Because bureaucracies are performance organizations, they require a stable environment. They are potentially devastated under dynamic conditions, when their environments force them to do something other than what they were standardized to do. Nevertheless, machine bureaucracies can change by restandardizing their work processes, a more or less rational-technical process of rerationalizing their work and reformalizing work behavior. However, when its environment becomes dynamic, the professional bureaucracy cannot respond by making rational-technical adjustments in its work because its coordination rests within each professional, not in its work processes. At a minimum, change in a professional bureaucracy requires a change in what each professional does, because each professional does all aspects of the work individually and personally with his or her clients. Nevertheless, because schools are managed and governed as if they were machine bureaucracies, attempts to change them typically follow the rational-technical approach (Elmore & McLaughlin, 1988; House, 1979), which assumes that changes in, or additions to, the existing rationalization and formalization will result in changes in the way the work gets done. Of course, this fails to bring about the desired changes because the existing rationalization and formalization are located in the decoupled machine bureaucracy structure. However, because such changes or additions require at least overt conformity, they act to extend the existing rationalization and formalization. This, of course, drives the organization further toward the machine bureaucracy configurations, which reduces teacher thought and discretion even further, leaving students with even less personalized and thus even less effective services.
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