Weber: Bureaucracy

Weber: Bureaucracy (Abraham, 1989, p. 185)

The term bureaucracy was discussed prior to Weber’s writings. The invention of the word bureaucracy was invented by Vincent de Gourney, a French economist, in 1745. He terms ‘bureau,’ which means ‘writing-table’ and ‘office,’ and added to it the word ‘cracy’ derived from the Greek, which means ‘power,’ ‘rule,’ and ‘government.’ The word suggests a particular system of administration. Weber said, Bureaucracies are organized according to rational principles, officials ranked in a hierarchical order, and operations are characterized by impersonal rules.” In this form of Government, there is consciousness of power in the hands of separations. As a technical term in sociology, ‘bureaucracy’ is associated with Max Weber.

Max Weber defined Bureaucracy as “a type of historical organization which is designed rationally to coordinate you work of many individuals in pursuit of large scale administrative responsibilities.” He gave it an accurate definition and recommended it as the best administrative form for an ordinary search for organizational goals.

Level of Bureaucracy

Typology and its Middle Ages Analogy

The typology can be summarized as follows:

1. Nobles (group 1): The most powerful ones, as in the Middle Ages, are responsible for the daily essential management tasks, in this case, the policy implementation process. The nobles hold the highest in the intermediate positions, usually perform various work activities, have considerable management background, and are well educated, influential and very connected.

2. Knighs (group 2): This type of mid-level bureaucrat, like the Knights in the feudal system, is composed of the civil service’s elite - part of a permanent career in the top posts and well educated, nevertheless, without the Nobles’ power and influence. They are mostly advisors and are connected and busy with the public sector’s activities on average.

3. Vassals (group 3): Although these Vassals are seldom a representative of the elite, different from the Nobels and Knights, which their lower commissioned positions can perceive and because they do not work in the Federal District, the Vassals type overcome it with high education level and experience in government and team management. As in the Middle Ages, Vassals usually performed relevant management responsibilities in decentralized units (military support and mutual protection). Therefore, they are influential in the policy decision process, connected, and multitask.

4. Merchants (group 4): These mid-level bureaucrats differ completely from the other types because they are all advisors without a permanent link with the civil service, exactly like the Merchants during feudalism. Since this class was typically nomadic people established in a particular setting, the merchants were young with low experience and educational level, subsequently not influential and less connected and busy.

5. Farmers (group 5): The largest type of mid-level bureaucrats, as the small rural owners in the intermediate layer of Middle Ages social structure, need to be more influential, educated, and connected. Most of them work in executive activities and are very concentrated in the lowest commissioned positions; however, they are spread throughout the Brazilian states.

Characteristic of Bureaucracy

Max Weber, a prominent sociologist, introduced the concept of bureaucracy as a rational-legal form of organization. He attributed the following characteristics to bureaucracy:

1. Rules generally order the principle of fixed and official jurisdictional areas. The regular activities associated with each status are distributed fixedly as official duties. Rules delineate and strictly delimit the structure of authority.

2. The principle of office hierarchy and levels of graded authority with a firmly ordered system of super-ordination and subordination in which the higher ones supervise the lower offices.

3. A division of labour based on specialized functions and responsibilities.

4. A system of written documents (‘the files’) defining the procedure and the rights and duties of people in all positions.

5. Office management based on thorough and expert training.

6. Selection for employment and promotion based on technical competence, specialized knowledge, or skill.

7. Office-holding as a ‘vocation.’ Official work is no longer a secondary activity but something that demands the full working capacity of the official.

8. Provision for pecuniary compensation as a fixed salary.

9. Appointment of employees by higher officials rather than by election.

10. The system of tenure for life. Normally, the bureaucrat's position is held for life, as the contract specifies.

11. A clear distinction between the sphere of office and that of the individual's private affairs. The bureaucratic official is not an enterprise owner and, therefore, is not entitled to use official facilities for personal needs except as defined by strict rules.

12. The practice of performing specialized administrative functions according to purely objective considerations and the official discharge of business according to calculable rules and ‘without regard for persons.’

Bureaucratic form according to Max Weber

In the 1930s, German sociologist Max Weber wrote a basis that labeled the bureaucratic form as the ideal way of creating government agencies. Max Weber's principles spread throughout both the public and private sectors. Even though Weber's writings have been widely condemned, the official form lives on. Weber is renowned for six main principles.

1. A formal hierarchical structure: Each level controls the level below and is measured by the level above. A formal hierarchy is the basis of central development and integrated decision-making.

2. Management by rules: Controlling by rules allows decisions made at high levels to be implemented consistently by all lower levels.

3. Organization by functional specialty: Work is to be done by experts, and people are organized into units based on the type of work they do or their skills.

4. An “up-focused” or “in-focused” mission: If the mission is described as “up-focused,” then the organization's persistence is to serve the stockholders, the board, or whatever agency authorized it. If the mission is to serve the organization and those within it, to produce high incomes, gain market portion, or produce a cash stream, then the mission is described as “in-focused.”

5. Purposely impersonal: The idea is to treat all staff and clientele equally and not be influenced by individual differences.

Max Weber: The Concept of Bureaucracy

Weber never defined bureaucracy. He only described it as “an administrative body of appointed officials.” (Prasad. et. al. p. 80). He also described its characteristics. Bureaucracy includes explicitly appointed officials who leave out the elected ones. Weber wrote a great deal about the place of the official in modern society. For him, it has an increasingly important social role. As in the case of authority, Weber categorised bureaucracy into (1) patrimonial bureaucracy, found in traditional and charismatic authorities and (2) legal-rational bureaucracy, found only in the legal type of authority. Weber identified certain features of legal-rational bureaucracy.

1. Features of Legal-Rational Bureaucracy

The model of legal-rational bureaucracy described by Weber has the following features:

i. Official business is conducted on a continuous, regulated basis,

ii. An administrative agency functions by stipulated rules and is characterised by three interrelated attributes;

(a) the powers and functions of each official are defined in terms of impersonal criteria,

(b) the official is given matching authority to carry out his responsibilities and

(c) the means of compulsion at his disposal are strictly limited and the conditions under which their employment is legitimate are clearly defined,

iii. Every official and every office is part of the hierarchy of authority. Higher officials or offices perform supervision and the lower officers and officials have the right to appeal,

iv. Officials do not own the resources necessary for rendering the duties, but they are accountable for using official resources. Official business and private affairs, official revenue and private income are strictly separated.

v. Offices can not be appropriated by the incumbents as private property, and

vi. Administration is conducted based on written documents. (Prasad. et. al. p.81)

2. Features of Officials

Weber also discussed in detail, as a part of his model of bureaucracy, the features of officials. They are:

i. the staff members are personally free, observing only the impersonal duties of their offices,

ii. they are appointed to an official position based on the contract,

iii. an official exercises authority delegated to him by impersonal rules, and his loyalty is expressed through the faithful execution of his official duties,

iv. his appointment and job placements depend upon his professional qualifications,

v. his administrative work is a full time occupation,

vi. his work is rewarded by regular salary and by prospects of career advancement,

vii. there is a clear-cut hierarchy of officials and

viii. he is subjected to a unified control and disciplinary system.

Max Weber: Elements of Bureaucracy

When we closely observe the features of bureaucracy mentioned above, we can identify certain important elements of the Weberian model of bureaucracy.

1. Impersonal Order: Weber emphasised that official should perform their duties impersonally. The subordinates should follow the issuance of command and obedience to impersonal order. According to Merton, “authority, the power of control which derives from an acknowledged status, inheres in the office, not in the person who performs the official role.” (Prasad. et al. p. 82). It talks about the de-personalisation of relationships in the organizations.

2. Rules: Rules are the basis for the functioning of the legal-rational authority. They bind officials and regulate the conduct of an office. Their rational application requires specialised training. In this regard, Merton felt that adherence to rules originally conceived as a means becomes an end. Rules become more important than the organisation’s goals.

3. Sphere of Competence: It involves a sphere of obligation to perform functions marked off as a part of a systematic division of labour. It also implies the provision of the incumbent with the necessary authority to carry out the functions.

4. Hierarchy: According to Weber, every office and official is part of a hierarchy. Under this system, the lower office functions under the control of the higher office. He attaches greater importance to the principle of hierarchy in the organization of offices.

5. Separation of Personal and Public Ends: Weber pleads for officials' separation from their ownership of the means of administration. Officials cannot use their office positions for personal ends. Office property is separated from personal property, and at the same time, the official is accountable for using office property.

6. Written Documents: Written documents are the heart of Weberian bureaucracy. All administrative acts, decisions and rules are recorded in writing. These documents make the administration accountable to the people and provide a ready reference for future action.

7. Monocratic Type: This means that certain functions performed by bureaucracy cannot be performed by any other organisation. Bureaucracies monopolise certain functions, and only the authorised official can perform that function, making them monocratic.

For all types of authority, Weber wrote, “the fact of the existence and continuing functioning of an administrative staff is vital. It is indeed, the existence of such activity which is usually meant by the term organisation”. (Bertram Gross, p.139). Weber considered pure or monocratic bureaucracy is the most rational form of administrative staff. He further felt that “it is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of discipline and in its reliability. It thus, makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of organisations and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations, and is formally capable of applications to all kinds of administrative tasks”. (Bertram Gross, p.139).

Bureaucratic administration is, other things being equal, always, from a formal technical point of view, the most rational type. According to Weber, “for the needs of mass administration today, it is (bureaucracy) completely indispensable. The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dilettantism in the administration field”. (Bertram Gross, p.140). Thus, Weber believed that rational bureaucracy is technically superior and capable of attaining high efficiency.

Important Factors Contributing to the Development of Modern Bureaucracy

Weber counts the following among the most important factors contributing to the development of modern bureaucracy:

1. The development of a money economy, which guaranteed a constant income for maintaining bureaucracy through a stable taxation system; it also encouraged pecuniary compensation for the officials and a purely economic conception of the office as a source of the official’s private income.

2. The quantitative development of administrative tasks, especially in politics, where “the great state and mass party are the classic soil for bureaucratization.”

3. Qualitative changes of administrative tasks. Among purely political factors, the demand for order and protection (‘police’) and the so-called ‘welfare state,’ and among essentially technical aspects, the development of modern means of communication, especially the railroads and the mass media, operate in the direction of bureaucratization.

4. The purely technical superiority of bureaucracy over any other organization.

5. Modern culture's complicated and specialized nature demands “the personally detached and strictly ‘objective’ expert, in lieu of the master of older social structures, who was moved by personal sympathy and favour, by grace and gratitude.”

6. The rational interpretation of the law is based on a strictly formal conception of ‘equality before the law’ and the demand for legal guarantees against arbitrariness. This contrasts the old form of adjudication bound to sacred traditions and characterized by traditionalism, arbitrariness and the personally free discretion flowing from the ‘grace’ of the old patrimonial domination.

7. The concentration of the material means of management in the hands of the master is exemplified in the development of big capitalist enterprises and giant public organizations such as the modern state or army.

8. The leveling of economic and social differences and the corresponding rise of modern mass representative democracy in contrast to the old democratic self-government of small homogenous communities.

The inevitable furthering of bureaucratization and rationalization of modern Western economies seemed to Weber inescapable. The contemporary state’s industry, economics, and standard of living- is only possible with the emergence of a rational organization on a large scale. Weber insists:

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