Bureaucratic persistence paths: The role of embedded agency

In the context of today's post-industrial economy, corporate bureaucracy is widely condemned as obsolete, while radically different post-bureaucratic forms have long been expected to replace it. Yet many organizations today continue to be governed by bureaucratic principles. The present paper presents an actor-centered perspective on bureaucratic survival and persistence. Drawing on the conceptual resources of recent neo-institutional work on embedded agency, while also moving beyond the more deterministic versions of legitimacy-based explanations of form persistence, I outline a conceptual framework for explaining the different ways in which bureaucracy persists.