'Bureaucracy and the ethic it generates undercuts the crucial
premises of this classic ideology [The Protestant ethic] and strips
it of the powerful religious and symbolic meaning it once had.
'Bureaucracy breaks apart the ownership of property from its
control, social independence from occupation, substance from
appearances, action from responsibility, obligation from guilt,
language from meaning, and notions of truth from reality.
'Most important, and at the bottom of all of these fractures, it
breaks apart the older connection between the meaning of work and
salvation ["hard work will lead to success"]. In the bureaucratic
world, one's success, one's sign of election, no longer depends on
an inscrutable God, but on the capriciousness of one's superiors and
the market; and one achieves economic salvation to the extent that
one pleases and submits to new gods, that is, one's bosses and the
exigencies of an impersonal market.'