Bureaucracy Flashcards
Bureaucracy definition
Weber:
Organization focused on instrumental rationality, reliant on rational-legal authority
Model of bureaucracy
- fundamental specialization
- hierarchy of authority
- system of rules
- impersonal implementation
Dysfunctions of bureaucracy
- unintended consequences
- Merton (1940)
- Blau (1955)
- Gouldner (1954)
- Ferguson (1984)
Unintended consequences of bureaucracy
- iron cage
- people have own sense of rational
- separation of means and ends
- doesn’t account for human (only mechanized process)
Bureaucratic mentality
- focus on tasks not goals
- rational problem solving and achieving efficiency
- refrain from personal opinion (obedience/discipline)
Individual morality is neutralized
- denial of proximity
- effacement of face
- reduction to traits
How Bureaucracy made the Holocaust possible
Bauman (1989)
- loss of humanity
- speed of process
- collective rather than individual responsibility
Bureaucracy is attacked on three fronts
- Popular: red tape, impersonal
- Rational and instrumental: denied emotion/morality
- Entrepreneurial: lack of flexibility and response to change
Americanization
Globalization increases similarity of practices around the world, takes away cultural differences and replaces with ‘sameness’
Nothingness
Social form generally conceived, controlled and comparatively devoid of distinctive, substantive content
5 dimensions of something-nothing continuum
- complexity
- spatial (e.g. Non-places)
- temporal
- human (e.g. Non-people)
- magical
Criticisms of post-bureaucratic ideal (Heckscher, 1994)
- people like to keep their jobs for long terms
- people like hierarchy: know the progression structure
- people like rules: no need to debate or discuss
Criticisms of epochal claims that ‘bureaucracy is dead’
- we still find qualities in bureaucracy that we like
- large organizations: bureaucracy is fairly unavoidable
