Bureaucracy

Bureaucrats are civil servants responsible for carrying out administrative functions in the government.

Bureaucrats are composed of a small portion of non-elected officers.

Bureaucrats are composed of a small portion of non-elected officers, and their distinctive functions are related to the administrative jobs in the governmental structure. This administrative group is called the bureaucracy.

All nonelected officers, whether administrative or nonadministrative, are called bureaucrats.

While public
bureaucracy is responsible to the rulers and
follows the official rules, private bureaucracy is
accountable to the owners or directors of those
private institutions and follows their organizations’
regulations. Another difference is that, while
public bureaucracy is bound by the government’s
goals and officially acts to serve the public interests,
private bureaucracy tries to realize the interests of
their organizations.

China had the most developed centralized bureaucracy until modern times among all the traditional societies.

German scholar Max Weber (1864-1920)
was the leading theorist of bureaucracy, and his
understanding of bureaucracy is still the dominant
model for studying bureaucracy.

He analyzed
the rise of bureaucracy in modern society in
detail and set the differences between traditional
and modern bureaucracies. While he called the
traditional bureaucracy patrimonial, he called
modern bureaucracy rational-legal bureaucracy.
According to Weber, the rise of modern rationallegal bureaucracy was an indicator of the general
rationalization process of society in Europe.

Weber mentioned three types of
dominations to analyze the subject of bureaucracy:
Charismatic, traditional (patriarchal and
patrimonial), and rational-legal.

Charismatic authority is the personal authority
and stems from the unique personal qualities of
leaders. Those qualities could be imagined or real.
Whether real or imagined, once people believe their
leaders have extraordinary qualities, charismatic
authority appears

A significant factor in the development of
modern bureaucracy was the Industrial
Revolution which led to the development
of capitalism in Europe. Capitalism was
the driving force behind the rise of both
national and international economies,
which increased “the need for complex and
highly technical public services”

The term is
coined by the French word bureau (writing desk
or office) and the Greek word cratie (to rule or
government)

According to Hegel, the family, civil
society, and the state are three different domains
of social life. Each domain rests on a different
principle and serves different interests:

As an elitist liberal, Mill advocates elite rule
based on education, skill, wisdom, and expertise in
government. Mill sees bureaucracy as a necessary
apparatus for an efficient government, for
bureaucracy represents professionalism, expertise,
practical wisdom, and experience

Marx considers modern bureaucracy
an integral apparatus of the capitalist state and thus
just an instrument of the capitalist class to exploit
the working class.

In his seminal work titled Political Parties, German-born Italian
sociologist Robert Michels (1876-1936) is one of the first scholars
to discuss the relationship between bureaucracy and oligarchy.

The Weberian bureaucracy as an apparatus of the interventionist state
was seen as “as the source of administrative inefficiency, poor economic performance, and financial deficit in the 1970s”

The bureaucrats
follow detailed and complex legal rules in
their functions, leading to slowness and lack
of responsiveness to changing conditions.
They have to obey the rules which often
become obsolete in a highly fluid social and
economic environment. Even though they
realize they are slow, they cannot overstep
legal rules binding them.

Bureaucracy is portrayed as unresponsive, incompetent, and corrupt.

New Public Management (NPM) refers to a cluster of
ideas and practices that seek, at their core, to use private-sector and business approaches in the public sector.