The Concept of Bureaucracy - Essay Example

In contrast to decades of bureaucracy bashing, the paper argues that contemporary democracies are involved in a struggle over institutional identities and institutional balances.

It also argues that for those interested in how contemporary public administration is organized, functions, and changes, it is worthwhile to reconsider and rediscover bureaucracy as an administrative form, an analytical concept, and a set of ideas and observations about public administration and formally organized institutions. The argument is developed in the following way: First, some characteristics of bureaucratic organization are outlined. Second, claims about the undesirability of bureaucracy are discussed competing criteria of success/failure and assumptions about the performance of bureaucratic organizations.

Third, aspects of administrative dynamics and the viability of bureaucratic organization are inquired, and fourth, some reasons for rediscovering bureaucracy are recapitulated. "Bureaucracy" is often used as a pejorative slogan, as well as a label for all public administration or any large-scale formal organization. Max Weber, however, made bureaucracy an analytical concept, decoupled from the polemical context in which it had emerged (Albrow 1970); and here the term signifies, first, a distinct organizational setting, the bureau or office: formalized, hierarchical, specialized with a clear functional division of labour and demarcation of jurisdiction, standardized, rule-based, and impersonal. Second, bureaucracy refers to a professional, full-time administrative staff with lifelong employment, organized careers, salaries, and pensions, appointed to office and rewarded based on formal education, merit, and tenure.

Third, bureaucracy implies a larger organizational and normative structure where the government is founded on authority, that is, the belief in a legitimate, rational-legal political order and the fight of the state to define and enforce the legal order. Binding authority is claimed through a fourfold rule-bound hierarchical relation: between citizens and elected representatives, between democratic legislation and administration, within the administration, and between administration and citizens as subjects (as well as authors) of law. Bureaucratization, then, refers to the emergence and growth of bureaucratic forms and not to the perversions and illegitimate extension of the power of bureaucrats. (2)