Max Weber Bureaucracy
Max Weber
has made lots of contributions to the areas of organizational studies,
management, and organizational communication. And the main one is his
contribution to the concept of bureaucracy. First, how do you pronounce
his name? I've heard Weber, I've heard Viber. I've looked all over the internet.
I've informally surveyed my colleagues in academia and it's about 50/50.
Name pronunciation of Max Weber
The Weber pronunciation is the Americanized
style, the Americanized version of his name, and Veyber is the more European
pronunciation. I think both are acceptable and I recommend, however,
your teacher says it, that's how you should pronounce it. He was a German
sociologist and political economist.
Concept of Bureaucracy and Max Weber
People always use his concept of bureaucracy in organizational communication and organizational studies, but Weber actually wrote quite a lot of different areas and has influenced many areas of academia beyond just the working area studies. He saw the rise of large organizations bringing together large groups of people to manage, and that's not a straightforward thing. We're going from farms to factories, from smaller shops to larger organizations, and how are people gonna do that?
Well, he believed that the existing approaches
to our organizing that he saw had really obvious problems, especially around
the area of authority. He saw that most workplaces used relationships, kinship
or family, or customs to lead and decide.
We call this traditional authority. He saw lots of problems with that. The main one was particularism, where employees were hired or fired for a variety of non-organizational reasons, such as their religion, race, sex, and relation or family connections. We call this favoritism. He used the term particularism specifically because a particular group of people was having a very disproportionate influence over the organization.
Decision-making authority
The decision-making has isolated in the hands of a few people, and it was very unlikely that they were going to be the most qualified people to run the organization at its best. He saw this as a disadvantage to organizations if they let this happen. He favored a more rational approach to running organizations. He wanted them to achieve their goals more rationally, especially through clarified leadership and clarified rules for decision-making.
In terms of leadership, he wanted what he called the legal, rational authority, where the legitimate authority of leadership positions should formalize and fixed to those positions. So it wasn't about if you had lots of charisma or if you're really persuasive, or if it related you to a certain somebody, your legitimate authority came from the position that you occupied in the structure.
In this way, he wanted to be consistent with societal law where organizations should run by formal rules and policies. He wanted the organization's rules and policies to parallel the rules that we see in society. And he thought the authority should live in the position or the office.
It should not live with the individual person, the personality, because let's say you're being supervised by somebody and they move out of that position and a new person moves in. The person who's occupying that position should have decision-making power over you and your department. The person who leaves should not still be having that kind of influence from the sidelines over the organization.
So he wanted to keep it much more legal and rational. Bureaucracy has many parts. The first is the division of labor among the participants. So the division of labor is where we divide work into small, separate steps. So let's say you want to complete a semester schedule of courses at college. You would think that you may just walk in, swipe your credit card, take your seat, and now you're enrolled in the course and off you go. But if you've ever been to a college campus, you know there are lots of distinct steps.
We chopped this up into seemingly endless steps. So you have to figure out financial aid for one office, you get advised somewhere else. When you register, that's a separate process. Pay in various ways. Then you confirm your course schedule.
Six Points of Bureaucracy
You get add codes and drop codes from somebody
else. And so, what should be or what could be very simple, we divided it into lots
of distinct steps. And there are reasons for this. One of them is, so that,
let's say you swipe your credit card and let's say the professor runs off with
that money, well, you're protected against that because you pay one department
and then you take a course with another department.
And so, I mean bureaucracy to again protect against disproportionate or lopsided influence. The hierarchy of offices is number two. You're probably familiar with this, where there's a kind of pyramid structure. And at the bottom of that pyramid are all the employees and above that, you have supervisors, then managers, and finally, the big boss.
Number three, a set of general rules that govern performance was a big part of the bureaucracy. So there are rules that govern how you perform. The supervisor, the people running things, can't just make it up and change it, depending upon their mood and who you are.
Let's say you're working at a place and they say productivity is important and you show good productivity. They say your sales numbers are important and you show that. Customer service is important and you show that. Well, those are the general rules that everybody should be evaluated by. They shouldn't mark you high in these things and still fire you. You should be able to get rewarded, promoted, and maybe even get a raise if you uphold the goals and follow the policies.
The Fourth, a rigid separation of personal life from work life. This guards, again, against particularism. So let's say a couple gets married, they meet at work, and they get married. And one person is still being supervised by the other. What happens in many organizations is they will put the person who was being supervised in a different department so that their spouse is not directly supervising them. This guard against favoritism or that particularism.
Number five, it did the selection of personnel based on technical qualifications and that pursues the equal treatment of all employees. You're getting selected, you're getting promoted because you are the most qualified, not because you're the right or wrong religion or race, wrong gender, wrong family relationships, etc.
Number six, participants view employment as a career and tenure protection against arbitrary dismissal. Tenure meaning if you've been there for a while and you have what you might call veteran status, you're gonna keep your job as long as you continue to do well. They're not gonna fire you for some petty personal reason. You're gonna basically keep your job.
General Discussion and conclusion
These are the six points under bureaucracy and we see bureaucracies all over the place. Any time you hear the word administration, you're talking about an organization that has chosen a bureaucratic style like lots of different branches of government. College campuses, as I mentioned earlier, are really ideal or pure examples of bureaucracies.
The military is a classic example. Large companies, even for-profit corporations, often organized in a bureaucratic style. And certainly factories like Volkswagen or if you're in Europe, Volkswagen, just like we pronounced it Veyber in Europe.
Factories often choose to be organized in a bureaucratic style of structure. The legacy of Weber's bureaucracy is a little mixed. Some people, of course, will still attempt to take advantage, even though Weber wanted to guard against particularism, against favoritism.
Some people, of course, can operate in just about any structure and try to find a personal advantage. There's also the concept of red tape. That's a term you often hear associated with bureaucracies, and that's the overemphasis on structure, policies, and procedure that slows or prevents needed action. So if you've ever worked inside a bureaucracy, then you know what I mean. It feels as if just to do anything; the limits of the organization constrained you, and you are.
You have constrained, that's what it's there for.
However, sometimes it's constraining what should be positive action. Weber
called this the iron cage where people have trapped in what he's called
calculated systems that pure efficiency and control that threatened
individual freedom.
So you might feel you're just stuck in your own little box, in your own little divided area of labor, on your rung of the hierarchy and that's all you can really do is stay there and do the little work that you have given. So the legacy is next.
Weber saw this as much better than the alternative, like traditional authority and that particularism and certainly better than a more charismatic style of leadership, or it is based upon the person's personality. We look to Max Weber often in organizational studies. Tens of thousands of researchers, scholars, and recently still has cited consistently for decades his work, his work is more cited than ever.
A very influential figure, a foundational researcher, and author in organizational studies. And that's why we study Max Weber's concept of bureaucracy.
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