The Ecological Theory of Bureaucracy: The Case of Josiah Wedgwood and the British Pottery Industry

John Langton This article attempts to show that by combining concepts and propositions drawn from behavioral evolutionism, Weberian sociology, and organizational systematics, an ecological theory of bureaucracy can be constructed that explains the emergence and proliferation of bureaucratic organizations as well as the classical Darwinian theory of natural selection explains the rise and adaptive radiation of higher biological taxa, such as birds or mammals. This ecological theory is then used to explain the bureaucratization of the British pottery industry during the industrial revolution. One preliminary finding of this investigation is that bureaucratic elements are selectively retained because they enhance a firm's profitability in both the neoclassical and Marxian sense of the term: they increase its inputoutput efficiency and its ability to extract surplus value.