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bureaucracy

  (byʊ-rŏk'rə-sē) pronunciation
n., pl. -cies.
    1. Administration of a government chiefly through bureaus or departments staffed with nonelected officials.
    2. The departments and their officials as a group: promised to reorganize the federal bureaucracy.
    1. Management or administration marked by hierarchical authority among numerous offices and by fixed procedures: The new department head did not know much about bureaucracy.
    2. The administrative structure of a large or complex organization: a midlevel manager in a corporate bureaucracy.
  3. An administrative system in which the need or inclination to follow rigid or complex procedures impedes effective action: innovative ideas that get bogged down in red tape and bureaucracy.

[French bureaucratie : bureau, office; see bureau + -cratie, rule (from Old French; see –cracy).]


 
 
Political Dictionary: bureaucracy

Government by permanent office-holders. The term was coined in eighteenth-century France, and first appeared in English in 1818, in both cases with pejorative overtones built in from the beginning. The pejorative overtones are still current in everyday usage and in semi-jocular references to such maxims of bureaucracy as Parkinson's Law (‘Work expands to fill the time available for it’).

The first writer to view bureaucracy more favourably was Max Weber. Weber argued that working to the rules in a hierarchical office in which appointment and promotion went by merit was more rational than making appointments on other bases such as patronage. Weber also stressed the tension between bureaucrats and elected officials. The latter may wish to give favours to their supporters in return for votes. Bureaucrats may be expected to obstruct this.

Most subsequent sociological writing on bureaucracy has been an extended footnote to Weber. An important extension, due especially to Michel Crozier (The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, English edition, 1964) stresses the difference in motives between the bureaucrat at the top of the organization and the bureaucrat at the bottom. The latter wants a quiet life which may best be ensured by slavish adherence to the rules, whatever they are. The former may have more elevated aims for the bureaucracy which are frustrated by inability to force the routine employee to have the same aims as the bureau. Generally, means become ends in themselves. This difficulty is shared with firms. Indeed, the Weberian analysis of bureaucracy is intended to apply just as much to the firm as to the government office. Therefore it gives no support to the ‘New Right’ proposition that governments are less efficient than markets.

Many of the economists who have investigated bureaucracy, however, have made precisely that claim. W. A. Niskanen, in Bureaucracy and Representative Government (1971), argues that the bureaucrat seeks to maximize his or her budget and therefore systematically to overproduce bureau goods and services. The politician to whom the bureau reports would like to control its costs, but faces what economists call an ‘agency problem’. The only reliable information on the costs of the bureau comes from the bureau itself, unless the politicians erect a second bureau to check on the costs of the first. This is done to a limited extent (for instance by the Office of Management and Budget in the United States and the audit office, which has gone by various names and which serves the Public Accounts Committee, in the UK Parliament). But who is to check on the costs of the second agency, or check that the audit agency is not conniving with the agency it is auditing? Once again, however, note that these problems are shared by public and private bureaucracy. Auditing has not prevented a number of notable scandals in recent company history. Therefore, although the Niskanen model is elegant and has spawned many studies of bureaucracy, it provides less ammunition for the privatization programme of governments in the 1980s than its partisans claim.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: bureaucracy

Professional corps of officials organized in a pyramidal hierarchy and functioning under impersonal, uniform rules and procedures. Its characteristics were first formulated systematically by Max Weber, who saw in the bureaucratic organization a highly developed division of labour, authority based on administrative rules rather than personal allegiance or social custom, and a "rational" and impersonal institution whose members function more as "offices" than as individuals. For Weber, bureaucracy was a form of legalistic "domination" inevitable under capitalism. Later writers saw in bureaucracy a tendency to concentrate power at the top and become dictatorial, as occurred in the Soviet Union. Robert K. Merton emphasized its red tape and inefficiency due to blind conformity to procedures. More recent theories have stressed the role of managerial cliques, occupational interest groups, or individual power-seekers in creating politicized organizations characterized by internal conflict.

For more information on bureaucracy, visit Britannica.com.

 
Archaeology Dictionary: bureaucracy

[De]

A type of organization marked by a clear hierarchy of authority, the existence of written rules of procedure, and staffed by full-time, salaried officials. Often held to be one of the characteristics of an early state or civilization.
 
Sports Science and Medicine: bureaucracy

1. An administrative organization based on a hierarchical structure and governed by written rules and established procedures. The authority attached to an official and the position of an official within the hierarchy depends on the office held, rather than the personal attributes and status of the incumbent.

2. A term used pejoratively to describe any official process that is deemed inefficient or unnecessarily obstructive.

 
US History Encyclopedia: Bureaucracy

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the federal bureaucracy consisted of 2.8 million people; almost 19 million Americans work for governments of some type, from federal to local units. In a famous lecture given in 1918, the great sociologist Max Weber predicted that the twentieth century would be an era in which governments would be dominated by professional politicians and professional bureaucrats. In most advanced industrialized democracies, Weber's prediction was born out fully. In the United States, however, the bureaucracy has not attained the degree of power or influence that Weber anticipated. The reasons for this relate to the special history of the bureaucracy in the United States.

Most advanced, industrialized democracies developed a professional, permanent bureaucracy around the middle of the nineteenth century. European reformers argued that the expanding role of government in a more urbanized and industrialized society required professional bureaucrats to make government work. Bureaucracies should consist, particularly at their highest levels, of highly educated and trained people organized rationally, not of people who were selected on the basis of whom they knew or had supported in the previous election. Such arguments were made forcefully in the United States as well, particularly later in the nineteenth century by Progressive reformers. However, the shift from patronage to a professionalized, merit-based bureaucracy ran into problems in the United States. First, the notion that making government work required special skills, talents, or education had been rejected by the Jacksonians as incompatible with American values of equality and participation. In the Federalist era, the United States had taken some limited steps along the road toward the creation of a bureaucracy composed of socially superior and educated men. Andrew Jackson reversed these trends, firmly establishing the notion that any (white) man could run government. Second, government jobs were crucial to the workings of American political parties until well into the twentieth century; "to the victor the spoils" was a key principle of party organization. Supporters expected to be rewarded with, among other things, government jobs if their party won. Parties were naturally unwilling to hand over as crucial an element in securing power as government jobs to a merit-based bureaucracy.

In spite of these problems, reformers did ultimately secure the creation of a merit-based system. The assassination of President James A. Garfield by a disappointed job seeker also highlighted the difficulties of operating a patronage system. The triumph of the Progressive reformers seemed to be completed by the New Deal, which resulted in a vast expansion in the number of government agencies and jobs. The practical problems of staffing the much-expanded government machine with political appointees, and the scale of political power that such vast opportunities for patronage could produce, were compelling reasons for completing the transition to a bureaucracy recruited and promoted on the basis of merit. From the New Deal onward, the majority of government jobs were awarded on the basis of merit, not patronage.

Yet the special factors inhibiting the growth of a professional bureaucracy in the United States insured that the reformers' triumph was never total. American government remained distinctive compared with other advanced industrialized democracies in retaining a thick layer of political appointees at the top of government departments. For much of the twentieth century, it seemed as though this layer of political appointees would gradually diminish in the face of practical problems and pressures from reformers. However, in the last few decades of the twentieth century, the number of political appointees began to increase again. In contrast to the situation in other advanced, industrialized democracies, the permanent bureaucracy was largely excluded from participation in policy making and was relegated to mere policy implementation.

Although American political parties no longer depended on patronage for their support as heavily as in the past, several trends emerged that discouraged reliance on the permanent bureaucracy. First, presidents, particularly Republican presidents, believed that the bureaucracy was ideologically predisposed against them and their policies. There is evidence that this belief had some empirical foundations in the Nixon era, though by the end of the twentieth century, bureaucrats had become noticeably more conservative and less Democratic in their personal politics. Second, all presidents found that the vast federal bureaucracy had become a "fourth branch of government" that was difficult to control. The bureaucracy had its own opinions on what constituted good policy and its own political alliances with interest groups and Congressional committees. Third, new styles of thinking, derived from microeconomics, emerged after World War II. In these "rational choice" perspectives, bureaucrats were not the selfless servants of the public good that Progressive reformers had intended but rather selfish maximizers of the size of their staffs and budgets. Writers in this school, such as William Niskanen, were particularly influential with Republican politicians. It followed that the power of bureaucrats should be reduced. Wherever possible, government work should be privatized or "contracted out" to privately owned firms. Senior bureaucrats should be limited in the role they played in developing policy and subordinated to political appointees whose loyalty to the administration was likely to be greater. However, it was a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, who pushed through legislation that addressed these concerns by moving the most senior bureaucrats into a Senior Executive Service. With this, the president had far more control in the ability to reassign officials than over the rest of the civil service. Carter's reforms were invaluable in helping President Reagan impose radically conservative perspectives on the bureaucracy.

The distinctive history of the bureaucracy in the United States has had both advantages and disadvantages. Advantages have included the facilitated participation in government by large numbers of people from business, academic life, and other backgrounds who have served as political appointees in Washington. Political appointees have brought with them fresh perspectives and attitudes that a permanent bureaucracy may not provide. Most obvious among the system's disadvantages is the continued appointment of people to government service whose qualifications only include the payment of the large sums of money or services to the victorious presidential candidate. Additional disadvantages include the length of time it takes to appoint and secure Senate approval for the thousands of political appointees who arrive with a new administration, which complicates the smooth running of government. Although bureaucracies can be self-interested and slow to change, they can also provide politicians with much-needed advice and perspectives; good governance may result from the effective combination of the perspectives of bureaucrats and politicians.

Bibliography

Aberbach, Joel D., and Bert A. Rockman. In the Web of Politics. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2001.

Light, Paul C. Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995.

Skowronek, Stephen. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1876–1922. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

—Graham K. Wilson

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: bureaucracy
(byʊrŏk'rəsē) , the administrative structure of any large organization, public or private. Ideally bureaucracy is characterized by hierarchical authority relations, defined spheres of competence subject to impersonal rules, recruitment by competence, and fixed salaries. Its goal is to be rational, efficient, and professional. Max Weber, the most important student of bureaucracy, described it as technically superior to all other forms of organization and hence indispensable to large, complex enterprises. However, because of the shortcomings that have in practice afflicted large administrative structures, the terms bureaucracy and bureaucrat in popular usage usually carry a suggestion of disapproval and imply incompetence, a narrow outlook, duplication of effort, and application of a rigid rule without due consideration of specific cases. Bureaucracy existed in imperial Rome and China and in the national monarchies, but in modern states complex industrial and social legislation has called forth a vast growth of administrative functions of government. The power of permanent and nonelective officials to apply and even initiate measures of control over national administration and economy has made the bureaucracy central to the life of the state; critics object that it is largely impervious to control by the people or their elected representatives. The institution of the ombudsman has been one means adopted in an attempt to remedy this situation. Others has been collective decision making and organizational structures that emphasize minimize hierarchies and decentralize the power to make decisions. Administrative bureaucracies in private organizations and corporations have also grown rapidly, as has criticism of unresponsive bureaucracies in education, health care, insurance, labor unions, and other areas. See also civil service; industrial management.

Bibliography

See M. Dimock, Administrative Vitality: The Conflict with Bureaucracy (1959); R. Bendix, M. Weber (1960); C. Barnard, Functions of the Executive (1980); M. Albrow, Bureaucracy (1970); P. M. Blau, Bureaucracy in Modern Society (2d ed. 1971); J. Hage, Theories of Organization (1980); K. Ferguson, The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy (1984); C. Perrow, Complex Organizations (3d ed. 1986).

 
Law Encyclopedia: Bureaucracy
This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

A system of administration wherein there is a specialization of functions, objective qualifications for office, action according to the adherence to fixed rules, and a hierarchy of authority and delegated power.

Organizations such as the armed forces or administrative agencies are common examples of bureaucracies.

 
Science Dictionary: bureaucracy
(byoo-rok-ruh-see)

A formal, hierarchical organization with many levels in which tasks, responsibilities, and authority are delegated among individuals, offices, or departments, held together by a central administration. According to many sociologists and anthropologists, the development of bureaucratic organizations is necessary for the emergence of any modern civilization. (See Max Weber.)

  • Today, the term bureaucracy suggests a lack of initiative, excessive adherence to rules and routine, red tape, inefficiency, or, even more serious, an impersonal force dominating the lives of individuals. (See Big Brother is watching you.)

    •  
    Word Tutor: bureaucracy
    pronunciation

    IN BRIEF: A group of government or business officials who use many laws and regulations to make decisions.

    pronunciation As the agency's new president, Mr. Diaz tried to reduce the bureaucracy of several departments.

     
    Quotes About: Bureaucracy

    Quotes:

    "I always get back to the question, is it really necessary that men should consume so much of their bodily and mental energies in the machinery of civilized life? The world seems to me to do much of its toil for that which is not in any sense bread. Again, does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?" - William Allingham

    "A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business." - Walter Bagehot

    "A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office a Republican wants." - Alben W. Barkley

    "In the US we find the label requirements are crazy. It is almost as if we had to label a bookcase with the warning 'do not eat this bookcase -- it can be harmful to your health'." - Bjorn Bayley

    "Poor fellow, he suffers from files." - Aneurin Bevan

    "Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true." - William Blake

    See more famous quotes about Bureaucracy

     
    Wikipedia: bureaucracy
    This article is about the sociological concept. For computer game, see Bureaucracy (computer game).

    Bureaucracy is the structure and set of regulations in place to control activity, usually in large organizations and government. It is characterized by standardized procedure (rule-following), formal division of responsibility, hierarchy, and impersonal relationships. In practice the interpretation and execution of policy can lead to informal influence.

    Bureaucracy is a concept in sociology and political science referring to the way that the administrative execution and enforcement of legal rules are socially organized. Four structural concepts are central to any definition of bureaucracy: a well-defined division of administrative labor among persons and offices, a personnel system with consistent patterns of recruitment and stable linear careers, a hierarchy among offices, such that the authority and status are differentially distributed among actors, and formal and informal networks that connect organizational actors to one another through flows of information and patterns of cooperation.

    Examples of everyday bureaucracies include governments, armed forces, corporations, hospitals, courts, ministries and schools.

    Origin of the concept

    The word "bureaucracy" stems from the word "bureau", used from the early 18th century in Western Europe not just to refer to a writing desk, but to an office, i.e., a workplace, where officials worked. The original French meaning of the word bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The term bureaucracy came into use shortly before the French Revolution of 1789, and from there rapidly spread to other countries. The Greek suffix - kratia or kratos - means "power" or "rule."

    In a letter of July 1, 1764, the German Baron von Grimm declared: "We are obsessed by the idea of regulation, and our Masters of Requests refuse to understand that there is an infinity of things in a great state with which a government should not concern itself." Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay sometimes used to say, "We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania." Sometimes he used to invent a fourth or fifth form of government under the heading of "bureaucracy". In another letter of July 15, 1765 Baron Grimm wrote also, "The real spirit of the laws in France is that bureaucracy of which the late Monsieur de Gournay used to complain so greatly; here the offices, clerks, secretaries, inspectors and intendants are not appointed to benefit the public interest, indeed the public interest appears to have been established so that offices might exist."[1]

    This quote refers to a traditional controversy about bureaucracy, namely the perversion of means and ends so that means become ends in themselves, and the greater good is lost sight of; as a corollary, the substitution of sectional interests for the general interest. The suggestion here is that, left uncontrolled, the bureaucracy will become increasingly self-serving and corrupt, rather than serving society.

    Development of Bureaucracy

    Bureaucracies arise in all large states because they are the "middle men": the government makes decisions which affect the people, but it is the bureaucrats who implement those decisions.

    Perhaps the early example of a bureaucrat is the scribe, who first arose as a professional in the early cities of Sumer. The Sumerian script was so complicated that it required specialists who had trained for their entire lives in the discipline of writing to manipulate it. These scribes could wield significant power, as they had a total monopoly on the keeping of records and creation of inscriptions on monuments to kings.

    In later, larger empires like Achaemenid Persia, bureaucracies quickly expanded as government expanded and increased its functions. In the Persian Empire, the central government was divided into administrative provinces led by satraps. The satraps were appointed by the Great King to control the provinces. In addition, a general and a royal secretary were stationed in each province to supervise troop recruitment and keep records, respectively. The Achaemenid Great Kings also sent royal inspectors to tour the empire and report on local conditions.

    The most modernesque of all ancient bureaucracies, however, was the Chinese bureaucracy. During the chaos of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States, Confucius recognized the need for a stable system of administrators to lend good governance even when the leaders were inept. Chinese bureaucracy, first implement during the Qin dynasty but under more Confucian lines under the Han, calls for the appointment of bureaucratic positions based on merit via a system of examinations. Although the power of the Chinese bureaucrats waxed and waned throughout China's long history, the imperial examination system lasted as late as 1905, and modern China still employs a formidable bureaucracy in its daily workings.

    Modern bureaucracies arose as the government of states grew larger during the modern period, and especially following the Industrial Revolution. Tax collectors, perhaps the most reviled of all bureaucrats, became increasingly necessary as states began to take in more and more revenue, while the role of administrators increased as the functions of government multiplied. Along with this expansion, though, came the recognition of the corruption and nepotism often inherent within the managerial system, leading to civil service reform on a large scale in many countries towards the end of the 19th century.

    In the modern welfare state, bureaucracy has become ever larger as government becomes an ever more significant player in people's daily lives. In some areas of the United States, for example, the federal government is in fact the dominant employer. This leads some to argue that modern bureaucracies are too unwieldy and that more of their functions should be returned to the private sector.

    Entrepreneurship, Networked Legitimacy, and Autonomy

    In "The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy," Daniel Carpenter argues that bureaucratic autonomy emerges only upon the historical achievement of three conditions. First, the autonomous bureaucracies are politically differentiated from the actors who seek to control them. Second, the bureaucratic autonomy requires the development of unique organizational capacities - capacities to analyze, to create new programs, to solve problems, to plan, to administer programs with efficiency, and to ward off corruption. Third, bureaucratic autonomy requires political legitimacy, or strong organizational reputations embedded in an independent power base.

    Karl Marx and bureaucracy

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    In Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels's theory of historical materialism, the historical origin of bureaucracy is to be found in four sources: religion, the formation of the state, commerce and technology.

    Thus, the earliest bureaucracies consisted of castes of religious clergy, officials and scribes operating various rituals, and armed functionaries specifically delegated to keep order. In the historical transition from primitive egalitarian communities to a civil society divided into social classes and estates, beginning from about 10,000 years ago, authority is increasingly centralized in, and enforced by a state apparatus existing separately from society. This state formulates, imposes and enforces laws, and levies taxes, giving rise to an officialdom enacting these functions. Thus, the state mediates in conflicts among the people and keeps those conflicts within acceptable bounds; it also organizes the defense of territory. Most importantly, the right of ordinary people to carry and use weapons of force becomes increasingly restricted; in civil society, forcing other people to do things becomes increasingly the legal right of the state authorities only. (see Friedrich Engels, The origin of the family, private property and the state [1].

    But the growth of trade and commerce adds a new, distinctive dimension to bureaucracy, insofar as it requires the keeping of accounts and the processing/recording of transactions, as well as the enforcement of legal rules governing trade. If resources are increasingly distributed by prices in markets, this requires extensive and complex systems of record-keeping, management and calculation, conforming to legal standards. Eventually, this means that the total amount of work involved in commercial administration outgrows the total amount of work involved in government administration. In modern capitalist society, private sector bureaucracy is larger than government bureaucracy, if measured by the number of administrative workers in the division of labor as a whole. Some corporations nowadays have a turnover larger than the national income of whole countries, with large administrations supervising operations[citation needed].

    A fourth source of bureaucracy Marxists have commented on inheres in the technologies of mass production, which require many standardized routines and procedures to be performed. Even if mechanization replaces people with machinery, people are still necessary to design, control, supervise and operate the machinery. The technologies chosen may not be the ones that are best for everybody, but which create incomes for a particular class of people or maintain their power. This type of bureaucracy is nowadays often called a technocracy, which owes its power to control over specialized technical knowledge or control over critical information.

    In Marx's theory, bureaucracy rarely creates new wealth by itself, but rather controls, co-ordinates and governs the production, distribution and consumption of wealth. The bureaucracy as a social stratum derives its income from the appropriation of part of the social surplus product of human labor. Wealth is appropriated by the bureaucracy by law through fees, taxes, levies, tributes, licensing etc.

    Bureaucracy is therefore always a cost to society, but this cost may be accepted insofar as it makes social order possible, and maintains it by enforcing the rule of law. Nevertheless there are constant conflicts about this cost, because it has the big effect on the distribution of incomes; all producers will try to get the maximum return from what they produce, and minimize administrative costs. Typically, in epochs of strong economic growth, bureaucracies proliferate; when economic growth declines, a fight breaks out to cut back bureaucratic costs[citation needed].

    Whether or not a bureaucracy as a social stratum can become a genuine ruling class depends greatly on the prevailing property relations and the mode of production of wealth. In capitalist society, the state typically lacks an independent economic base, finances many activities on credit, and is heavily dependent on levying taxes as a source of income. Therefore, its power is limited by the costs which private owners of the productive assets will tolerate[citation needed]. If, however, the state owns the means of production itself, defended by military power, the state bureaucracy can become much more powerful, and act as a ruling class or power elite. Because in that case, it directly controls the sources of new wealth, and manages or distributes the social product. This is the subject of Marxist theories of bureaucratic collectivism.

    Marx himself however never theorized this possibility in detail, and it has been the subject of much controversy among Marxists. The core organizational issue in these disputes concerns the degree to which the administrative allocation of resources by government authorities and the market allocation of resources can achieve the social goal of creating a more free, just and prosperous society. Which decisions should be made by whom, at what level, so that an optimal allocation of resources results? This is just as much a moral-political issue as an economic issue.

    Central to the Marxian concept of socialism is the idea of workers' self-management, which assumes the internalization of a morality and self-discipline among people that would make bureaucratic supervision and control redundant, together with a drastic reorganization of the division of labor in society. Bureaucracies emerge to mediate conflicts of interest on the basis of laws, but if those conflicts of interest disappear (because resources are allocated directly in a fair way), bureaucracies would also be redundant.

    Marx's critics are however skeptical of the feasibility of this kind of socialism, given the continuing need for administration and the rule of law, as well as the propensity of people to put their own self-interest before the communal interest. That is, the argument is that self-interest and the communal interest might never coincide, or, at any rate, can always diverge significantly.

    Max Weber on bureaucracy

    Max Weber has probably been one of the most influential users of the word in its social science sense. He is well-known for his study of bureaucratization of society; many aspects of modern public administration go back to him; a classic, hierarchically organized civil service of the continental type is — if perhaps mistakenly — called "Weberian civil service".

    However, contrary to popular belief, "bureaucracy" was an English word before Weber; the Oxford English Dictionary cites usage in several different years between 1818 and 1860, prior to Weber's birth in 1864.

    Weber described the ideal type bureaucracy in positive terms, considering it to be a more rational and efficient form of organization than the alternatives that preceded it, which he characterized as charismatic domination and traditional domination. According to his terminology, bureaucracy is part of legal domination. However, he also emphasized that bureaucracy becomes inefficient when a decision must be adopted to an individual case.

    According to Weber, the attributes of modern bureaucracy include its impersonality, concentration of the means of administration, a leveling effect on social and economic differences and implementation of a system of authority that is practically indestructible.

    Weber's analysis of bureaucracy concerns:

    • the historical and administrative reasons for the process of bureaucratization (especially in the Western civilisation)
    • the impact of the rule of law upon the functioning of bureaucratic organisations
    • the typical personal orientation and occupational position of a bureaucratic officials as a status group
    • the most important attributes and consequences of bureaucracy in the modern world

    A bureaucratic organization is governed by the following seven principles:

    1. official business is conducted on a continuous basis
    2. official business is conducted with strict accordance to the following rules:
      1. the duty of each official to do certain types of work is delimited in terms of impersonal criteria
      2. the official is given the authority necessary to carry out his assigned functions
      3. the means of coercion at his disposal are strictly limited and conditions of their use strictly defined
    3. every official's responsibilities and authority are part of a vertical hierarchy of authority, with respective rights of supervision and appeal
    4. officials do not own the resources necessary for the performance of their assigned functions but are accountable for their use of these resources
    5. official and private business and income are strictly separated
    6. offices cannot be appropriated by their incumbents (inherited, sold, etc.)
    7. official business is conducted on the basis of written documents

    A bureaucratic official:

    • is personally free and appointed to his position on the basis of conduct
    • exercises the authority delegated to him in accordance with impersonal rules, and his loyalty is enlisted on behalf of the faithful execution of his official duties
    • appointment and job placement are dependent upon his technical qualifications
    • administrative work is a full-time occupation
    • work is rewarded by a regular salary and prospects of advancement in a lifetime career

    An official must exercise his judgment and his skills, but his duty is to place these at the service of a higher authority; ultimately he is responsible only for the impartial execution of assigned tasks and must sacrifice his personal judgment if it runs counter to his official duties.

    Weber's work has been continued by many, like Robert Michels with his Iron Law of Oligarchy.

    Criticism

    As Max Weber himself noted, real bureaucracy will be less optimal and effective than his ideal type model. Each of Weber's seven principles can degenerate:

    • Vertical hierarchy of authority can become chaotic, some offices can be omitted in the decision making process, there may be conflicts of competence;
    • Competences can be unclear and used contrary to the spirit of the law; sometimes a decision itself may be considered more important than its effect;
    • Nepotism, corruption, political infighting and other degenerations can counter the rule of impersonality and can create a recruitment and promotion system not based on meritocracy but rather on oligarchy;
    • Officials try to avoid accountability and seek anonymity by avoiding documentation of their procedures (or creating extreme amounts of chaotic, confusing documents, see also: transparency)

    Even a non-degenerated bureaucracy can be affected by common problems:

    • Overspecialization, making individual officials not aware of larger consequences of their actions
    • Rigidity and inertia of procedures, making decision-making slow or even impossible when facing some unusual case, and similarly delaying change, evolution and adaptation of old procedures to new circumstances;
    • A phenomenon of group thinking - zealotry, loyalty and lack of critical thinking regarding the organisation which is perfect and always correct by definition, making the organisation unable to change and realise its own mistakes and limitations;
    • Disregard for dissenting opinions, even when such views suit the available data better than the opinion of the majority;
    • A phenomenon of Catch-22 (named after a famous book by Joseph Heller) - as bureaucracy creates more and more rules and procedures, their complexity rises and coordination diminishes, facilitating creation of contradictory rules
    • Not allowing people to use common sense, as everything must be as is written by the law.

    In the most common examples bureaucracy can lead to the treatment of individual human beings as impersonal objects. This process has been criticised by many philosophers and writers (Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt) and satirized in the comic strip Dilbert, Franz Kafka's novels The Trial and The Castle , Douglas Adams' story The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the film Brazil.

    Austrian School Analysis of Bureaucracy

    The analysis of bureaucracy by the Austrian school reflects its characteristic focus on economics, and emphasizes the distinction between bureaucratic management and profit management.[2]

    Current academic debates

    Modern academic research has debated the extent to which elected officials can control their bureaucratic agents. Because bureaucrats have more information than elected officials about what they are doing and what they should be doing, bureaucrats might have the ability to implement policies or regulations that go against the public interest. In the American context, these concerns led to the "Congressional abdication" hypotheses--the claim that Congress had abdicated its authority over public policy to appointed bureaucrats.

    Theodore Lowi initiated this debate by concluding in a 1979 book that the U.S. Congress does not exercise effective oversight of bureaucratic agencies. Instead, policies are made by "iron triangles," consisting of interest groups, appointed bureaucrats, and Congressional subcommittees (who, according to Lowi, were likely to have more extreme views than the Congress as a whole).[3]

    William Niskanen's earlier (1971) 'budget-maximizing' model complemented Lowi's claims; where Lowi claimed that Congress (and legislatures more generally) failed to exercise oversight, Niskanen argued that rational bureaucrats will always and everywhere seek to increase their budgets, thereby contributing strongly to state growth. Niskanen went on to serve on the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors under President Reagan, and his model provided a strong underpinning for the worldwide move towards cutbacks of public spending and the introduction of privatization in the 1980s and '90s.[citation needed]

    Two branches of theorizing have arisen in response to these claims. The first focuses on bureaucratic motivations; Niskanen's universalist approach was critiqued by a range of pluralist authors who argued that officials' motivations are more public interest-orientated than Niskanen allowed. The bureau-shaping model (put forward by Patrick Dunleavy) also argues against Niskanen that rational bureaucrats should only maximize the part of their budget that they spend on their own agency's operations or give to contractors or powerful interest groups (that are able to organize a flowback of benefits to senior officials). For instance, rational officials will get no benefit from paying out larger welfare checks to millions of poor people, since the bureaucrats' own utilities are not improved. Consequently we should expect bureaucracies to significantly maximize budgets in areas like police forces and defense, but not in areas like welfare state spending.

    A second branch of responses has focused more on Lowi's claims, asking whether legislatures (and usually the American Congress in particular) can control bureaucrats. This empirical research is motivated by a normative concern: If we wish to believe that we live in a democracy, then it must be true that appointed bureaucrats cannot act contrary to elected officials' interests. (This claim is itself debatable; if we fully trusted elected officials, we would not spend so much time implementing constitutional checks and balances.[4])

    Within this second branch, scholars have published numerous studies debating the circumstances under which elected officials can control bureaucratic outputs. Most of these studies examine the American case, though their findings have been generalized elsewhere as well.[5][6] These studies argue that legislatures have a variety of oversight means at their disposal, and they use many of them regularly. These oversight mechanisms have been classified into two types: "Police patrols" (actively auditing agencies and looking for misbehavior) and "fire alarms" (imposing open administrative procedures on bureaucrats to make it easier for adversely affected groups to detect bureaucratic malfeasance and bring it to the legislature's attention).[7]

    A third concept of self-interested bureaucracy and its effect on the production of public goods has been forwarded by Faizul Latif Chowdhury. In contrast to Niskanen and Dunleavy, who primarily focused on the self-interested behaviour of only the top-level bureaucrats involved in policy making, Chowdhury in his thesis submitted to the London School of Economics in 1997 drew attention to the impact of the low level civil servants whose rent-seeking behaviour pushes up the cost of production of public goods. Particularly, it was shown with reference to the tax officials how rent-seeking by them causes loss in government revenue[8]. Chowdhury’s model of rent-seeking bureaucracy captures the case of administrative corruption whereby public money is directly expropriated by public servants in general.

    Globalization and bureaucracy

    Bureaucracy and globalization are interlinked. However, the inter-linkage is often forgotten and globalization is related to only to free trade, thanks to WTO and trade-analysts. Globalization is essentially an global expansion of bureaucratic structure, implying global division of labour and tasks.

    Sources

    • On Karl Marx: Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Volume 1: State and Bureaucracy. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979.
    • Marx comments on the state bureaucracy in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right [2] and Engels discusses the origins of the state here: [3]
    • Ernest Mandel, Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy. London: Verso, 1992.
    • On Weber: Watson, Tony J. (1980). Sociology, Work and Industry. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-32165-4. 
    • Neil Garston (ed.), Bureaucracy: Three Paradigms. Boston: Kluwer, 1993.
    • Chowdhury, Faizul Latif (2006), Corrupt Bureaucracy and Privatization of Tax Enforcement. Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, ISBN 984-8120-62-9.

    References

    1. ^ Baron de Grimm and Diderot, Correspondence littéraire, philosophique et critique, 1753-69, 1813 edition, Vol. 4, p. 146 & 508 - cited by Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy. London: Pall Mall Press, 1970, p. 16
    2. ^ von Mises, Ludwig [1944] (1962). Bureaucracy. Retrieved on 2006-11-10. 
    3. ^ Lowi. 1979. The end of liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
    4. ^ Scholz and Wood. 1988. Controlling the IRS: Principals, principles, and public administration. American Journal of Political Science 42 (January): 141-162.
    5. ^ Huber and Shipan. 2002. Deliberate discretion: The institutional foundations of bureaucratic autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    6. ^ Ramseyer and Rosenbluth. 1993. Japan's political marketplace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    7. ^ McCubbins and Schwartz. 1984. Congressional oversight overlooked: Police patrols versus fire alarms. American Journal of Political Science 28: 16-79.
    8. ^ Chowdhury, Faizul Latif (2006). Corrupt Bureaucracy and Privatization of Tax Enforcement. 

    External links


    This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

     
    Misspellings: bureaucracy

    Common misspelling(s) of bureaucracy

    • beaurocracy

     
    Translations: Translations for: Bureaucracy

    Dansk (Danish)
    n. - bureaukrati, embedsmandsvælde

    Nederlands (Dutch)
    bureaucratie, ambtenarij

    Français (French)
    n. - bureaucratie

    Deutsch (German)
    n. - Bürokratie

    Ελληνική (Greek)
    n. - γραφειοκρατία

    Italiano (Italian)
    burocrazia

    Português (Portuguese)
    n. - burocracia (f)

    Русский (Russian)
    бюрократия

    Español (Spanish)
    n. - burocracia

    Svenska (Swedish)
    n. - byråkrati

    中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
    官僚, 官僚机构, 官僚作风

    中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
    n. - 官僚, 官僚機構, 官僚作風

    한국어 (Korean)
    n. - 관료[제도,주의]

    日本語 (Japanese)
    n. - 官僚政治, 官僚主義, 官吏, 官僚, お役所仕事

    العربيه (Arabic)
    ‏(الاسم) بيروقراطيه, تحكم موظفي الدوله, الجهاز الأداري للحكومه‏

    עברית (Hebrew)
    n. - ‮שליטה באמצעות ניהול מרכזי, ביורוקרטיה, שלטון מדכא ונוקשה של פקידים, משרדנות, ניירת‬

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