I can't seem to find a good canonical reference at the moment, but there's some interesting writing in organizational theory about the extent to which some of those kinds of bureaucracies are themselves basically mechanical systems, controlled by code that just happens to be manually executed by human operators. In general, code executed by computers tends to be executed more "rigidly", but in some systems humans can also be quite automaton-like in just executing instructions. In those cases it's not clear the human operators, rather than the algorithms they're executing, are in control of the decisions (it may not even be true that any one human knows what algorithm is being executed). Of course, you could argue someone can always change the bureaucratic protocol, but that's even true with computer code: someone at Google can always edit the code, at some times more easily than others.