2016 Understandng Bureaucracies Yolles.pdf

Political administrations, whether for a nation state or a corporation and no matter if despotic or democratic, normally generate rational policies that arise from their context-sensitive goals. The capability of an administration to develop and implementation policies is measured as efficacy, which can influence the value and stability of an administration. However, policy development and implementation is not only an attribute of a political administration, but also of its bureaucracy. The natures of, and connection between, a political administration and its bureaucracy is important if one is interested in creating a comparative measure of that efficacy across administrations or political systems. A traditional blueprint model of a bureaucracy comes from Weber, seen to be a servicing body for the implementation of political policy decisions resulting from a process of governance. An alternative model arises from the fictional works of Kafka, which is underpinned by a firm conceptual basis of a bureaucracy that confronts that of Weber. This paper explores the nature of bureaucracies, representing them as complex and dynamic. Agency theory will be used to model bureaucracies, and comparisons will be made between the Weber and Kafka conceptualisation. The outcome suggests that any attempts to measure comparative efficacy across political systems or administrations may well lead to failure due to the distinctions in the nature of the bureaucracies that they maintain.

Telos, 1985

Focusing on the relations between "Bureaucracy and Culture," the conference program promised to have sections on intellectuals, the labor movement, prisons, mass culture, the new class, state terrorism, etc. As is usually the case in even the best organized conferences, however, most speakers paid only lip service to their assigned theme and chose to discuss instead whatever they happened to be working on. The predictable result, of course, was that when these various Leibnizian monads were forced by the collective discussion to focus on the issues at hand, they simply fell back on recycling well-worn political stances to confront specific questions with automatic easy answers. Hence, from the very first day, the conference evolved into a predictable internal debate within the liberal-left intelligensia. To the extent that, unlike the three earlier conferences on bureaucracy, this time the participants included three Telos editors, the more interesting debates gradually turned into a clash between the Telos position and the traditional left analysis. Richard Wolin provided the opening address and then placed the question of critical theory's analysis of bureaucracy at the top of the agenda. After all, aside from warmed-over accounts of Weber or panglossian technocratic apologies, the analysis of bureaucracies in the previous three conferences as well as in the predominant literature have been particularly sterile. There is always the promise of alternatives but, as Antonio commented about the first such conference, 1 very little ever emerges. Of course, critical theory itself has not been extremely successful in going much beyond Weber, yet it provides analytical tools for more meaningful accounts-especially in a situation where the framework within which the bureaucracy functions has been qualitatively altered. The "one-dimensional" or "totally administered" societies of Marcuse and Adorno were still predominant social tendencies at the time they were theorized and both authors had no chance of analyzing the post-1968 realities when those tendencies reached maturity. In such a situation, the disappearance of civil society as an autonomous sphere free of bureaucratic penetration, and the collapse of virtually all political opposition, qualitatively alters the nature and function of bureaucracy. From rationalizing agencies facilitating the universalization of the commodity form paving the way for more advanced modes of capitalist organization, bureaucracies became costly obstacles to further social development obstructing rather than facilitating social rationalization. Thus, Weber's theory of bureaucracy goes the way of his theory of religion: an interesting historical tool to make sense out of the trajectory of Western civilization, but carrying very little contemporary socio-political import. Before critical theory can fully develop a theory of bureaucracy both adequate to the present and able to go beyond Habermas' reformulation (without any substantial improvement) of Weber, it is necessary to cleanse the amorphous heritage of "classi-1. Robert Antonio, "Bureaucratic Approaches to the Bureaucracy: A Conference Repon, "in

Administration & Society, 2023

While the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy has gained attention in historical cycles, the literature on the roles of bureaucrats in relation to democracy has become increasingly fragmented. Drawing on comparisons among public administration theory, as well as participatory, deliberative, and collaborative democracy, this article provides typologies that reflect the historical multiplication of the theoretically determined roles and characteristics of bureaucracy that contribute to democracy. This comparative analysis has demonstrated a common democratic trend among the four schools in adding stresses on bureaucrats' autonomy, morality, publicity, and direct connection to citizens, with a constant coexistence of rational and managerial elements.

Encyclopedia of Management Theory, 2013

Comparative Social Research

It is doubtful whether Max Weber would have been appreciative of his current status as the father of organisation theory. Weber did not develop the concept of bureaucracy as part of a quest to advance a science of organisations, or in order to do a microanalysis of the internal structure of particular organisational units. The concept of bureaucracy was an ideal-typical concept developed as a point of departure for comparisons across historical periods and geographic settings. Weber’s research was motivated by macroscopic and historical questions such as ‘why did capitalism develop in the West’ and, ‘how do persons in the West and other civilizations attach meaning to their activities?’ Unlike consultants and organisation theorists that make use of him today, it was not a major concern for Weber to develop criteria for the most efficient kinds of organisations. Rather, his concern was to identify variations in administrative and bureaucratic cultures and patterns by the means of the bureaucratic ideal type. It is maintained in modern textbooks in organisation theory that there has been a development from a closed and rationalistic paradigm towards an understanding of organisations as open and natural systems, and Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy is taken as a point of departure for this kind of narrative. This classification of Weber as an example of a rational and closed approach is highly questionable. The cross-societal and historical approach used so effectively by Weber, is put on a sidetrack in such mainstream narratives. It would be more in the spirit of Weber to focus on organising as an activity, bureaucracy as an ethos and to study organisations within their particular political and cultural contexts.

Economy and Society, 2006

Administrative Theory & Praxis