WEBER'S THEORY OF BUREAUCRACY AND ITS CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE
This research paper summarizes Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy and discusses the validity of the proposition: Weber's Theory of Bureaucracy Is More Appropriate for Public Management in the Steam Age than in the Information Age.
Weber (1864-1920) believed that the requirements of the Industrial Age necessitated the use in public sector management of bureaucratic or highly centralized, rule bound, expert-driven hierarchist systems. That system as it has evolved lent itself to excesses and has proved to be inadequate to meet the needs of the Information Age. Various experiments are underway to reorient public administration to make it more flexible, efficient and responsive so that it may better serve the public interest in the Information Age. However, it is by no means clear that this process of reform will lead to more enlightened or effective government. On the contrary, it may produce a system of public management which represents a more pervasively intrusive, impersonal and oppressive form of government than anything Weber contemplated. Weber feared such a development. In that sense his insights were prophetic and are relevant today.
Weber's writings on power relationships in society, the sources of legitimacy of state power and its organization and administration do not fit neatly within the epistemology of modern cultural theorists. The latter posit that societies are organized along hierarchist, egalitarian, individualistic of fatalistic lines. While all societies contain "competing ways of life," each of them evidence "a consistent package of biases" toward one or the other of these cultural orientations" (Schwarz & Thompson, 1990, p. 61). Weber saw life and politics as a "struggle between nations, classes and individuals for power and authority" (Droneberger, 1971, p. xii). He said that "as a rule compliance with authority is almost invariably determine...