article
Bureaucratic Structure and Personality.
Merton, Robert K. "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality." Social Forces 18, no. 4 (1940): 560–568.
Why this matters here
Robert Merton’s 1940 essay on bureaucratic structure and personality describes goal displacement and ritualism: officials trained for rule-following can come to treat procedure as the end rather than the means. Coupling cites that ritualism when process metrics improve while outcomes worsen—documentation, audits, and training substituting for learning. Merton analyzes bureaucratic personality and displacement; the book asks how institutions under drift measure compliance as if it were repair.
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