Bureaucracy is a system of organized activities used primarily by large entities. Bureaucracy provides a mechanism by which one or more large, complex tasks can be administered through a hierarchy of departments and subdivisions managed by officials at various levels. Each official follows rules and regulations set by the organization. German Sociologist Max Weber saw the development of bureaucracy as one of the characteristics indicating the movement toward rational social organization in modern societies. Using bureaucracy as a measure, modern societies differed from more primitive cultures in that government was based on a system of law. Leaders obtained their offices by following certain legal procedures. The power to rule was vested in the position rather than in the leader as an individual.
Weber viewed bureaucracy as an old system of administration which had become the pervasive pattern of choice in modern industrial countries. According to Weber's theory, bureaucracy included any combination of a number of characteristics: a clear-cut division of labor among officials; a hierarchy of authority with distributed powers and responsibilities; a general understanding and knowledge by most of the members of the society of the rules and regulations; recruitment of officials on the basis of their technical knowledge and expertise; an explicit set of rules for making decisions; a strict separation of official business from personal concerns; and the establishment of a career service for employees of the bureaucracy. According to Weber, this set of characteristics made bureaucracy the most efficient method of coordinating and accomplishing large-scale tasks.
Weber attributed the longevity of the bureaucratic model to its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. Weber noted that bureaucracies usually came into power when economic and social differences in the society were removed by revoluti...