THE EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT OF BUREAUCRACY

Bureaucracy as a concept has created a lot of controversies and tension among politician, academician, authors and even administrators alike, this paper attempts to critically evaluate and analyze the strength and weakness of bureaucracy. This researcher has identified two categories—the pessimist and optimist of bureaucracy. All of whom has shown sufficient reason to back their claims which this paper seeks to explore. The research also seeks to investigate Weber's ideal model and his dilemma on authority. It appears that Weber is more concerned with position and not the person who hold position and this has created a contradiction as some civil servant are promoted in to position based on their seniority and experience, and not competence. The issue here is, where does authority lies-in positions or in competency?

The term " bureaucracy " is of recent origin. Initially referring to a cloth covering the desks of French government officials in the eighteenth century, the term " bureau " came to be linked with a suffix signifying rule of government (as in " aristocracy " or " democracy "), probably during the struggles against absolutism preceding the French Revolution. During the nineteenth century the pejorative use of the term spread to many European countries, where liberal critics of absolutist regimes typically employed it to decry the tortuous procedures, narrow outlook, and highhanded manner of autocratic government officials (Heinzen 1845). Since then this pejorative meaning has become general in the sense that any critic of complicated organizations that fail to allocate responsibility clearly, or any critic of rigid rules and routines that are applied with little consideration of the specific case, of blundering officials, of slow operation and buck-passing, of conflicting directives and duplication of effort, of empire building, and of concentration of control in the hands of a few will use this term regardless of party or political persuasion (Watson 1945). During the years following World War ii this common stereotype was given a new twist by the witty, mock-scientific formulations of Parkinson " s Law, which derided empire building, waste of resources, and inertia by implying that official staffs expand in inverse proportion to the work to be done. Introduction This popular, pejorative usage must be distinguished from ―bureaucracy‖ used in a technical sense. Although the distinction is beset with difficulties, social scientists have employed the term because it points to the special, modern variant of age-old problems of administration, just as terms like ―ideology‖ and ―class‖ point to modern aspects of intellectual life and social stratification. The analytic task is to conceptualize this modern variant. At the macroscopic level, Max Weber's definition of bureaucracy under the rule of law provides the best available solution to this problem; none of the critics of Weber's analysis has as yet dispensed with his definition. According to Weber, a bureaucracy establishes a relation between legally instated authorities and their subordinate officials which is characterized by defined rights and duties, prescribed in written regulations; authority relations between positions, which are ordered systematically; appointment and promotion based on contractual agreements and regulated accordingly; technical training or experience as a formal condition of employment; fixed monetary salaries; a strict separation of office and incumbent in the sense that the official. A government administration so defined must be understood, according to Weber, as part of a legal order that is sustained by a common belief in its legitimacy. That order is reflected in written regulations, such as enacted laws, administrative rules, court precedents, etc., which govern the employment of officials and guide their administrative behavior. Such authoritative ordering of the

BUREAUCRACY: Its Benefits and Failures. Bureaucracy exists in modern States. It is a vital part of the government and, because of its essential expanding function to respond to the needs of the people, bureaucracy has become, in some instances, a state within a state. Scholars agree that inefficiency of bureaucracy is revealed in time of crisis and high emergencies when a human catastrophe occurs and afflicts thousands or millions of innocent lives. Normally, bureaucracy is established to be efficient so as to be beneficial to society. Hence, inefficiency is the exception. However, after counting the human disaters around the world, one wonders if 'inefficiency' has not become the iron rule challenging the governing system and consequently threatening its existence. " Chernobyl " is one of these disasters of the world that made the discussion of this issue as one of the highest priorities of the governance of the people. In the first part of this essay, the description of Chernobyl Nuclear Plant disaster and analysis of the ex-Soviet Republic, at the time of the catastrophe, is necessary to introduce the problem. The second part considers the definition of Bureaucracy, static and dynamic. The third part strengthens, through some examples of human disasters, the dilemma of bureaucratic efficiency.

Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2012

In this article AU :2 , we focus on the stabilizing functions of public bureaux and examine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make them less hierarchical and more 'flexible'. In so doing, we seek to evidence the ways in which what are represented as anachronistic practices in the machinery of government may actually provide political life with particular required 'constituting' qualities. While such practices have been negatively coded by reformers as 'conservative', we hope to show that their very conservatism may serve positive political purposes, not the least of which is in the constitution of what we call 'responsible' (as opposed to simply 'responsive') government. Through a critical interrogation of certain key tropes of contemporary programmes of modernization and reform, we indicate how these programmes are blind to the critical role of bureaucracy in setting the standards that enable governmental institutions to act in a flexible and responsible way.

Constitutionale

The purpose of this paper is that the author tries to explain the concept of bureaucracy and government. In addition, the author also describes the differences between bureaucracy and government in terms of definition, theory, and task. This paper also aims to discuss the position of the bureaucracy in the trias politica system where there is a classification of power, namely the executive, legislative and judiciary. Then, this paper will lead to the administration and implementation of public services. The conclusion from this paper is that government and bureaucracy are two different things and bureaucracy can become its own entity outside of the executive, legislative and judiciary and those in charge of providing public services are the bureaucrats, not the government, although actually bureaucrats and government have different roles in responsibility to deliver public service.

Administration & Society, 2003

2005

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 1994

What's in a name? Sometimes a good deal. Tom Hammond organized the panels on "Public Administration" for the 1988 meetings of APSA. As he later told me, he decided that this section name had a narrower connotation than he wanted. He told prospective panelists that he wanted the section to encompass phenomena outside public agencies that affected the agencies, phenomena inside the agencies themselves, and the interaction between outside and inside phenomena. Not much omitted, one would think. But the title he chose for the section-"Bureaucracy"-elicited an intense reaction from several professors of public administration. One said in rather vigorous terms that Tom was trying to read public administration out of the APSA. This reaction puzzled and frustrated him; he had tried to be inclusive. I sympathized with Tom. On reflection, however, it seems that there probably are differences. Some of these are institutional: I would guess that a higher proportion of those who label their field bureaucracy are in political science departments than are those who call their field public administration. A higher percentage of the latter are probably in free standing departments or schools of public administration. Perhaps the former are more likely to publish in political science journals; the latter, more likely to publish in the PAR. Some differences are conceptual: the word bureaucracy has a structural connotation, referring to public agencies (regardless of their function in the larger political system), whereas public administration has, following Frank [ would like to thank Tom Hammond and Goodnow's formulation, a functional connotation, referring to the ames Fesier for some very helpful com-execution of public policies ([1900] 1981, 83). But too much can wilts on an earlier draft. For more: on the bg made Qf ^ j a s { difference In the United States and most ifference between defining the field in ..... ... , ,. . : rms of structure (bureaucracy) versus industrial democracies there is a strong though incomplete conefining it in terms of function (adminis-nection between structure and function: Most (public) administraration), see Landau (1960). tive functions are carried out by public agencies and, conversely, a great deal of what agencies do is administrative in character. So '-PART, 4(1994): 1:27-39 the two groups often study the same phenomena.