Management Thoery and Practice - Essay Example

Although theories of Weber and Taylor are slightly dated today, they still offer a beneficial perspective. To Weber’s perspective, society, and also the workplace, is something that arises out of a state of chaos, so people want to make order out of chaos and make a workplace as real and rational as possible for them, and often this is in the form of the modern bureaucracy as Weber saw it. All industries have some degree of bureaucracy, and the beauty and hair salon industry is no different.

Weber thought that people should look to the past and look at bureaucracies and also how they relate to the present situation, and we can still do this today. Weber also believed in the ideal type of the bureaucracy, or the optimal ideal. The ideal represents the idea, and the actual is represented by how things really are. There are possible problems in the situation because ideal types often do not live up to the real situation. Weber believed that focusing on the bureaucracy would yield positive results that could be construed in the value-neutral position of the bureaucracy.

This led to his formulation of the ideal type methodology, which later functionalists would see as an automatic pattern of stability to be looked for in a societal context. Weber saw that the object of science was to make subjective observations of the bureaucracy’s function and look at these observations along methodological lines. Other early bureaucratic theories like those of Taylor stressed the presence of an ideal condition where complex tasks were simplified, so Taylor borrowed these notions and thought about how absolute standards could be put upon the subjectivity and reality observed by social science.

“Taylors strongest positive legacy was the concept of breaking a complex task down in to a number of small subtasks, and optimizing the performance of the subtasks. This positive legacy leads to the stop-watch