Negotiating Order: Experts and Control in Bureaucratic Organizations

This two-year ethnographic study of a major UK hospital’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic examines how control is negotiated between managers and experts in bureaucratic organizations. Previous studies have shown that experts lose control in bureaucratic organizations as managers come to dominate. In this study, the locus of control shifted between managers and experts through a process that we label ‘negotiating order’. Specifically, we show that managerial control was temporarily challenged by the experts through a set of expert control practices – creating expert groups, framing emerging issues, and creating briefing notes for managers – which collectively enabled experts to gain control and re-establish operational order. Once the operational order was re-established, managers regained control by applying a distinct set of managerial control practices – formalizing structures, allocating roles, and creating policies – which enabled managers to take the response to scale. This process of negotiating order also led to a renegotiation of the organizational order because which individuals were in positions of control varied with every shift of the locus of control. However, such opportunities for positional shifts were not equally distributed across the organization. We discuss the implications for studies on the bureaucratization of expertise, upward influence, and intra-occupational inequality in organizations.