Political Science and Public Administration (Part 2)Lecture-4: Perspectives on Bureaucracy

Professor Dr. Mohammad Mohabbat KhanSenior- most Professor University of DhakaDepartment of Public Administration Dhaka -1000Bangladesh

Origins

While the concept as such existed at least from the early forms of nationhood in ancient times, the word "bureaucracy" itself stems from the word "bureau", used from the early 18th century in Western Europe not just to refer to a writing desk, but to an office, i.e., a workplace, where officials worked.

The original French meaning of the word bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The term bureaucracy came into use shortly before the French Revolution of 1789, and from there rapidly spread to other countries. The Greek suffix - kratia or kratos - means "power" or "rule".

Development

Perhaps the early example of a bureaucrat is the scribe, who first arose as a professional on the early cities of Sumer. The Sumerian script was so complicated that it required specialists who had trained for their entire lives in the discipline of writing to manipulate it.

These scribes could wield significant power, as they had a total monopoly on the keeping of records and creation of inscriptions on monuments to kings.

In later, larger empires like Achaemenid Persia, bureaucracies quickly expanded as government expanded and increased its functions. In the Persian Empire, the central government was divided into administrative provinces led by satraps.

The satraps were appointed by the Shah to control the provinces. In addition, a general and a royal secretary were stationed in each province to supervise troop recruitment and keep records, respectively. The Achaemenid Great Kings also sent royal inspectors to tour the empire and report on local conditions.

The most modernesque of all ancient bureaucracies, however, was the Chinese bureaucracy. During the chaos of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, Confucius recognized the need for a stable system of administrators to lend good governance even when the leaders were inept.

Chinese bureaucracy, first implemented during the Qin dynasty but under more Confucian lines under the Han, calls for the appointment in bureaucratic positions based on merit via a system of examinations.

Modern bureaucracies arose as the government of states grew larger during the modern period, and especially following the Industrial Revolution.

Tax collectors, perhaps the most disliked of all bureaucrats, became increasingly necessary as states began to take in more and more revenue, while the role of administrators increased as the functions of government multiplied.

Along with this expansion, though, came the recognition of corruption and nepotism often inherent within the managerial system, leading to civil service reform on a large scale in many countries towards the end of the 19th century.

Philosophic Perspective on BureaucracyViews of Karl Marx and Max Weber

Karl Marx– In Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels's theory of

historical materialism, the historical origin of bureaucracy is to be found in four sources: religion, the formation of the state, commerce, and technology.

– Thus, the earliest bureaucracies consisted of castes of religious clergy, officials and scribes operating various rituals, and armed functionaries specifically delegated to keep order.

– In the historical transition from primitive egalitarian communities to a civil society divided into social classes and estates, beginning from about 10,000 years ago, authority is increasingly centralized in, and enforced by a state apparatus existing separately from society.

– This state formulates, imposes and enforces laws, and levies taxes, giving rise to an officialdom enacting these functions. Thus, the state mediates in conflicts among the people and keeps those conflicts within acceptable bounds; it also organizes the defense of the territory.

– But the growth of trade and commerce adds a new, distinctive dimension to bureaucracy, insofar as it requires the keeping of accounts and the processing/recording of transactions, as well as the enforcement of legal rules governing trade. If resources are increasingly distributed by prices in markets, this requires extensive and complex systems of record-keeping, management and calculation, conforming to legal standards.

– In Marx's theory, bureaucracy rarely creates new wealth by itself, but rather controls, co-ordinates and governs the production, distribution and consumption of wealth. The bureaucracy as a social stratum derives its income from the appropriation of part of the social surplus product of human labor. Wealth is appropriated by the bureaucracy by law through fees, taxes, levies, tributes, licensing etc.

– Bureaucracy is therefore always a cost to society, but this cost may be accepted insofar as it makes social order possible, and maintains it by enforcing the rule of law. Nevertheless, there are constant conflicts about this cost, because it has the big effect on the distribution of incomes; all producers will try to get the maximum return from what they produce, and minimize administrative costs.

– Whether or not a bureaucracy as a social stratum can become a genuine ruling class depends greatly on the prevailing property relations and the mode of production of wealth.

– In capitalist society, the state typically lacks an independent economic base, finances many activities on credit, and is heavily dependent on levying taxes as a source of income. Therefore, its power is limited by the costs which private owners of the productive assets will tolerate.

– Marx himself however never theorized this possibility in detail, and it has been the subject of much controversy among Marxists. The core organizational issue in these disputes concerns the degree to which the administrative allocation of resources by government authorities and the market allocation of resources can achieve the social goal of creating a more free, just and prosperous society.

– Central to the Marxian concept of socialism is the idea of workers' self-management, which assumes the internalization of a morality and self-discipline among people that would make bureaucratic supervision and control redundant, together with a drastic reorganization of the division of labor in society.

Max Weber

– Max Weber has probably been one of the most influential users of the word in its social science sense. He is well-known for his study of bureaucratization of society; many aspects of modern public administration go back to him; a classic, hierarchically organized civil service of the continental type is — if perhaps mistakenly — called Weberian civil service several different years between 1818 and 1860, prior to Weber's birth in 1864.

– Weber described the ideal type bureaucracy in positive terms, considering it to be a more rational and efficient form of organization than the alternatives that preceded it, which he characterized as charismatic domination and traditional domination. According to his terminology, bureaucracy is part of legal domination. However, he also emphasized that bureaucracy becomes inefficient when a decision must be adopted to an individual case.

According to Weber, the attributes of modern bureaucracy include its impersonality, concentration of the means of administration, a leveling effect on social and economic differences and implementation of a system of authority that is practically indestructible.

Weber's analysis of bureaucracy concerns:– the historical and administrative reasons for

the process of bureaucratization (especially in the Western civilization)

– the impact of the rule of law upon the functioning of bureaucratic organizations

– the typical personal orientation and occupational position of a bureaucratic officials as a status group

As Max Weber himself noted, real bureaucracy will be less optimal and effective than his ideal type model. Competences can be unclear and used contrary to the spirit of the law; sometimes a decision itself may be considered more important than its effect;

Nepotism, corruption, political infighting and other degenerations can counter the rule of impersonality and can create a recruitment and promotion system not based on meritocracy but rather on oligarchy;

The Social and Political Implications of Bureaucratization

Bureaucracy is a concept in sociology and political science referring to the way that the administrative execution and enforcement of legal rules are socially organized.

Bureaucracy can be looked upon like other dynamic social phenomena. Although it is often perceived, like the universe, to be continuously expanding, there are reasons to believe that it may contract, in part because some of its justifications may no longer hold.

Bureaucracy is, in its essence, a means of communication whose purpose is to reduce risk. Within organizations, the risk-averting dialogue is articulated in rules that bound the behaviors of people and control processes.

There is also an inter-institutional dialogue that establishes rules which similarly limit individual decision making in order to reduce risk and to comply with larger social objectives articulated by the legislature. Necessarily, by constraining risk, bureaucratic rules are perceived as unfriendly to entrepreneurs.

It is not an overstatement to say that both in private firms and in government agencies, entrepreneurs have often been hunted down and eliminated. Their disruptive behavior presents a challenge to the goal of predictable (low-risk) outcomes.

Bureaucracy developed as a common idiom for rule-setting. While their objectives may have been different, government and private-firm bureaucracies engaged in an ongoing dialogue with clearly articulated rules of engagement.

Government bureaucracy was nominally committed to ensuring value in government purchasing while industrial bureaucracy was committed to expanding government-firm relationships and monitoring efficiency within the firm, in large measure to comply with government expectations.

The Psychological Consequences of Bureaucratization

The bureaucratization based on domination very strongly furthers the development of …the personality type of the professional expert.

-Max Weber Psychologically, the experience of knowing

and feeling-cognition and emotion-is radically different for the bureaucrat from knowing and feeling among people in society.

This is so because bureaucracy's structures force bureaucrats into behaviors that alter the psyche's processes by which knowledge is acquired and by which emotions are felt. The individual no longer retains the right to judge what is right and wrong. The individual no longer is accorded the ability to judge when work is done well or done badly.

Above all, bureaucracy claims the right to determine who or what we are; no longer are we allowed to work out our personality, we are assigned an organizational identity as we let the organization be our conscience and define what is real.

The individual as such disappears and is replaced by a bundle of functions: a role. Emotionally we agree to this dissolution of our conscience, our ego competence, and our personality when we first agree to enter the state of passionless and mind-numbing rationality demanded by bureaucracy's norm of neutrality.

When we are asked to give up our personal feelings for the people and things we work on, we surrender the prime human emotions: love and hate.

Yet human beings have great difficulty working without a sense of what they are doing (reality), without a sense that what they do affects others for good or for ill (morality), without an inner sense of who they are (personality), and without feelings for the things they belabor or the people they work with or the work itself (intentionality).

Imprisoned in reality structures that can enforce such working conditions from without, people in bureaucracy make up their own reality from within. Fantasy comes to dominate. This is something that the designers of bureaucracy did not foresee in their deep belief that rationalism could conquer all.

A psychology of work rises up against the psychology of organization. The psychology of organizations over-all focuses on the dilemma that different, and at times antagonistic, psychologies are required for organizing and for actually accomplishing work.

In sum, the psychological experience of bureaucracy is this:– 1. Bureaucrats are asked to become people

without conscience; judgments as to right and wrong are to be left to the supervisor, the manager, or the organization as a whole. Those who submit become people without heart: not only does their sense of moral judgment atrophy but so do their feelings for others.

– 2. Bureaucrats are asked to become people without a sense of mastery; judgments as to whether they do their work well or badly are to be left to those in the hierarchy or to the organization's rules, not to direct experience with the reality of things itself.

– 3. Bureaucrats are asked to leave their emotions at home. Yet all that human beings do-in relating themselves to other people, the objects of their work, the working itself-carries with it feelings. We love our work when we do it well.

– 4. Finally, bureaucrats experience in moments of accidental or organizationally planned personal crisis, their dependency on the organization for identity who or what I am at all times dependent on who or what the organization says I am. To the extent that I have already given up moral and mastery judgments along with my true feelings, there does not seem to be much left of me in the face of the organization. My personality is no longer my own; it has been replaced by what I am for the organization: organizational identity comes to replace self-identity.