to perform a task as a land surveyor. Some of the locals do not believe this to be the case and insist that K. leaves the village. As the book proceeds, K. fumbles through the little village and tries to find his way and to make sense of the Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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systems which appear to govern him and the village. For example, K. tries to get to the Castle the very first day. However, the road leading to the Castle does not run straight to the mountain. ‘[I]t only went close by, then veered off as if on purpose, and though it didn’t lead any farther from the Castle, it didn’t get any closer either’ (p. 14). Step by step, however, K. (maybe) becomes wiser. By scouring The Castle, we will map out the Castle’s authorities with Weber at hand. Hierarchical organization The Castle administration is extravagantly hierarchically organized. The smallest unit in a formal organization is a position. The position determines importance. For example, whether K. is considered employed as a surveyor or not has bearing on his importance. As a former assistant to K. explains:

As long as my relationship to you was an official one, you were of course a very important person to me, not because of your own qualities but because of my official instructions, and I would have done anything for you at the time, but now I couldn’t care less about you. (p. 117) Through the book, we encounter a myriad of positions – civil servants, heads of office, department heads, directors of bureau, functionaries, secretaries, super- and subordinate secretaries, castle stewards, castle sub-stewards, assistants, servants and messengers – of whom some are even further divided into finer gradations. All of the positions are part of a ranking. Sometimes the rankings are easily understood, usually not. But somewhere in this foggy hierarchy, a ranking is present. Vertical references such as above/below, higher/lower – even lower than the lowest – are frequent throughout the book. The clothing also has a hierarchical significance. Some of the civil servants are so important that they may bear an official suit in contrast to insignificant others, while other civil servants are so important that their significance can be taken for granted and therefore requires no particular clothing (p. 88). Presumably, the offices in the Castle are not hierarchically organized in floors or sizes. But there is an important distinction between inner and outer offices, where the inner and most secret are populated by the most important civil servants, because one must pass many counters in order to reach them (p. 88). A more unambiguous sign of hierarchy is the presence of controlling authorities, that is, superior authorities, which can intervene and correct the decisions of lower-ranking authorities. In this regard, the Castle administration is abundantly well-equipped. K. asks the local authority – the village chairman – whether there is a controlling authority: You’re very severe . . . but multiply your severity by a thousand and it will still be as nothing compared with the severity that the authorities show toward themselves. Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. (p. 38; italics added) Highly skilled and professional civil servants live in these hierarchies. They are undoubtedly full-time employees, as in Weber’s model, some of them even considerably more than that. Nothing is mentioned about the payment, but there is no indication that it is irregular (for example, bribery) – except in one case, which we shall return to later. The civil servants have truly professional training, which is tested if admission to the service is desired. In that case, the civil servant is submitted to the public admission examination, which is very difficult and may even last for years without any certainty of acceptance (p. 111). Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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But the organization is not hierarchical in the monocratic sense, as Weber prescribed. There would appear to be a plurality of hierarchies, which are linked – or possibly not linked – to each other in an obscure manner. Furthermore, civil servants can mutually represent one another, and there are often attached authorized, partly authorized and almost unauthorized secretaries in several cases. In a peculiar way, Kafka is playing with the Weberian demand of clear authority, as when secretary B urgel philosophizes ¨ for almost a full page over the concepts of authorization and jurisdiction and how the Castle applies the concepts, ending with the following statement: ‘Doesn’t the least bit of jurisdiction contain all of it?’ (p. 131). A decent hierarchical organization must have a top executive. But not in the Castle. It is quite true that we are briefly introduced in the beginning of the book to Count Westwest and to the Count’s authorities. The count later disappears from the picture, however, and the Kafkaesque hierarchy appears to be vertically endless. In fact, there is neither top nor bottom, as we have heard about positions which are lower than the lowest. The hyper-hierarchical world is marked by a number of cracks. Surveyor K. already identifies an ambiguity in his ‘letter of employment’. There are passages in the letter where he is addressed as a free man with a free will, whereas in other passages he is being treated as an inferior worker, hardly visible from the elevated level of the director, and he is offered two kinds of hierarchy – both with an imaginary element – from which he can choose. The question to K. was: ‘. . . whether he wanted to be a village worker with a distinctive but merely apparent connection to the Castle, or an apparent village worker who in reality allowed the messages brought by Barnabas to define the terms of his position’ (p. 20). Time after time, cracks are pointed out with words such as connections, advantageous opportunities, convenient occasions, possibilities, allusions and hints, which – correctly utilized and interpreted – can grant one access to formally unjustified advantages. In sum, Kafka is systematically relating to the phenomenon of hierarchy. He paints a portrait of an imposing, wildly growing hierarchy characterized by a confusing lack of clarity, excessive worship of rankings, endless hierarchies, hierarchical contradictions and cracks in the hierarchy: significantly different from Weber’s model, on the one hand, but certainly relating to that particular element in Weber’s model on the other. Documents Documents and records form the keystones in the bureaucratic world. It is indisputable what Kafka thinks of this feature of the Castle’s authorities. At this point, Kafka invites us to join a pure farce. During his struggle against the Castle, K. is being directed to the village chairman in order to obtain information about his appointment. The chairman must show K. a decree from the Castle and makes his wife look for the document in a large cabinet. When his wife opens the cabinet, two large piles of documents fall out. The wife continues to dig and overturns one armful after another of documents on the floor (p. 36). Now this is actually a very little stack, because most of the documents are kept in the barn, many have been thrown out, and the chairman has even stopped copying all letters and decrees. Weber might have suggested that this is merely the usual mess one can find with an apparently pre-bureaucratic amateur civil servant. The heart is in the right place, the papers are not. Let us therefore move up to the Castle, where we find a rule-following and, in the Weberian sense, true ‘beamten’: functionary Sordini. He is known and feared for his extreme meticulousness, his stubbornness and – quite unfortunately – his great capacity for work. He demonstrates the same dedication to the smallest and largest cases Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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alike. In all of the cases, the documents are to Sordini what oxygen is to a human being. According to what is told, . . . the walls in his room are hidden behind columns of large bundles of files piled on top of one another, those are only the files Sordini is working on just then, and since files are constantly being taken from and added to the bundles, all this at great speed, the stacks are constantly falling down, and it’s precisely those endless thuds in rapid succession that have come to seem typical of Sordini’s study. (p. 39) Do documents have any significance? They do. The evidence is found one early morning at the Gentlemen’s Inn, where the civil servants from the Castle are to be found when their official duties force them down to the village. We now find ourselves in a long corridor in the basement, where the civil servants stay in cubicles along the corridor. Around five o’clock, the civil servants wake up and life and commotion is everywhere in the corridor: This babble of voices from the rooms had something extremely cheerful about it. First it sounded like the jubilation of children getting ready for an excursion, then like wake-up time in a henhouse, like the joy of being in complete accord with the awakening day, somewhere there was even a gentleman imitating the crowing of a cock. (p. 134) This description is in fact highly auditory and one can easily imagine Kafka having listened to the beginning of the first movement in Gustav Mahler’s first symphony. But what is going on? Is it morning feeding in a monkey cage? Well, in a sense it is: ‘From a distance, guided by a servant, came a tiny little cart containing files. A second servant walked alongside, holding a list which he was evidently using to compare the numbers on the doors with those on the files’ (p. 135). Afterwards, the documents are distributed among the civil servants in the cubicles. A few of them only receive a single piece of paper, and dissatisfaction is pronounced in those particular cases. In other cases, the civil servant is provided with a large pile of papers. Usually, this pile is left in front of the cubicle for a while in order for the others to take proper notice. There is a rattling of doors expressing the discontent from the neighbouring cubicles. Distributional errors do occur. For unknown reasons, documents must be interchanged on several occasions. Some civil servants must return the already-distributed documents, and protracted and emotional negotiations are taking place at several cubicles. An overlooked and offended civil servant only slowly settles: ‘ . . . just as children’s uninterrupted crying gradually turns into ever more isolated sobbing, so too with his shouting, but even after he had quieted down entirely, one could sometimes once again hear an isolated shout or a hasty opening and slamming of that door’ (p. 137). In this inimitable manner – over several full pages – Kafka portrays how the possession of documents is a strong symbol. Of course, possession of documents represents the allocation of knowledge but also – and in particular – the allocation of authorization and organizational status. Procedural precision All of the admirers of the Count’s various authorities and the excellent administrative procedures exercise every available opportunity to praise this administration in exactly the same way Weber praises bureaucracy: fast, precise, competent, and with the greatest thoroughness. At the same time, however, the consciousness of the admirers circles perseveringly around the possibility that errors may occur. We have just heard about errors – if not chaos – related to the distribution of case documents, which in a bureaucratic organization – as K. rightly notices – is the lifeblood Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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of the whole organization. Already upon K.’s arrival in the village, however, the theme of errors attracts the reader’s attention. K. is being accosted by the son of the Castle steward (here is one error: it is later revealed that he is the son of one of the Castle’s very lowest sub-stewards), who announces to K. that it is not possible to stay at the Inn without permission from the Count. A phone call is made to the Castle’s main chancellery in order to confirm or – hopefully – disconfirm K.’s claim that he has been sent for by the Count in order to work as a land surveyor. The Castle returns the call: no surveyor is expected. But another call is received after a while: it was an error. A surveyor is expected. That error – if it is an error – imbues the book. The explanation given by the village chairman to K. as to why he has been sent for despite the fact that they do not need him is central. This is a report of a little, in fact very little confusion. Errors are never made in large cases, the chairman guarantees K. When the authorities announced that a surveyor should be appointed, the village could only reply that there was no need to do so. However, the answer ended in Department B and not in Department A, which had sent the message. Unfortunately, the answer had also fallen out of the case folder, so Department A receives no answer, while Department B receives an incomplete answer related to a case unknown to them. In Department A, they waited steadily and quietly for an answer, which was certainly the appropriate behaviour considering the procedural precision of the whole organization. In Department B, however, functionary Sordini is authorized to the case, which now only consists of the file folder. He returns the folder to be completed. Several months – if not years – have now passed, and the village chairman has also forgotten all about the case, which actually does not matter, because ‘. . .the excellence of the organization is such that the file must zealously seek the wrong way, for otherwise it won’t find it . . .’ (p. 37). If an accident does occur, it can thus take quite some time for the error to be detected. Once detected, however, Sordini reveals himself as a determined tormentor, who – in writing, of course – cross-questions the chairman. At this point, the ordinary reader and surveyor K. will start to wonder. Why is Sordini not questioning the other departments in this mysterious case? Doing so would have been an error, considering the organizational excellence and remembering that all cases must be passed on with considerable speed. Moreover, the other departments ‘. . .wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error’ (p. 37). Due to the system’s own outstanding logic, it is about to get off track. At this time, however, the aforementioned control agencies surface; yet they do also follow the relentless logic of the system, because even if they should find a little error, ‘ . . .who can finally say that it is an error?’, the chairman adds gloatingly (p. 37). At this point, K. is very likely rather confused. Fortunately, the chairman can inform K. that the first control agency has detected the error and acknowledged it to be an error. ‘But’, he adds, ‘who can claim that the second control agencies will judge likewise and the third, and so on?’ (p. 38). Here, the endless hierarchy again surfaces and guarantees the order of everything and at the same time a fundamental ambiguity, because one can never know whether the last agency that has made a statement really is the final one or whether there is one more – in exactly the same way as with prime numbers. The case creates some controversy in the village, and the case therefore drags out. This points out a central characteristic in the authorities’ administrative procedures: the system is so precise and fast-working that it is extremely sensitive. When a case drags out and strains the system, it is possible ‘. . .that suddenly, like lightning, in some unforeseeable Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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place, which cannot be located later on, a directive is issued that usually justly, but nonetheless arbitrarily, brings the matter to a close’ (p. 40). All of this is unsatisfactory for K. He is subjected to a system in which only infinitesimal coincidences or a soupçon of decent humanity separates the rational system from the enigmatic. And the redemption is just as mysterious. K. is not satisfied with this: ‘[W]hat I want from the Castle is not charity, but my rights’ (p. 43). The separation of the public and private life of the civil servant A very crucial point in Weber’s model is the strict separation of the public and the private. In The Castle, this separation totally breaks down: ‘Nowhere else had K. ever seen one’s official position and one’s life so intertwined as they were here, so intertwined that it sometimes seemed as though office and life had switched places’ (p. 35). One early morning, K. is seated in Secretary B urgel’s cubicle. Burgel explains how an ¨ ¨ error can occur, because he is also insanely preoccupied with the possibility of errors. His account is about the civil servant’s weak moment, at night, when the most peculiar things can happen in the consciousness of the civil servant:

At night one involuntarily inclines to judge matters from a more private point of view . . . entirely irrelevant considerations about the parties’ circumstances in other respects, their sorrows and their fears, interfere with the judgment, the necessary barrier between parties and officials . . . (and) the persons involved switched places in a strange and absolutely inappropriate manner. (p. 129) It so happens that one of the defendants creeps in during the night. One is then tempted to fulfil the plea of the defendant, even though doing so would blast the entire organization. Burgel is compelled to give in, to act based on subjective criteria, to do what ¨ seems right but which is forbidden. In this dilemma lays the most severe trial of the civil servant. Luckily, Burgel ¨ can comfort himself and K. by assuring that the nightly visits occur very rarely. Almost never. Actually, K. is seated on Secretary B urgel’s bed right ¨ now. Not at the part of the bed reserved for public duty, but at the private part! Burgel is not alone in using a private room as a public office. We repeatedly encounter ¨ secretaries who are seated in the their beds and accepting visits, or – as in the case of the village chairman – have the office located completely in the private space. They also handle their cases in the taproom at the Gentlemen’s Inn. Thus, already in the physical organization of work, the division between public and private is blurred. Likewise, there is no clear demarcation between working hours and private time; ‘Such distinctions are alien to us’ (p. 129). Emotions are also mixed into the work in different ways. We have seen power struggles during the distribution of documents in the morning, and B urgel talks about ¨ the importance of passion: ‘Isn’t the passion with which the matter gets tackled decisive? And isn’t this passion always present to the same extent, isn’t it always there in full force?’ (p. 131). This passion even trumps authorization. No secretary can hold himself back if he is offered a case, even if he has only the most moderate authorization. Some civil servants even have illegitimate passions. This becomes evident when a new member of staff is being interviewed for recruitment: . . . there are some officials who very much against their own will love the smell of that sort of wild game, and during admission exams they sniff the air, twist their mouths, roll their eyes, men like that somehow seem to stir their appetite, and they must cling to the law books in order to be able to resist. (p. 111) Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Another – spicier – passion seems rather widespread. The civil servants have mistresses. And (apparently) they do not mince their actions: ‘. . .anything is possible with those gentlemen from the Castle, no matter how beautiful or ugly the particular girl happens to be’ (p. 103). Olga, sister to Amalia, who is to be introduced shortly, tells of how she has helped calm down the waiters at the Gentlemen’s Inn: ‘ . . . for over two years now I have spent the night in the stable with the servants, at least twice a week’ (p. 110). These servants have been described as shameless, fierce and disobedient, not to be restrained by any other law than their own insatiable sexual instincts. It is fair to claim that the Castle administration is almost extravagantly un-Weberian in its various violations of the boundaries between public and private. But the conclusion yet again must be that Kafka actually relates systematically to this dimension in Weber’s model. The Castle and the village While the Castle does not restrain itself when it comes to transcending its own barriers, the village and its inhabitants have very strict limits. A harsh separation in the direct relationship between a civil servant and his supplicant is being practiced. Due to ‘. . . the seamlessness of the official organization . . .’ (p. 130), a subpoena is immediately and without any hesitation sent to the supplicant, ‘. . . usually even before he has thought the matter through, indeed even before he knows about it . . .’ (p. 131). In this manner, they beat the humble citizen to it, decide when a contact can occur, and if the citizen shows up at the correct time, he will often be sent home again with reference to the more or less fictive remarks in the case. Careful preparation has been made prior to the actual interrogations. The civil servants only engage in negotiations if there is little reason to fear defeat; they test themselves prior to the negotiations and cancel them if they are not feeling on top. In order to soften up the defendant, they can be called for negotiations a maximum of ten times, all of which are cancelled; and the civil servant can allow himself to be represented by another civil servant, unauthorized in the specific case, who therefore can carry out fictive negotiations. The administrative separation is supported by a physical separation. It is difficult, even almost impossible, to find the way to the Castle. K. already realizes this the first morning. And when you reach the Castle and stand at the road in order to talk to a civil servant, the problem is that there are several driveways to the Castle. One of the driveways is used the one day, while another driveway is used other days and so on. Sometimes changes are even made during the course of the day. ‘The rules according to which these changes take place are still unknown’ (p. 108). If you nevertheless manage to get into the Castle because you have a legitimate errand, the problems are not over yet. K.’s messenger Barnabas ‘ . . . certainly does go into the offices, but are the offices actually the Castle? And even if the Castle does have offices, are they the offices Barnabas is permitted to enter? He enters offices, but those are only a portion of the total, then there are barriers and behind them still more offices’ (p. 88). The Castle’s power No matter how comically the Castle is presented, its power remains unquestionable. The Castle penetrates and encloses the whole village and all its inhabitants. Nearly all of them belong to the Castle and draw their identity through the Castle. In Weber’s understanding, administration is the everyday form of control. Based on the legal rationality of the Castle, the village inhabitants are given certain roles, such as subordinates and supplicants, Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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and the Castle dominance is supported by the village’s social self-control, neatly guided by the Castle. The Castle’s power is most obviously demonstrated through the history about Amalia and her family. Refusing to grant a civil servant female favours can have harsh consequences. Amalia’s family has been totally destroyed, because Amalia has torn up an ‘invitation’ and cast the pieces in the messenger’s face. The invitation comes from Sortini (not to be confused with Sordini), one of the more prominent masters in the Castle. Quickly – but quietly and discreetly – the family’s situation changes completely. The sister’s account of the fate of her family is one of the tragic sections in The Castle, because it reveals, among other things, that the ruining of the family is due to the village’s own self-control. Knowledge regarding Amalia’s unfortunate answer has obviously spread far and wide, and as everybody fears the Castle, the village withdraws from the family. The father loses his job as a voluntary fire inspector, his employees leave him, and the family is being frozen out. The father humiliates himself by lining up in front of the Castle in order to beg forgiveness. But as long as the Castle has not displayed any discontent, the father has nothing to apologize for, and the Castle cannot accept an apology for an error that they have not acknowledged has at all occurred. It then becomes the father’s task to prove that he has something to apologize for. An efficient control-trap has snapped shut. The Castle encloses the village from an elevated distance. Klamm, director of Bureau no. 10, is compared to an eagle: (K.) considered Klamm’s remoteness, his impregnable abode, his muteness, broken perhaps only by shouts the likes of which K. had never heard before, his piercing, downturned gaze, which could never be proved, never be refuted, and his, from K.’s position below, indestructible circles, which he was describing up there in accordance with incomprehensible laws, visible only for seconds . . . .(p. 62) How do villagers then react to the Castle dominance? Using Hirschman’s (1970) concepts – exit, voice and loyalty – the villagers react with loyalty. Revolt (voice) seldom occurs, though one might suspect K. to be a rebel. As it turns out later, however, this makes no sense at all. Finally, the villagers could leave this unhappy place (exit), but nobody does so. The only one who has had a remote idea of exiting is Klamm’s former mistress, Frieda – K.’s fiancée for a brief period – who says to K.: ‘if only we had gone abroad at once, that same night, we could be somewhere else, safe, always together, your hand always close enough for me to catch hold of . . .’ (p. 125). However, both she and K. remain. K. ends up as an illegal inhabitant in the room of one of the most subordinate maids at the Gentlemen’s Inn. And on the Castle hill, we can still find ‘. . . the authorities in their inextricable greatness . . .’ (p. 93) smiling after having won the struggle (p. 11). What Weber might conclude There is little doubt that large parts of The Castle can benefit from being read through the lenses of Weber, simply because all of the dimensions in Weber’s model of bureaucracy can be identified in The Castle. Weber hereby provides a rather exact focus for reading the novel. Through Weber, one can obtain a clear diagnosis of what is wrong in the Castle administration: the distance between the Castle administration and the Weberian model is astonishingly large. Weber himself would immediately point to the lack of separation of public and private life as a crucial problem. In many instances, we hear about connections, mistresses, the Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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mixture of working and private life, the lack of physical separation between working life and private time, nightly interrogations, and the excessive passion that the civil servants put into their work. The Castle’s authorities have none of the prescribed cool-headedness – sine ira et studio. Next, there are too many documents. There is no space to store all of the documents, requested files cannot be found, and the piles of cases in Sordini’s office are repeatedly falling. Ironically, there are nevertheless too few documents, as the village chairman has stopped copying and keeping the documents. And even worse than this chaos: while changing meaning from being carriers of information to symbols of status, the documents have become addictive. The civil servants in the Castle have grown heavily dependent on the documents; indeed, they are fed with paper and hereby transformed from civil servants to civil animals. Furthermore, the hierarchies are growing wild, and the endless hierarchies without top or bottom cause unpredictability, a preoccupation with formal positions, and a ‘verticalization’ of language and sense of reality. On the basis of a popular understanding of the bureaucratic phenomenon, one can claim that the Castle administration is indeed supremely bureaucratic. This is a common misunderstanding. Weber would correctly point out other interpretations. With regard to the lacking separation of public and private life, the Castle administration is an example of pre-bureaucratic administration. Apart from that, the Castle is a neat example of a bureaucracy run amok. In that way, the Castle illustrates the differences between the good type and the degenerate type, resembling Plato’s discussion of types of government in The Republic. KAFKA’S RESPONSE

Kafka may smile mildly at Weber’s comments and say: ‘Dear Max, I know. The Castle is simply a parody of your model. Your model is fine as an analytical abstract, but how do you think it will work in real life?’ Should that be the case, Kafka has written a much-contemplated parody, almost a counter-punctual ideal type, based on four key observations. Note that since Weber, many sociologists have discussed the shortcomings of bureaucracy. For one of the earliest treatments, see Merton (1940), who partly touches upon the first two of the four key observations that follow. Bureaucratic excesses unfold in time and space Documents and hierarchy can be exaggerated, but what causes all of these exaggerations? The simple answer is that the bureaucratic model – in practice – is ruined by people. A Weberian bureaucracy is an artificial state. It is worth pursuing, because it is suitable to regulate the subjective, emotional and interest-driven control of other people. Nevertheless, an artificial state will inevitably break down or develop pathological traits. For example, over time, documents and positions become symbols of personal significance. Too much paper and hierarchy are the likely results. In the long run, they create a demand for personal connections, beneficial occasions, offers of personal services, and so on, which in turn break down the separation between public and private life. In other words, overdevelopment leads to cracks in the bureaucracy. All of these cracks are counterproductive and self-reinforcing. This is not to say that irregularity is a problem in itself; well-functioning organizations require regularity as well as innovative and creative irregularity, but the exaggerated bureaucracy creates excessive regularity, which necessarily leads to dysfunctional irregularity. Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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In other words, Kafka points out the natural pathological developments in a bureaucratic organization. While Weber’s model is a static description of a system, an organizational chart, Kafka places the model in time and space, thus providing an alternative and more accurate understanding. Like music, a social system is a phenomenon which can only be understood dynamically. The ‘no errors’ ideology generates dilemmas Kafka points directly to two unpleasant problems related to the concept of the infallible administration. The first infallibility problem is internal. Based on the chairman’s description, it goes like this: (1) the system is excellent in every respect, all agencies are control agencies, and errors cannot occur; (2) since everything is expected to be under control, the infallibility has become an organizational ideology, and control is unnecessary; (3) if errors occur, the system runs away, because in reality it is not fitted to cope with errors, nor has the urge to react to them, since it must then recognize that it was an error not to expect errors; (4) the endless hierarchy means that one can never know if an error really was an error; (5) as a result, there is very good breeding ground for small errors, which have the potential to become massive; and (6) a perfect and exact system is of course extremely sensitive and breaks down after a period of strain. This means that bureaucracy as a form of organization cannot sustain itself. Kafka more than suggests that there is very little separating rational bureaucracy and enigmatic bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is organized artificial intelligence and – just like artificial intelligence – cannot react in a flexible manner, repeating with pleasure absurd actions infinitely. Another interpretation is that The Castle provides a neat description of a total institution, that is, an institution in which all of the parts of the lives of the individuals under the institution are subordinated to and dependent upon the authorities of the organization (Goffman 1961). This is a systemic power that – disconnected from society – has itself as reference. Luckily, there is a kind of emergencybrake – an incomprehensible, arbitrary decision – which in most cases nevertheless is obviously correct. It does not rest upon rules and competencies. It comes from an unknown place – which cannot be investigated – and has the character of a revelation or something intuitive. This rescue is trans-rational. Bureaucratic rationality can only be unfolded together with its antithesis: arbitrariness. Otherwise, pathologies prevail. Indeed, Weber himself thought that a bureaucracy needed to be challenged by external, arbitrary decisions, for example, from political leadership. The second infallibility problem regards the relationship between client and system. Secretary Burgel ¨ circles long around the relationship between the civil servant and the defendant. As in Weber’s model, the excellent administration is supposed to handle everyone according to the rules and without consideration to the person’s reputation. Burgel himself has the desire to show consideration, to supplement the rule of law with ¨ fairness. But it is the burden of the civil servant not to show consideration. In fact, it is thoughtful to the defendant to be inconsiderate, and individual considerations would blow up the whole system. B urgel has a point. The rule of law is (also) that the defendant ¨ is not to be treated better than others. However, the quest for infallibility – the system that continues to function – has, as an immediate consequence, rigidity in the handling of the defendant. In fact Weber also acknowledged this problem. He cautiously warned in a footnote (Weber 1957, p. 215): ‘Here we cannot discuss in detail how the bureaucratic apparatus may, and actually does, produce obstacles to the discharge of business in a manner suitable for the single case’. Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Somewhat more serious is the delusion that the burden of the civil servant is not to show thoughtfulness, while inconsideration is equated with consideration. The latter legitimizes the questionable treatment the defendants receive from the Castle’s civil servants, and in the same manner does the executioner legitimize his job. In other words, the second problem of infallibility is the legitimization of inhumanity. B urgel ¨ is caught in a bureaucratic trap: displaying individual consideration is tantamount to the abuse of power. Failing to do so, he is inhuman. Indeed, the burden associated with exercising authority is a phenomenon often approached in fiction dealing with public authorities and organizational life. In his book The Flaw from 1965, Samarakis gives a splendid treatment of inhumanity and infallibility. Kafka suggests that a fully developed – as opposed to excessively developed – bureaucracy is not only a rare flower that is difficult to cultivate and sustain, it is also a problematic flower. Inscrutability as life condition Weber was fully aware of the dark side of bureaucracy. He was concerned about the bureaucratization of societal life through formalization, standardization and dehumanization, that is, a pathological magnification of the five principles characterizing the modern relationship between administration and citizen, which introduced the article. But is Kafka’s concern the same? Certainly not. In stark contrast, Kafka fears the inscrutability that follows the total breakdown of the principles. Understanding the Castle’s authorities is no easy task, since the examples of ambiguity and inscrutability are legio. On the very first page of The Castle, ambiguity is presented as the fundamental theme. K.’s very appointment to surveyor is dubious. K.’s connections to the Castle’s authorities are only apparent connections, and it is only K.’s ignorance about local circumstances that has made them real. The term ‘real civil servants’ suggests that ‘unreal’ or ‘apparent civil servants’ also exist. Last, but not least, there are the arbitrary decisions which are not to be explored. Here, Kafka also suggests that technical rationality can possibly be approached at the bottom of the organization, because rules can be made for decisions and behaviour, while arbitrariness – but not necessarily imprudence – increases the higher in hierarchy one gets. It should be noted that inscrutability is a favourite theme among fiction writers (Beck Jørgensen 1994), just as ambiguity has long been a recurrent theme in organization theory (see March and Olsen 1976). Everything in an inscrutable world is subject to conjecture and sense-making interpretations. Barnabas has been promised an official suit. But it drags out. What is the meaning of this slowness? That the affair is being handled thoroughly? That the handling of the affair has not yet started? Or that it has already been finished, but that he has not been informed about it (see p. 88)? What does it mean if he has not been informed? Similarly: what does it mean that Barnabas has been given two letters to give to K.? Are these two letters of great importance? Or is that a fallacy, the consequence being that one should consciously not assign any significance to these letters? As a villager mentions: ‘. . . the thoughts that they prompt are endless and the point at which one happens to stop is determined only by accident and so the opinion one arrives at is just as accidental’ (p. 114). Kafka later slightly corrects this statement when he allows the landlord of the Gentlemen’s Inn to say: ‘. . . and chance is always on the gentlemen’s side . . .’ (p. 24).) One guesses, interprets, assumes – and it does not help at all. Unfortunately, Kafka’s three observations are functionally connected. The infallibility ideology allows for bureaucratic excesses ad libitum, and these are suitable producers of inscrutability. This leads directly to the fourth observation. Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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The perpetual walking on the spot He who experiences inscrutability as a condition of life will end up walking on the spot. The landlady in the Bridge Inn continues to be concerned about why she is no longer Klamm’s mistress. Amalie’s father is still waiting by the wrong driveway. All of the nameless defendants are held in check by the well prepared interrogations during the night at Gentlemen’s Inn. And K. himself learns something about the Castle, but he never comes close to it – let alone conquers it. He never gets his justice, because perhaps there is no justice. The Castle’s awareness about its own invincibility is already hinted at in Chapter 1: ‘. . . the Castle had smilingly taken up the fight’ (p. 11). With inspiration from Hofstadter (1979), we may say that he has moved around as though in a crab canon by Bach: the theme first moves forward, then is reversed and moves backwards. He ends where he started – without status. Even though he has become wiser after having explored the Castle, it has not brought him anywhere. The Castle is still up there, wrapped in mist and darkness in the apparent emptiness. There is something surreal about the universe in The Castle which does not harmonize with the physical world in which we live. We need to move to art to see what cannot be seen in reality. M.C. Escher’s paintings, with their strange perspectives in impossible architectonical spaces, strike at something characteristic in The Castle. In Escher’s painting ‘ Ascending and Descending’ (1960), we see a number of persons who keep walking up (and down). This is the perfect illustration of Kafka’s topless and bottomless hierarchy. At the same time, it also illustrates how the walkers get nowhere, because the stairs continuously lead them back to where they came from, just as Waterfall (1961) portrays water running down, only to end up where it came from. Again, we can see K. walking towards the Castle but getting neither closer nor further away. He is walking on the spot. In Hofstadter’s (1979) words, he is in ‘a strange loop’, where he ends up where he started. Hofstadter labels a hierarchy characterized by a strange loop as a ‘tangled hierarchy’. That is a rather precise description of the impression one gets of the Castle administration. In Escher’s painting Moebius Strip I (1961), the front becomes the back and the back becomes the front. This again illustrates a universe containing both physical and logical contradictions. We have seen many of these contradictions in The Castle, but these contradictions are neither physical nor logical contradictions. They are natural paradoxes, which is noticeably reminiscent of the mathematician G odel’s Incompleteness Theorems. ¨ The first theorem states that in any axiomatic system above a certain level of complexity, one can infer a statement which can neither be proved nor disproved, or both proved and disproved. An axiomatic system is therefore either ‘incomplete’ or ‘inconsistent’. According to Godel’s ¨ second theorem of incompleteness, an axiomatic system which can be proven to be consistent is inconsistent. If we then consider Weber’s model of bureaucracy to be an axiomatic system and the five principles characterizing the relationship between administration and citizen as derived theorems, then the model is either incomplete or inconsistent. If anyone claims they can prove it to be consistent, then it is inconsistent. That is exactly what Kafka tells us in The Castle. WEBER–KAFKA UNITED

Can Weber and Kafka nevertheless both be right? According to the traditional reading, both The Castle and The Trial are primarily interpreted as narratives about the respective individual’s futile defences against a repressive superiority. That is an unfortunate misunderstanding. The Castle and The Trial are very different novels. The Trial begins with Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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the arrest of Josef K. for a crime, which he is not informed about. And it ends with the request to kill himself. He is not able to do so, and two gentlemen must then kill him. While dying, Josef K. feels guilty about not being able to execute the punishment himself. If anything, that is repression and superiority. In The Castle, Surveyor K. voluntarily arrives in the village. He chooses the place – not the other way around. What is his purpose? After close consideration, K. says that the Castle has taken up the fight, and K. once refers to himself as an assailant (p. 35). So K. has apparently challenged the Castle, and one is tempted to interpret K. as a rebel rather than a victim. However, this interpretation makes no sense, despite the mentioned indications. As a rebel, K. acts very awkwardly. K. claims to be called for by the Castle. But where is the letter that calls him to the Castle? K. never shows it. K. refers to assistants that shall follow the next morning with instruments. They never arrive. They have probably never existed. He has apparently never planned to do anything as a surveyor. Is it then surprising that the Castle reacts in this situation? Add to this that K. insults everybody from the very beginning. He quickly steals director Klamm’s mistress, Frieda, and has sex with her immediately outside Klamm’s door (not very smart). He does not accept advice and simply demands his right, even though he probably does not have any rights. When, towards the end of the novel, B urgel ¨ actually wants to help, K. falls asleep (neither polite nor very smart) and has a dream about a fight with a naked secretary, who resembles a statue of a Greek God! Good Lord – as a rebel, K. acts so unintelligently that Kafka must have been thinking about something else. K. makes most sense as the person who – by walking, talking, listening, observing and provoking – uncovers the Castle’s authorities. K.’s role resembles that of a social scientist. He has a problem in the beginning: the apparent emptiness, the pedal point of the Castle. Through several interviews and on-the-spot observations, he then encircles what this apparent emptiness consists of and what it means. The reader becomes wiser while K. works his way up through the hierarchy from the Bridge Inn to the Gentlemen’s Inn, even though K. ends up where he started. Surveyor K. is Kafka’s academic instrument, and K.’s own destiny in the novel is only of interest to the extent that it reflects the reality K. is examining. One may ask why K. is a land surveyor? The literature addressing this question outlines many detailed suggestions (see Zilcosky 2002). The most simple and convincing answer is that the capacity to carry out research through action and provocation is strengthened by the position as surveyor. A surveyor – and especially a newcomer – can potentially create unrest and conflicts – as the village chairman also remarks. The data that construct the world for K. are the peoples’ interpretations and conjectures. K. actually acts as if he has read about Weber’s ‘verstehen’ approach. Social systems do not exist through hard facts, but rather through the agents’ interpretations of what facts are and what they mean. Obviously, Kafka never presents us with any exact knowledge about the Castle administration. The only thing we know about the Castle is how some people experience it. Furthermore, we only become acquainted with the Castle through persons who are outsiders, subordinated or peripherally affiliated. This means that all of the experiences of inscrutability and ambiguity are the experiences of the marginalized. If we accept the role of K. as a social scientist, we require the specification of the relevance of K.’s insights. Here, K. has two problems. Firstly, he lets himself be caught. He carries out field research as a social scientist (in the role of the surveyor), but never gets out of the field again. Secondly, he is clearly limited to a certain group of people and their experiences. This, it should be noted, is not entirely K.’s fault. He is possibly up against a Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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world that has very little interest in being investigated – a condition, indeed, that many social scientists have experienced. Against this background, we cannot rule out that with a change of perspective, one could find order, system and clarity. Weber’s way of analysing the world represents a change of perspective. Weber’s model of bureaucracy and his entire essay tell us very little about the concrete relationship between the bureaucracy and the citizen, especially from the citizen’s perspective. Weber works with a top-down perspective, and his historic-comparative method places him in a position that allows ‘overview’. Viewing the Castle’s authorities from a higher level may provide clarity. K. actually hints at this possibility himself when, in an archetypical Kafkaesque manner, he mentions: ‘the admirable consistency of the service, which was, one suspected, especially perfect on occasions when it appeared to be missing’ (p. 35). As someone living in the shadow of the Austrian-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, Kafka might have had more experience than Weber with pre-bureaucratic administration. But the most important differences between Weber and Kafka are, with little doubt, that they view the same phenomenon from different positions and with different methods. Are the observations of the one more correct than the other? The question is meaningless. The two texts enrich one another. As two opposite poles, Weber and Kafka ‘magnetize’ each other. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen for helpful comments and especially to former professor at Copenhagen Business School, Egil Fivelsdal, for not only being helpful but also visionary. REFERENCES Beck Jørgensen, T. 1994. ‘The Gioconda Smile of the Authorities: An Essay on Fictional Pictures of Public Administration and Citizens’, in B. Czarniawska-Joerges and P.G. de Monthoux (eds), Good Novels, Better Management. Reading Organizational Realities in Fiction. Tampa, FL: Harwood Academic, pp. 267–303. Derlien, H.-U. 1991. ‘Bureaucracy in Art and Analysis: Kafka and Weber’, Journal of Kafka Society of America, 1–2, 4–20. Gerth, H.H. and C. Wright Mills (eds). 1948. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gerth, H.H. and C. Wright Mills (eds). 1957. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 3rd edn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Goffman, E. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday. Harrington, A. 2007. ‘Alfred Weber’s Essay ‘‘The Civil Servant’’ and Kafka’s ‘‘In the Penal Colony’’: The Evidence of an Influence’, History of the Human Sciences, 20, 3, 41–63. Heinemann, R. 1996. ‘Kafka’s Oath of Service: ‘‘Der Bau’’ and the Dialectic of the Bureaucratic Mind’, PMLA (Proceedings of the Modern Language Association), 111, 2, 256–70. Hirschman, A.O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hofstadter, D.R. 1979. G¨ odel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books. Kafka, F. 1998. The Castle. A new translation, based on the restored text. Translated and with a preface by M. Harman. New York: Schocken Books (http://www.scribd.com/doc/13621292/The-Castle-by-Franz-Kafka-translated-Mark-Harman). March, J.G. and J.P. Olsen. 1976. Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Bergen: University Press. Merton, R.K. 1940. ‘Bureaucratic Structure and Personality’, Social Forces, 18, 4, 560–8. Parsons, T. 1951. The Social System. New York: The Free Press. Radkau, J. 2009. Max Weber. A Biography. Cambridge: Polity Press. Samarakis, A. 1965. The Flaw. A Novel. Translated by P. Mansfield and R. Burns. London: Hutchinson. Tönnies, F. 1887. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Leipzig: Fuess Verlag. Warner, M. 2007. ‘Kafka, Weber and Organization Theory’, Human Relations, 60, 7, 1019– 38. Weber, M. 1972 [1918]. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. T ubingen: ¨ J.C.B. Mohr. Zilcosky, J. 2002. ‘Surveying The Castle: Kafka’s Colonial Visions’, in J. Rolleston (ed.), A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, NY: Camden House.

Date received 23 September 2010. Date accepted 7 November 2010. Public Administration 2011 © 2011 The Author. Public Administration © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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APPENDIX

Weber’s essay was first published in English in 1948 (see Gerth and Wright Mills 1948). The English translation is based on Max Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Weber 1918). The 1957 third edition, edited by Gerth and Mills, is used. Citations are referred to as Weber (1957). While the choice of Weber’s essay is obvious, The Castle is chosen on the grounds that of all of Kafka’s writings, it represents the work which deals most directly and irresistibly with administrative and organizational phenomena. The translation of Der Schloss used in this paper is Franz Kafka: The Castle, a new translation, based on the restored text, translated and with a preface by Mark Harman. It was first published in 1998. The reader must be aware that I refrain for reasons of space from relating to other writings by Weber and Kafka, not to mention the voluminous later research addressing their work.

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Weber And Kafka. The Rational And The Enigmatic Bureaucracy

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