Max Weber Bureaucracy

max weber has made lots of contributions to the areas of organizational studies management and organizational communication the main one is his contribution around the concept of bureaucracy first of all how do you pronounce his name i've heard weber i've heard weber i've looked all over the internet i've informally surveyed my colleagues in academia and it's about 50 50. the weber pronunciation is the americanized style the americanized version of his name and weber is the more european pronunciation i think both are acceptable and i personally recommend however your teacher says it that's how you should pronounce

it he was a german sociologist and political economist we use his concept of bureaucracy in organizational communication and organizational studies but he actually wrote quite a lot of different areas and has influenced many areas of academia beyond just the workplace studies he saw the rise of large organizations bringing together large groups of people to manage and and that's not an easy thing we're going from farms to factories from smaller shops to larger organizations and how are people going to do that well he believed that the existing approaches to organizing that he saw had really obvious

problems especially around the area of authority he saw that most workplaces used relationships kinship or family in other words or customs to lead and make decisions this is called traditional authority and he saw lots of problems with that the main one was particularism where employees were hired or fired for a variety of non-organizational reasons such as their religion race sex and relation or family connections we call this favoritism he called it particularism because a particular group of people was having a very disproportionate influence over the organization so the decision making was isolated in the hands

of a few people and it was very unlikely that they were going to be the most qualified people to run the organization at its best he saw this as a disadvantage to organizations if they let this happen and so he favored a more rational approach to running organizations he wanted them to achieve their goals more rationally especially through clarified leadership and clarified rules for decision making in terms of leadership he wanted what he called the legal rational authority where the legitimate authority of leadership positions should be formalized and fixed to those positions so it wasn't

about if you had lots of charisma or if you're really persuasive or if you were related to a certain somebody your legitimate authority came from the position that you occupied in the structure in this way he wanted to be consistent with societal law where organizations should be run by formal rules and policies he wanted the organization's rules and policies to parallel the kind of rules that we see in society and most importantly he thought the authority should reside in the position or the office it should not reside with the individual person their personality because let's

say they you're being supervised by somebody and they move out of that position and a new person moves in well the person who's occupying that position should have decision making power over you in your department the person who leaves should not still be having that kind of influence from the sidelines over the organization so he wanted to keep it much more legal and rational bureaucracy has numerous parts the first is division of labor among the participants so division of labor is where we divide work into small separate steps so let's say you want to finalize

a semester schedule of courses at college you would think that you might be able to just walk in swipe your credit card take your seat and now you're enrolled in the course and off you go but if you've ever been to a college campus you know there's lots of different steps this is chopped up into seemingly endless steps so you have to figure out financial aid for one office you get advised somewhere else when you register that's a separate process you have to pay through various ways then you confirm your course schedule you get ad

codes and drop codes from somebody else and so what should be or what could be very simple is divided into lots of different steps and there's reasons for this one of them is so that let's say you swipe your credit card and let's say the professor runs off with that money well you're protected against that because you pay one department and then you take a course with another department and so bureaucracy was meant to again protect against that disproportionate or lopsided influence hierarchy of offices is number two you're probably familiar with this where there's a

kind of pyramid structure and at the bottom of that pyramid are all the employees and above that you have supervisors then managers and finally the big boss number three a set of general rules that govern performance was a big part of bureaucracy so there are rules that govern how you perform the supervisor the people running things can't just make it up and change it from depending upon their mood and who you are let's say you're working at a place and they say productivity is important and you show good productivity they say your sales numbers are

important and you show that customer service is important and you show that well those are the general rules that everybody should be evaluated by they shouldn't mark you high in these things and still fire you you should be able to get rewarded promoted and maybe even get a raise if you uphold the goals and follow the policies number four a rigid separation of personal life from work life this guards again against particularism so let's say a couple gets married they meet at work they get married and one of the people is still being supervised by

the other what happens in many organizations is they will put the person who was being supervised in a different department so that their spouse is not directly supervising them this guards against favoritism or that particularism number five the selection of personnel is done on the basis of technical qualifications and that pursues the equal treatment of all employees you're getting selected you're getting promoted because you are the most qualified not because you're the right right or wrong religion or race the wrong gender the wrong family relationships etc number six participants view employment as a career and

tenure protects against unfair arbitrary dismissal tenure meaning if you've been there for a while and you have what you might call veteran status you're going to keep your job as long as you continue to do well they're not going to fire you for some minor or petty personal reason you're going to basically keep your job and these are the six points under bureaucracy and we see bureaucracies all over the place anytime you hear the word administration you're generally talking about an organization that has chosen a bureaucratic style like lots of different branches of government college

campuses like i mentioned earlier or really ideal or or pure examples of bureaucracies the military is a classic example large companies even for-profit corporations often organize in a bureaucratic style and certainly factories like volkswagen or if you're in europe volkswagen just like we pronounce it weber in europe factories often choose to be organized in a bureaucratic style structure the legacy of weber's bureaucracy is a little bit mixed some people of course will still attempt to take advantage even though weber wanted a guard against particularism against favoritism some people of course can operate in just about

any structure and try to find a personal advantage there's also the concept of red tape that's a term you often hear associated with bureaucracies and that's the overemphasis on structure policies and procedure that slows or prevents needed action so if you've ever worked inside a bureaucracy then you know what i mean it feels as if just to do anything you are constrained by the limits of organ of the organization and you are you're a constrained that's what it's there for however sometimes it's constraining what should be positive action weber called this the iron cage where

people were trapped in what he's called calculated systems that pursue efficiency and control that threaten individual freedom so you might feel like you're just stuck in your own little box in your own little divided area of labor on your rung of the hierarchy and that's all you can really do is stay there and do the little bit of work that you're given so the legacy is mixed weber saw this as much better than the alternative like traditional authority and that particularism and certainly better than a more charismatic style of leadership whereas based upon the person's

personality we look to max weber quite often in organizational studies his work has been cited consistently for decades by tens of thousands of researchers and scholars and very recently still his work is more cited than ever a very influential figure a foundational researcher and author in the area of organizational studies and that's why we study max weber's concept of bureaucracy