Bureaucracy and Democracy

• Main Author: VOGEL, Ann
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 1995
• Subjects: Politics and Social Change; Sociology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/381
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This essay is a response to Alvin Gouldner's study, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. This essay intends to examine Gouldner's criticism of Weber's theory as well as Gouldner's modification of it. Weber does not clarify who gains from the bureaucratic rules, if bureaucratic authority proves to be efficient. Moreover, he fails to answer in whose sense rules are rational and whose aims are realized in a bureaucracy, if bureaucracy works efficiently. Weber uses the term bureaucracy very differently from today's usual application. By bureaucracy he means a certain group of individuals-an administrative staff. Today, bureaucratization is mostly understood as an introduction of formalism into spheres of daily-life. The terms bureaucracy and bureaucratization are frequently used to express negative sentiments against powerful organizations and their inaccessibility to the individual. Weber defines rational authority as resting on a belief in the legalism of formal regulations and orders given by the administrative staff which represent the power holder.