The office of St. Peter: The emergence of bureaucracy in the English Catholic Church, 1066--1250

This dissertation explores the bureaucratization of the English Catholic Church from 1066 to 1250. This was the first reemergence of a bureaucratic organization in the West since the fall of Rome, but has not been subjected to a systematic sociological and organizational analysis. The centrality of the Church in medieval society, and its role in building the institutions of law, property rights, and education that served as later models for the development of the nation state makes this gap in knowledge surprising and important. This dissertation examines the process of bureaucratization using theories drawn from sociology, organizations, and political science to attempt to explain the development of a bureaucratic organization. It examines how organizational and institutional structures necessary for a bureaucratic organization came to be put into place. In particular, this research examines the development of formal positions, the attachment of property to positions not individuals, the emergence of bureaucratic careers, the establishment and expansion of schools to provide literate administrators, universities for specialized training in theology and canon law, the use of canon law for providing rational and routine rules for behavior, and the establishment of shift from authority being based in tradition to authority being based in a rational legal system. Contrary to theories emphasizing the division of labor, state-building, institutions, and organizational control, I find that the bureaucratization of the church was a product of relatively low-level actors in the organization using changes in the external environment to create organizational structures and elaborating on nascent institutions that increased their own power, unintentionally creating a bureaucratic organization.