This Bureaucracy Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.
Bureaucracy offers a way of organizing the administration of human affairs. It refers to a structure of offices or a process of formulating and implementing policy. Bureaucracies typically make binding decisions and thus embody a form of power.
The first major theorist of bureaucracy was Georg Friedrich Hegel, though bureaucracy only became a major subject of investigation in the work of Max Weber. Weber formulated the classic model of bureaucracy, characterized by hierarchy of command, specialized tasks, rules for decision-making, specialized training, and professional impartiality. For Weber, bureaucracy promoted administrative efficiency, but it could also pursue its own interests and clash with political mandates. He was in fact a sharp critic of bureaucracy, and unlike Hegel, he suggested that it presented a number of problems for modern society and the nation-state.
At the root of these problems is the instrumental rationality that bureaucracy embodies, making it an especially formidable type of control. The technical advantage of bureaucracy is its efficiency or the logical adaptation of means to ends, but at the expense of an unconstrained discussion of the ends themselves. Some writers have expressed concerns that the proliferation of bureaucratic rule represents a step toward total domination and the mechanization of life. Others have worried that bureaucratization seems inevitable and defies resistance because it is promoted by converging economic, political, and technical factors. In actuality bureaucracies do not conform to a single logic or a monolithic type, but assume different forms conditioned by social, cultural, and political considerations. They evolve informal patterns of communication and innovation. Technological changes in post-industrial society, such as rapid electronic communications, can even seem to promise a way of circumventing hierarchical bureaucratic processes. In light of such contrasting observations, the question of bureaucracy s compatibility with democratic governance is certain to endure as a concern in modern society.
Bibliography:
- Blau, P. & Meyer, M. (1987) Bureaucracy in Modern Society, 3rd edn. McGraw-Hill, New York.
- Weber, M. (1968) [1922] Economy and Society. Bedminster, New York.
See also:
ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER
Always on-time
Plagiarism-Free
100% Confidentiality
Special offer!
