Bureaucracy

: This page is about the sociological concept. Bureaucracy is also the name of a computer game.

Criticism

As Max Weber himself noted, in reality no ideal type organisation can exist. Thus the real bureaucracy will be less optimal and effective than his ideal model. Each of Weber's seven principles can degenerate:

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• Vertical hierarchy of authority can became chaotic, some offices can be omitted in the decision making process, there may be conflicts of competence;
• Competences can be unclear and used contrary to the spirit of the law; sometimes a decision itself may be considered more important than its effect;
• Nepotism, corruption, political infighting and other degenerations can counter the rule of impersonality and can create a recrutation and promotion system not based on meritocracy but rather on oligarchy;
• Officials can try to avoid responsibility and seek anonymity by avoiding documentation of their procedures (or creating extreme amounts of chaotic, confusing documents)

Even a non-degenerated bureaucracy can be affected by common problems:

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• Overspecialisation, making individual officials not aware of larger consequences of their actions
• Rigidity and inertion of procedures, making decision making slow or even impossible when facing some unusual case, and similarly delaying change, evolution and adaptation of old procedures to new circumstances;
• A phenomenon of group thinking - overzealousy, loyalty and lack of critical thinking regarding the organisation which is perfect and always correct by definition, making the organisation unable to change and realise its own mistakes and limitations;
• A phenomenon of Catch-22 (named after a famous book) - as bureaucracy creates more and more rules and procedures, their complexity raises and coordination diminishes, facilitating creation of contradictory rules;

In the most extreme examples, bureaucracy can lead to the treatment of individual human beings as impersonal objects. This process has been criticised by many philosophers and writers (Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt).

Related Topics:
Aldous Huxley - George Orwell - Hannah Arendt

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