QoG lunch seminar with Jan Vogler

Abstract:

Due to high degrees of formalization and routinization of personnel management, modern bureaucracies are often considered to primarily follow a merit-based rationale with respect to recruitment and promotion decisions. Accordingly, many scholars see meritocracy as a constitutional principle of modern administrative organization. The roots of this perspective are in Max Weber’s pioneering work that emphasizes the predominance of bureaucratic rationality and meritocracy. But do even the bureaucracies that are most closely aligned with Weber’s perspective really follow a clear merit-based logic? Highlighting the critical roles of discretion, heuristics, and social relations in complex promotion and hiring decisions, our theory emphasizes how and why even in highly formalized bureaucratic organizations—which may additionally be subject to performance-inducing external pressures—prestige and social connections remain central to individual careers. We subsequently test this theory with an original dataset covering the extreme case of top-level promotions in a highly formalized bureaucracy subject to intense military pressures: the German Wehrmacht during World War II.