A Chaos that Worked
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076709347075 |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Author | Christopher Grey,Andrew Sturdy |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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A Chaos that Worked
Organizing Bletchley Park
Christopher Grey and Andrew Sturdy
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
Drawing on a major historical study of the organization of Bletchley Park,
the site of British and Allied codebreaking during the Second World War,
this article shows that it was characterized by ‘chaos’ in terms of a lack of
clear formal structures. It is argued that the success of Bletchley Park can be
explained in terms of various factors including shared social capital of some
employees, organizational hybridity, centralization, knowledge-sharing and
organizational porosity. These factors may be understood to be the reasons
why Bletchley Park was successful despite its organizational chaos, but the
paper seeks to advance the stronger claim that it was successful because of its
organizational chaos.
Keywords
administration in the Second World War, Bletchley Park, contingency theory,
organizational chaos, organizational hybridity, signals intelligence
Introduction
It is now over 30 years since the work of Bletchley Park (BP) during the Second
World War became public knowledge (Winterbotham, 1974) and since then
material relating to it has been gradually, although still not entirely, declassified.
BP was the place where British signals intelligence (Sigint) efforts were concen-
trated and is most famously associated with the breaking of the German Enigma
cipher. It has now entered popular mythology and has been the subject of a novel
(Harris, 1995), giving rise to the film Enigma. BP has been satirized in a BBC
radio comedy show, Hut 33, and elsewhere:
At Bitchily and Tetchily Park, highly strung men and women in thick spectacles sat
stooped over crossword puzzles and chessboards in chilly, poorly lit rooms throughout
the night attempting to catch the famous Enigma cold. (Brown, 2005: 46)
DOI:10.1177/0952076709347075
ChristopherGrey,WarwickBusinessSchool,UniversityofWarwick,CoventryCV47AL,UK.
[email:chris.grey@wbs.ac.uk]
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At the same time, it has attracted a host of academic analyses and detailed jour-
nalistic accounts concerned with the significance of BP for military history (e.g.
Hinsley, 1993a; Hinsley et al., 1979; Smith, 1998) and diplomatic and strategic
history more widely (Ferris, 2005); and for the development of cryptographic and
cryptanalytic techniques (Kahn, 1996) and of computing (e.g. Copeland, 2001;
Goldstine, 1993). In addition, there is a quite massive literature of reminiscences,
many of which contain significant information about BP’s work (e.g. Calvocoressi,
2001; Hinsley and Stripp, 1993; Welchman, 1981). Although some of this literature
touches in more or less detail upon it, what has been much less widely explored
is how BP was organized (cf. Davies, 2001; Herman, 1996; Ratcliff, 2006). It is
this which is the focus of the present article. In it, we present an explication of
the organization of BP and will advance an explanation of why it was successful.
Our thesis, in brief, is that BP was characterized by a chaotic and incoherent set of
formal structures, but that there were a series of organizational features that meant
that BP managed to operate effectively. The ‘weak’ version of this thesis is that
BP was successful despite the chaos of its formal structures, but we also want to
present a ‘strong’ version of that thesis to the effect that BP was successful, at least
in part, because of those chaotic structures.
We suggest that this offers an unusual, and we hope unusually interesting, case
of how successful public administration can operate. Its significance lies partly in
its implications for what has become the dominant way in which policy makers in
the UK have approached bureaucracy in public administration. The guiding theme,
since at least the advent of New Public Management, has been that bureaucracy
is a ‘problem’ to be reformed. Such reform has for some years now, been explic-
itly configured in terms of ‘post-bureaucracy’ (e.g. Kernaghan, 2000; Morris and
Farrell, 2007) and this has been a feature of New Labour policy (Newman, 2001)
while also being placed at the centre of emergent Conservative thinking on the
delivery of public services (Cameron, 2009). These developments draw upon the
broad swathe of organizational and administrative theory to the effect that post-
bureaucracies necessarily offer operational superiorities (Heckscher, 1994), a
view which, while subject to challenge (Du Gay, 2000), has become so dominant
that it can now be considered mainstream.
Within this context, the BP case is instructive not least because it serves to
remind us of the limitations of polarized thinking about the merits and demerits of
bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy by recalling what used itself to be mainstream
in organizational and administrative theory, namely the notion of contingency. As
we hope to show, one aspect of the ‘chaos’ at BP was the co-existence of what in
traditional contingency theory were called ‘mechanistic’ and ‘organic’ organiza-
tional designs (Burns and Stalker, 1961), which roughly correlate to ‘bureaucracy’
and ‘post-bureaucracy’. Moreover, that it is possible to do this in relation to an
intelligence organization is significant since such organizations have many of the
characteristics of knowledge-intensiveness (Grey and Sturdy, 2009), which are
normally thought of as associating with post-bureaucracy. Thus, the BP case has
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GreyandSturdy:OrganizingBletchleyPark
the potential to help re-evaluate some of the more breathless claims of those who
would see a single direction of travel in administrative effectiveness.
Germane to these wider issues is the way that our account of BP will serve as
a corrective to its perhaps dominant received image. This tends to envisage BP
in terms of the genius of individuals of whom perhaps the most famous is Alan
Turing (Hodges, 1992). More recently it has also become widely recognized that
the ‘mundane’ work of thousands of people in technical, clerical and other capaci-
ties was vital to BP’s success. Their experiences have begun to be recorded through
accounts such as those in Hill (2004) and Page (2002, 2003). The effort required
to bring together, in conditions of complete secrecy, a complex organization that
increased in size from some 200 employees in 1939 to some 10,000 in 1944 was
substantial. To do so in ways that combined both the esoteric and the mundane was
an even more noteworthy achievement. It is with this that we are concerned.
Sources and Methods
This article is drawn from a major, ongoing research project on the organization
of BP (see also Grey and Sturdy, 2008, 2009), a project that utilizes a number of
sources and methods. The primary data are drawn from a study of archive material
held at the National Archives (NA), and reproduced in the Bletchley Park Trust
Archive (BPTA) where we consulted it. The main relevant document sequences
are HW3 and HW14.1 The BPTA also holds some 200 interviews with former BP
staff, conducted by different interviewers for different purposes over several years,
and we have consulted these for passing references to organizational issues. We
also draw upon the archives of Churchill College, Cambridge, which houses the
papers of Alistair Denniston, the first head of BP (the DENN sequence). In addi-
tion, we have consulted the voluminous secondary literature on BP and related
matters.
Archive data and secondary literature have been supplemented by interviews or
correspondence with 15 surviving members of BP staff, mainly contacted through
the Bletchley Park Trust and selected from a wider group of volunteers accord-
ing to the knowledge they might be able to shed on organizational issues. The
interviews, which were tape-recorded, took place in 2004 and 2005, normally in
the interviewees’ own homes and with their prior written consent. We also talked
to a wider number of BP veterans in a more informal way at their 2005 reunion
and have had a range of other informal contacts with them. These included a tour
of the sections of the main house at BP, not normally open to the public, where
the Directorate had their offices, conducted by one of our interviewees who had
been an office junior there at the time. We were aware of methodological issues
associated with the use of such retrospective testimony (for a discussion, see
Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, 2006) and have used it only with great care as an
adjunct to the archive material.
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Structure of Paper
We will begin the article with a brief and highly simplified explanation of the basic
functioning of BP – what it was for and how it operated – for those who may be
unfamiliar with it, since this is necessary to make sense of the detailed material
and analysis which follows.
We then present the two main sections of the article. In the first, we seek to
establish the chaotic nature of BP in organizational terms, stressing its lack of
clear lines of command and control and its departure from standard precepts of
administrative rationality. In the second main section we seek to explain why
BP was nonetheless able to operate successfully. We identify three main factors:
shared social capital; organizational hybridity; centralization, knowledge-sharing
and organizational porosity. These sections are followed by a discussion...
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