Bureaucracy and democracy

Economy and Society, 2006

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.

The first half of the paper defines the concept of bureaucracy, its evolution over the time and the current academic debates. A short review of the most debatable theories written by Lowi, Niskanen, Dunleavy and Choudhury is included. The second half focuses on the three concepts of power put forward by Russel and the non-paid goals bureaucratic offices pursue on a daily basis. The paper also analyses the issue of monitoring the output of bureaucratic offices.

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

Human Studies, 2012

THE THEORY OF BUREAUCRACY OF MAX WEBER, MERITS AND DEMERITS

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

Encyclopedia of Management Theory, 2013

Beginning with Max Weber, bureaucracies have been regarded as mechanisms that rationalize authority and decision-making in society. Yet subsequent theorists have questioned the rationality of bureaucracies. Which features of modern-day public bureaucracies are rational? Which are not? Buttress your argument with citations from organization and/or public administration theories.