Weber's Principles Of Bureaucracy Summary

Weber’s Bureaucratic Principles: A Critical Overview

Introduction

In this paper, Max Weber’s contribution in modern bureaucracy has been critically discussed. Weber came up with the idea of principles of bureaucracy based on existing legal-rational authority in the society. His ideal type principles of bureaucracy are hierarchical structure, impersonal relation within the organization, capacity building of the employees, formal rules and regulations, management by written order and well division of labor. Critiques think that Weber’s bureaucratic model has significant limitation with its application in modern administration given that this model emphasizes on “dehumanization” of employees, process rather than the result, rules rather than

Though his principles of bureaucracy have utterly been criticized by different critiques, these still have great importance in both theoretical and practical arena of public administration. Some critiques think that it really worked well when it was emerged first, but it no longer works in the modern administration. The reason why they believe so is that the nature of work governed by administration of that time was simpler and easier to handle than this time, as in this modern era, every government is considerably facing rapid technological change, economic competition etc. Others also think that it is a system emerged by genius and governed by a group of idiots. However, there has been growing demands for significant modification and reforms of bureaucratic structure given that “it ignores the issue of collective interest and of the role of public power in contemporary society”. Before going to the further discussions, I would like to briefly analyze about the contributions of Weber in the development of bureaucracy according to a chapter (Bureaucracy) of his book ‘Economy and Society’ (1968)

Therefore, their private business, wealth and other properties should be kept away from the official business. In other words, bureaucrats should have to be impersonal in maintaining their relationship with office. Weber’s this notion of bureaucracy has also been highly criticized for dehumanizing the personal life of officials. Hummel mentioned public officials as “mechanistic technician”, since bureaucracy considers their life detached from human society, emotional belongingness and all kind of personal relations. In other words, the concept of bureaucracy does not recognize human identity of the public officials that might discourage them in attaining the organizational