Bureaucracy: Characteristics, Classification, and Modern Transformations

Posted on Jan 24, 2025 in Economic Sciences

Bureaucracy

Features of Weber’s Rational-Legal Bureaucracy

  1. System of Rules: Requires equality in power between citizens and those who integrate the bureaucracy.
  2. Organizational Hierarchy: The chain of command is occupied by specific people and not by abstract structures.
  3. Formalized Division of Labor: Standardized procedures, free contests.
  4. Depersonalized Bureaucracy: Acts neutrally, without wrath or prejudice.

Historical Conditions for the Appearance of Weber’s Rational-Legal Bureaucracy

  1. Consolidation of a Cash Economy: The shift from payment in kind to money.
  2. Qualitative Growth of State Administrative Tasks: An increase in the number and size of administrative structures, and the development of transport and communications.
  3. Expansion of Power Capacity and Decision-Making: Demand for administrative support sectors.
  4. Democratization Process: The diffusion of the bureaucratic model, formalized legal equality of citizens before the law.
  5. Superiority Over Other Forms of Technical Administration: Bureaucracy’s efficiency.

Bureaucratic Classification Systems

First Criterion: Bureaucratic Systems as a Whole

  1. Centralization-Decentralization: Bureaucratic systems are organized differently in federal and unitary states. The allocation of staff in central, intermediate, and peripheral locations is unrelated to whether the state is federal or unitary. In a unitary state, the central level consists of ministries and staff. In a federal state, the intermediate level consists of communities and state officials, and the peripheral level consists of municipalities and officials.
  2. Division of Labor: According to two criteria: functional (different deployment tasks) and spatial (territorial division of power).

Second Criterion: Exclusive Deals in Bureaucratic Elites

  1. Social Origin and Elite Status: In Western countries, most elite bureaucracies belong to the higher classes. The social prestige of the work can be high, as in Germany or France, or low, as in Italy or Spain.
  2. Mode of Recruitment: Two types: zero mobility with career development within a single body, or broad mobility with frequent changes of body.
  3. Closed or Open Character of Elites: Three possibilities:
    • A closed bureaucratic body, without significant exchanges with other political elites.
    • A closed elite for entry but open for exit, where individuals cannot access the political, economic, or social elites.
    • An elite that is open both for entry and exit. Spain is a mixture of all three.
  4. Generalists and Specialists: Elites can be composed solely of generalists, solely of specialists, or a combination of both.

Current Transformations in Public Bureaucracies

Ministries remain the main foundation of state administrative systems.

Changes in Morphology

  • Composition: Different professional figures.
  • Number of Agencies and Public Bodies: Increased supply of education.
  • Existing Agencies Have Multiplied: They have grown in number and capacity.
  • Expansion of Contacts: Between public bureaucracies and private organizational groups.

Elements of Change in the Process

  • Fragmentation of Bureaucratic-Political Systems: Increasingly autonomous.
  • Greater Inter-bureaucratic Competition: They compete for scarce resources.
  • Unionization of Public Employment: The current possibility to organize openly, with some relaxation in discipline.
  • Increasingly Interventionist Character: Due to two reasons: bureaucracy is involved in program goals, where results matter more than strict adherence to the law, and secondly, because of the mediation task it assumes under organizational contacts with private groups.