Characteristics of Bureaucracies

Bureaucracies have been a hallmark of advanced capitalist economies for several centuries. Beginning with public perceptions of bureaucracies and the difference between public and private bureaucracies, this discussion turns to the origins of bureaucracies and how they are defined through reference to characteristics such as hierarchy and division of labor. The essay continues with an examination of three leading exponents of bureaucracy — Max Weber, Karl Marx and Ludwig von Von Mises — and ends with a discussion of the changes and challenges faced by public and private bureaucracies, such as deregulation, as well as the methods government regulatory agencies are using to be more responsive to taxpayers, including public comment and public notice.

Keywords Bureaucracy; Capitalism; Civil Servant; Deregulation; Division of Labor; Hierarchy; Private Bureaucracy; Public Bureaucracy; Regulation

Characteristics of Bureaucracies

Overview

Bureaucracies and bureaucrats often suffer from negative public perceptions. As prominent social scientist James Q. Wilson noted, many taxpayers believe that "bureaucrats are lethargic, incompetent hacks who spend their days spinning out reels of red tape and reams of paperwork, all the while going to great lengths to avoid doing the job they were hired to do. Their agencies chiefly produce waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement" (Wilson, 1989, p. 8). Along these same lines, scholars have shown that many American politicians running for election or reelection know that developing an adversarial relationship with public bureaucracies is a winning strategy (Garrett et al., 2006). Meanwhile, the size of the federal bureaucracy continues to grow to record levels (Light, 1995; Light, 2004).

On a more positive note, some historians have argued that bureaucracies have been responsible for the rise of modern nations, including Japan after World War II. Wilson has also noted that, despite the common perception of government bureaucrats, most Americans surveyed about their dealings with state agencies report that their "experiences were good, [and] that the agency personnel were helpful, friendly, and competent. This can only mean that those lazy, incompetent bureaucrats must work for some other agency - the one the citizen never sees" (Wilson, 1989, p. 8).

Marxist conceptions of bureaucracies will be compared and contrasted. The essay concludes with a discussion of the role of public and private bureaucracies in the twenty-first century.

Origins of the Bureaucracy

Bureaucracies date back to the beginning of recorded human history. Bureaucrats toiled in such far-flung locations as ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Samaria, Persia, and China, tending to the daily affairs of life in those empires (Beyer, 1959). Perhaps the most well-known ancient bureaucrat was St. Matthew, a tax collector for Rome and, according to the New Testament, a disciple of Jesus.

While bureaucrats have long been a fixture of empires, the word bureaucracy dates only to eighteenth-century France. It was coined by the Frenchman Vincent de Gournay (1712–1759) from two Greek words that, when combined, have the literal meaning of "government by desk" (Walker, 2001, p. 104). From the very beginning, and certainly by the time Marx first wrote against bureaucracy in 1843, the term bureaucrat had a negative connotation; it quickly became a stick with which to strike out against the increasingly cold and impersonal manner in which government and industry were run. According to Wilson (1989), "Honore de Balzac (1799–1850) described 'bureaucracy' as a 'giant power wielded by pygmies…with a natural kindness for mediocrity…as fussy and meddlesome as a small shopkeeper's wife.'" Referring to the French origins of the word, the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) huffed in 1850 that bureaucracy was a "continental nuisance" (cited in Wilson, 1989, p. 104).

The origins of the bureaucratic idea in the United States remains the subject of debate, but there is an emerging consensus that the actual rise of public and private bureaucracies was due in part to several factors. In the public sector, bureaucracies formed and grew due to the growth of government and the need to properly administer it; and the desire of reformers to use "objective" scientific methodologies to protect individual rights from being trampled by majority rule (Nelson, 1992; cf. Schwartz, 1984). In the private sector, industrial bureaucracies were used to manage factories and large numbers of workers in what was thought to be the most efficient and "scientific" manner possible. By the beginning of the twentieth century, bureaucracies were firmly entrenched in American life.

Defining Bureaucracy

At the most basic level, a bureaucracy is just another way of "conceptualizing the system of interrelationships in organizations" (Hall, 1963, p. 32). Bureaucracies have been viewed as negative or positive, depending upon the particular bureaucracy, and possibly, one's perspective:

Organizational research presents two conflicting views of the human, or attitudinal, outcomes of bureaucracy. According to the negative view, the bureaucratic form of organization stifles creativity, fosters dissatisfaction, and demotivates employees. According to the positive view, it provides needed guidance and clarifies responsibilities, thereby easing role stress and helping individuals be and feel more effective (Alder & Borys, 1996, p. 61).

Public & Private Bureaucracies

There are both private bureaucracies and public bureaucracies. Private bureaucracies are bureaucracies within corporations and non-governmental organizations, while public bureaucracies are those within local, state and federal governments. Examples of private bureaucracies include corporations, schools and hospitals. Examples of public bureaucracies include governments, courts and the military. Many public local, state, and federal government agencies — from the local registry of motor vehicles to US Department of Housing and Urban Development — are bureaucracies that make and enforce rules on all manner of subjects.

There are several common characteristics of all bureaucracies:

• Hierarchical reporting structure

• Division of labor within various departments

• Well-defined and predictable employee career paths

• A web of connections between various departments

In practical terms, bureaucracy is a type of organization designed to minimize waste and inefficiencies -- economic or otherwise - while maximizing quality service delivery through streamlined, predetermined and objective processes.

The degree to which any given bureaucracy meets, or even aspires to, these lofty ideals continues to be hotly contested in some quarters and bemoaned in others. Justified or not, there continues to be a popular sentiment that many bureaucracies are unelected and unaccountable regulatory bodies that exercise an unhealthy degree of power over the lives of ordinary Americans. Many Americans also feel, as noted by Wilson, that bureaucracies tend to do more harm than good.

Applications

Bureaucracy in Modern Corporations

In many contemporary studies of business organization, anti-bureaucracy is the byword. Reacting to the prevailing thesis, articulated most cogently by sociologist Max Weber, that bureaucracies are necessary goods in the business world, a number of influential thinkers have suggested that open or flat business structures are preferable to the hierarchical structures that are part and parcel of bureaucracies. These scholars argue that in advanced capitalist economies such as those found in the United States and Europe, what matters is the rapid transfer of knowledge, which necessarily breaks down traditional bureaucratic structures that were created to facilitate a factory-based economy which has now been largely superseded (cf. Drucker, 1969). Various public intellectuals such as Karl Popper (1902-1994), author of "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945), have been enlisted in what might be called an anti-bureaucratic crusade (ArmbrÜster & Geber, 2002).

However, as recent scholarship has shown, there is something remarkably resilient about corporate hierarchies, one of the hallmarks of all bureaucracies:

In organizations, goal-oriented activity legitimately requires a division of tasks and a need to co-ordinate them which, from a certain size, generates a need for coordinative roles, a distribution of information needs and, hence, some sort of stratification. Even 'democratically' conceived organizations, therefore, cannot be equated with a demise of hierarchy (ArmbrÜster & Geber, 2002, p. 174).

In any case, bureaucracy is often a reason employees cite as a hindrance to their job satisfaction and productivity. There seems every reason to believe that, despite economic conditions, corporations operating within a fiercely competitive global economy will continue to seek ways to be more agile, which is another way of saying that they will focus on rapid response to change, innovation and results rather than reinforcing conventional corporate structures and policies for their own sake.

Agility in Public Bureaucracies

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, discussions of bureaucratic reform in the public sector took a distinctly technological turn with the argument being that the best way to reduce public sector waste and improve service delivery was to use technology whenever possible. However, while private sector companies have obvious financial incentives driving innovation, public sector innovation is a new research area, and the best ways to introduce innovation into the public sector remain somewhat unclear (PÄrna & von Tunzelmann, 2007).

How can the public sector best adapt to change? A recent and preliminary study of public services in four European countries found that financial incentives were not a significant driver of public sector reform from within. According to PÄrna & von Tunzelmann, "across the countries, the personal leadership or the existence of committed 'key' individuals was the most important internal factor supporting innovation in public sector services; this was followed by top management commitment and support, and open-minded managers" (2007, p. 122). Other factors that seem to create more agile and responsive public service delivery include "close cooperation with technology suppliers and future users, as well as just through better market (demand) knowledge" (PÄrna & Tunzelmann, 2007, p. 122).

Public sector agility is closely related to public sector accountability. Among both the public and leading politicians, there is the perception that bureaucracies are close to the antithesis of accountability, despite the efforts of oversight groups such as the OMB. Recent scholarship indicates that bureaucracies are not as responsive to political pressures as once thought (Meier & O'Toole, 2006; cf. Bennedsen & Feldmann, 2006).

Viewpoints

Influential Theories of Bureaucracy

Since the nineteenth century, as the size of governments grew in line with their increased oversight and regulation of the civil and economic lives of their citizens and employment within corporations became more standardized and even commoditized, sociologists and others have sought to offer more precise definitions and understandings of bureaucracy.

Max Weber

The German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) was one of the first and most prominent exponents of bureaucracy. Drawing a parallel with the difference between the mechanical and non-mechanical types of industrial production, Weber argued bureaucracy developed because of its "purely technical superiority over any other form of organization" (quoted in Dolan & Rosenbloom, 2003, p. 8). It is the means by which the will of the people is carried through into concrete, rational, and societal action. Weber went on to extol the virtues of bureaucracy as he saw them:

“Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs-these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration…. As compared with all collegiate, honorific, and avocational forms of administration, trained bureaucracy is superior on all these points” (cited in Dolan & Rosenbloom, 2003, p. 8).

Weber argued that bureaucracy was the form of organization best suited to a modern, complex capitalist economy marked by a strict division of labor. However, his support for bureaucracy was not unqualified. Mommsen remarks that, "Throughout his writings he pointed out again and again the threat to a liberal order created by insufficiently controlled or checked bureaucratic institutions" (1989, p. 118). In his 1918 lecture on socialism, Weber commented, somewhat sardonically, "It is the dictatorship of the official, not that of the worker, which, for the present at any rate, is on the advance" (cited in Anderson, 2004, p. 7).

Indeed, Weber judged specific bureaucracies by the same standard he judged other forms of human social organization; that is, whether they embraced and encouraged human "dynamism, creativity and leadership" (Mommsen, 1989, p. 118). Weber anticipated many critics of bureaucracy by noting that it was "among those social structures which are hardest to destroy" because it weaves durable power structures staffed by those with a vested interest in preserving that power by any means necessary (cited in Dolan & Rosenbloom, 2003, p. 9). In the end, Weber saw bureaucracies as vital to the continued operation of healthy capitalist economies.

Karl Marx

In light of the well-documented difficulties involved with the "state-within-a-state" bureaucracies of the former Soviet Union, it might come as a surprise that the younger Marx, particularly in his writings on Hegel, was an "irreducible opponent of bureaucracy under any guise" (Liebich, 1982, p. 78). Marx scorned bureaucrats as self-serving, aloof, and unresponsive to the needs of the working class. Certainly his first criticisms of bureaucracy stem from the fact that the Prussian bureaucrats of his time were active censors of views not considered worthy of discussion, including Marx's own views, so for Marx, "the censor becomes the prototype of the bureaucrat" (Liebich, 1982, p. 87). But Marx, as opposed to his collaborator Engels, saw some temporary value in bureaucracies, crediting their significant contributions "in the struggle against feudalism and in the consolidation of the modern state" (Liebich, 1982, p. 88). The older Marx expected that bureaucracies, like the state itself, would simply "wither away" (as Engels put it) because they will have outlived their usefulness.

Ludwig von Von Mises

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the author of a highly influential book on bureaucracy and can be thought of as an intellectual foil to Weber on the topic (Anderson, 2004). Weber and von Mises shared an admiration for each other's work, and they both saw bureaucracy as a possible threat to human liberty.

Von Mises argued in his books Bureaucracy and Human Action that human beings have two fundamental ways of organization — either through free, market-based economies or through bureaucracies. While he argued that bureaucracies were something of a necessary evil in the public sector, he believed they were anathema in the private sector. For von Mises the fundamental question for markets was whether the government would direct the economy through unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats or whether the economy would be organized around traditional capitalist categories such as the law of supply and demand (Anderson, 2004, p. 10). Von Mises was adamant that the only objective way to measure something subjective like social value is through the valuation of the marketplace and not through the whims and fancies of bureaucrats without all the informational inputs that can only be supplied by dynamically changing markets. Unlike Weber, von Mises argues that what constitutes efficiency in public and private enterprises is not the same. Within a bureaucracy, efficiency means subservience to the regulations, not to the consumer, and grants no harbor to deviation, innovation, or creativity. Business efficiency, on the other hand, depends upon economic calculation. Applying one definition of efficiency to the other style of management invites disaster for the manager. (Anderson, 2004, pp. 11-12)

In general, von Mises has a far less sanguine view of private sector bureaucracy than Weber. Rather than viewing it as the inevitable triumph of rationality and objectivity, von Mises sees it as the result of the unwarranted intrusion of government into the private sector economy. As one von Mises scholar put it, "bureaucracy's spread is politically, not economically, fueled. It spreads because it is corrupted by the desire for power and influence" (Anderson, 2004, p. 12).

Growing Sentiment Against Bureaucracies

The late twentith century and early twentieth-first century economic, political, and social scene is far removed from the world of Weber, Marx, and von Mises. While Weber's more optimistic views of bureaucracy held sway in business and government until the 1970s, the intellectual, social, and political trends since then have been notably hostile to public and private bureaucracy. Politicians, as noted above, see bureaucrats and bureaucracies as easy targets: too diffuse to mount an effective response. It has become almost taken for granted in public discourse that bureaucracies have come to represent the very opposite of what Weber believed they could and should be (Dolan & Rosenbloom, 2003, p. 8).

Mike Mears, a consultant on leadership and organizational change and former Chief of Human Capital at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has argued that it was only in the 1970s that the tide began to turn against bureaucracies, at least as they were conventionally envisioned:

“Part of why government doesn't emphasize leadership is because it was set up to administer things, not to lead and manage. Contrary to what stakeholders demand today, government was not constructed to be agile; it was established to handle repetitive tasks… Until about thirty years ago, management was top-down, and business or government organizations didn't give a lot of leeway to employees. That still holds true today in some of the private sector and much of government. Therefore, many government knowledge workers are trapped in a factory-worker environment” (as cited in Robison, 2008, p. 2).

Conclusion

Are Bureaucrats too Beholden to Business?

One of the most important tasks performed by government bureaucracies is drafting business rules and regulations outside of the normal democratic channels that involve elected public officials. For many decades, as the power of unelected regulatory agencies grew, concerns were raised that their rulemaking process was undemocratic. In an effort to address this concern, many regulatory agencies opened up their deliberative proceedings for public comment. However, researchers have shown that, rather than making the regulatory process more democratic, this change may have skewed the process even more in favor of business interests.

Researchers who analyzed bureaucratic rules and comments between 1994 and 2001 found that a disproportionate amount of feedback on federal regulations was provided by business interests. Moreover, as the number of businesspeople commenting on a proposed federal regulation increases, the chances that the resulting new or revised regulation would be favorable to the business community become greater (Yackee & Yackee, 2006). This influence was not found to be due to business "commenters communicat[ing] a greater level of information and expertise to agencies" (Yackee & Yackee, 2006, p. 136), but largely because business interests were disproportionately represented during the comment proceedings of regulatory agencies. As Yackee and Yackee also note, "this ending suggests that if other types of participants become more active in their submission of comments, business influence over agency policy outputs may decrease during the notice and comment period" (2006, p. 137).

Terms & Concepts

Bureaucracy: A form of organization stressing hierarchy and division of labor.

Capitalism: An economic system in which the means of production are privately owned.

Civil Servant: A bureaucrat that emphasizes his or her service to the taxpayer; a publicly paid service employee.

Deregulation: A move to reduce the number of state and/or federal regulations placed upon the private sector and industry, intended to stimulate more competition.

Division of Labor: A concept indicating that each member of an organization is to perform a precise set of activities not performed by other members of the organization.

Hierarchy: A component of a bureaucracy in which there is a clear organizational structure in which those in lower levels of an organizational chart report those higher up.

Private Bureaucracy: A non-governmental form of bureaucracy, such as a hospital.

Public Bureaucracy: A governmental form of bureaucracy, such as courts.

Regulation: A ruling or body of ruling issued by a public bureaucracy that imposes one or more restrictions on the way in which an individual or business can use their property or other resources.

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