Editorial Historicizing Bureaucratic Encounters

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.

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.

Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2022

This essay introduces the special symposium issue Reappraising Bureaucracy in the 21st Century in Perspectives on Public Management and Governance. The symposium seeks to place Weberian bureaucracy in the context of contemporary public administration and evaluate its relevance to modern-day concerns.

2005

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

Public Integrity, 2015

Over the course of three decades and more, hundreds of college and university professors and tens of thousands of undergraduate and M.P.A. students have benefited from reading The Case for Bureaucracy (editions 1983, 1985, 1994 and 2004) as they either embarked upon their formal public administration education or came to this classic in search of greater understanding of their chosen profession in public service. In either case, the high regard in which Charles Goodsell, professor emeritus in the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech, is held is undeniable. I myself made use of each of the prior editions of this classic with good results by way of student reactions in my own teaching over the period from 1971 to 2011; I made use of the book at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and with college students and public service practitioners alike in universities in California, Colorado, Indiana, Idaho and Washington State. His publication of the highly praised Mission Mystique: Belief Systems in Public Agencies research monograph in 2011, featuring six rich and highly insightful case studies of service made public in the name of democracy, set a strong foundation for this book. The New Case for Bureaucracy represents a fifth-and in this reviewer's opinion more balanced-pass at making the positive case for properly appreciating the comparatively high quality of governmental agency performance present in the United States. Goodsell has long argued that the public sector agencies of American federal, state, and local governments are not the hapless, wasteful, demoralized, alienating, and nefarious bad actors so commonly portrayed in much of the academic literature (principally sociology, economics, and political science), and also in much of the popular literature and the mass media. In the prior editions of The Case for Bureaucracy, Goodsell presented his arguments in the form of an outright polemic-that is, a blatantly direct assault on what he perceived as patently false myths and seriously misdirected lines of argument, using admittedly selective forms of empirical and qualitative evidence to bolster his case that the virtues of governmental agency service in the United States tend to be vastly undervalued, and its limited failings tend to be greatly

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?

2015

Bureaucracy usually only becomes visible when it stops working—when a system fails, when an event gets off schedule, when someone points to a problem or glitch in a carefully calibrated workflow. But Bureaucracy: A Love Story draws together research done by scholars and students in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas to illuminate how bureaucracy structures our contemporary lives across a range of domains. People have navigated bureaucracy for centuries, by creating and utilizing various literary and rhetorical forms—from indexes to alphabetization to diagrams to blanks—that made it possible to efficiently process large amounts of information. Contemporary bureaucracy is likewise concerned with how to collect and store information, to circulate it efficiently, and to allow for easy access. We are interested both in the conventional definition of bureaucracy as a form of ordering and control connected to institutions and the state, but we also want to uncover how...

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