Bureaucracy

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

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ecessity of finding people to keep the government bureaucracy functioning. This opportunity and the upward mobility it afforded new civil servants expanded the government bureaucracy until it was similar to the Tsarist system it replaced. Many new people had moved into the ranks, but literacy was a problem. With the nobility removed, literacy became the new elitism. At the time of the revolution, more than 80 per cent of the Russian people were illiterate. The only literate people were among the nobility, government workers, and some military personnel. Even among the privileged groups, almost 25 percent were illiterate. Before the revolution, access and cost limited education to the nobility, civil servants, and high-ranking military personnel. After the Bolsheviks seized power, they were faced with the reality of having to keep the civil servants from the old regime. They were the only people who could run the government (Goldstone, 1987, pp. 206-207). The workers and peasants who were able to became part of the government bureaucracy assimilated the social values and attitudes of the original bureaucratic civil servants. Impossible to completely remove, the bureaucracy remained rooted in the old social order whic

Category: Government - B