The Character and Transformation of the American Bureaucracy - Research Paper Example

I. Introduction The concept of ‘bureaucracy’ concerns modern administrative organizations, or those organizations producing goods and providing services. Peter Drucker’s The Age of Social Transformation and Jeremy Rifkin’s Work and the Future, illustrates how the features of bureaucracy have a dual foundation. On the one hand, they demonstrate the development of technical knowledge and the specialization that accompanies it; on the other hand, they develop from a definite set of culturally established and conveyed interaction and relationship between superior and subordinates. An organization that is bureaucratic is a specific form of controlled social system. Meanwhile, Mary Tripsas’s Staving off a Spiral toward Oblivion portrays the relation between structures of bureaucracy and continued innovation. There are several explanations for being interested with bureaucratic innovation at present. Some time ago, the process of innovation in society occurred mainly through the introduction of new organizations and the demise of traditional ones. With the capital demands of the current technology, this process appears to be quite uneconomical. We should hope that present organizations will acquire skills in innovation. The competence of contemporary credit management would have removed the obsolete capitalist even though the capital demands of advanced technology had not done so. A single letdown will cost his job. As a result, we should examine the performance of bureaucracy’s entrepreneurial operations; while failure for a traditional capitalist simply implied loss of profit, failure for the contemporary civil servant implies the loss of a part his/her identity. Innovation is more dangerous for the civil servant than for the capitalist. Loss of identity is much more critical than loss of profit. This argument will form a section of our analysis, particularly in the study of the relationship between bureaucracy and innovation. The objective of this paper is to explore the American political system, its nature and evolution. The American political system, to begin with, is a context-specific entity. And the three prevailing contexts that determine the performance and operation of the American bureaucracy are political, economy and social. Hence, the discussion will focus on the character and transformation of the American bureaucracy, both public and private, as it is significantly influenced by the three contexts. II. The American Political System A basic principle of democracy is that public policy should demonstrate a direct connection between the managers and the subordinates; specifically, public policy must be formulated by bureaucrats who are responsible to the people. Hence, a direct affiliation is required between unelected public servants, who could put into effect policy regulation, and the elected bureaucrats of the people. According to Kenneth Meier in his Bureaucracy and Politics the investigation of regulation of bureaucracies by political processes is a progressive industry. Thus, the United States is confronting a serious dilemma with the boundary between its electoral body and its bureaucracy. If only bureaucracy could be subjected to control, the budget could be balanced, poverty could be eradicated, and the educational institution could be strengthened. Absent in the political discussions is any critical evaluation of bureaucracy, its operations, its disadvantages, or its potentials. In relation to other developed democracies, though, the American bureaucracy seems to be significantly smaller and slimmer. It depends more on the private organizations to produce goods and provide services. Furthermore, Meier argues that the American bureaucracy is made up of technocrats rather than professional administrators. He also argues that it is both practically effectual and at the same time decidedly receptive to justifiable political claims. In Meier’s point of view, the setbacks in American government are not setbacks of bureaucracy but setbacks of governance. Quite the opposite to what is satisfactory performance by the bureaucracy, the electoral institutions’ performance has been bleak. Similarly, Philip Howard’s The Death of Common Sense asserted that a great deal of bureaucratic law is excessively inflexible and comprehensive; take for instance tax law, or workplace safety regulations. Legal particularity has the good qualities of allowing those involved become aware of their standing and maintaining official prudence within limits. Yet when taken farther it can have the reverse impact. The law turns out to be impenetrable and official unpredictability can become chronic amidst the uncertainty. Howard is particularly concerned with the fact that extremely inflexible control, by expelling human discretion, suppresses ‘trial and error—the key to all progress’ (Howard, 1995, 50). In order to mitigate the problems Howard illustrates, Americans would have to revisit several fundamental resolutions made in this point in time about federalism, regulation and the contract between the civil society and the state. Nonetheless, the performance and operations of the American bureaucracy is not only determined by the political processes discussed by Meier and Howard, but is also greatly influenced by the economy and the social dimension. Jeremy Rifkin in his Work and the Future attempted to discuss the transformation of industrial labor and the historical process underlying the creation of good jobs. His treatise is, therefore, a description of the bureaucratization of employment, for the reason that numerous of the qualities that identify good jobs, such as security, stability, rule-bound practices, and internal promotion, are traits of bureaucratic organization. The term bureaucracy is actually a loaded term; it bears multitudes of implications. For Tripsas, as indirectly argued in her article, the bureaucratic attributes of employment are indispensable and mechanical outcome of the technical requirements enforced by large and sophisticated organizations. In a similar note, Peter Drucker in his The Age of Social Transformation suggested that giant manufacturing industries were a widespread trait of the 1890’s industrial setting, but in several of them, blue-collar jobs did not gain bureaucratic traits until some decades later. Furthermore, medium-sized businesses were frequently among the foremost in abolishing the established scheme of factory labor management. Administration in these businesses utilized bureaucracy to resolve various problems, numerous of them not related to size. However management was not the only party to make use of bureaucracy and to gain from it. Workers aimed to bureaucratize employment through their unions in order to reinforce their bargaining power, protect themselves from tumultuous competition, and guarantee administrative stability and justice. III. Transformation of American Bureaucracies Peter Drucker takes precedence in the discussion of the evolution of American bureaucracy. He views bureaucratic employment traditions as the result of an extended struggle to surpass the uncertainty and discriminations generated by a market-focused employment structure. Each of the leading industrial nations all over the world underwent this struggle as a component of its shift to modernity, a transition defined by several remarkable evolutions: from the capitalist business to the great corporation, from the traditional to the emerging middle class; and from domestic resistances to countrywide labor parties and unions. These shifts all took place in the century following 1850, even though nations developed at various periods and at various tempos during this period. They varied also in the progression and the timing of the different transitions that constituted the shift. Within management, the disagreement between the established and the bureaucratic framework of employment was characterized by conflicts between the manufacturing department and the new personnel divisions that surfaced in the early twentieth century. The emergence of a personnel division indicated that employment procedure would now be carried out as an objective as such rather than as a way to the attainment of goals of the production department. Nonetheless, in spite of the adjustments in the employment relationship, a great deal of the structure in early part of the twentieth century remained intact. Even though it is popular to claim that throughout the last century we have evolved from agreement to rank back to agreement again, that unyielding bureaucracies have disappeared, a close examination of historical and current observations should remind us how dissimilar is the current century from the last one. References Drucker, P. (1994). The Age of Social Transformation. The Atlantic Monthly , 53-80. Howard, P. (1995). The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America. Meier, K. & Bohte, J. (2006). Politics and the Bureaucracy. Wadsworth Publishing. Rifkin, J. (n.d.). Work and Future. http://www.jobsletter.org.nz/art/rifkin02.htm http://www.foet.org/global/EW/Utne%20Reader-%20May-June%201995.pdf, accessed 14 September 2009. Tripsas, M. (2009). Staving off a Spiral Toward Oblivion. New York Times , BU 3. Read More