The potential of governing a large territory can only be realized fully with the help of sophisticated coordinating mechanisms (Merelman, 1988, pp.
587, 595, and 598). Territorialization does not visibly improve the territory and the communities living in it. Territory and people need to be moni- tored, and that takes people (military, police, etc.) who are not productive
otherwise and who need to be supported through taxes. It is in this sense that bureaucracy and bureaucrats can be a burden to society.
Some anthropologists argued that complex social organization, which includes bureaucracy, coordinates people and resources and thus solves rather than creates problems. Complex organizations help establish social stability (for instance, Cohen, 1985). Others argued the opposite case (for instance, Paynter, 1989). A case can, indeed, be made that bureaucratic organization was rather parasitic for most of history, serving those in power rather than the people. But can we still say that bureaucracy is a problem rather than a solution? Can the modern state do without bureaucracy? Can political officeholders work without the specialist’s and generalist’s input of the career civil servant? We argue that bureaucracies contribute to the collapse of society when their cost to society is larger than their benefit.
Hence, when bureaucracies exist only to extract resources in kind, labor, and/or money from the population at large, then they are parasitic.
However, when bureaucracies actually provide services to populations, and when the benefits of their existence outweigh the costs, bureaucracies will continue to exist. We believe that in the modern world the latter situation has become common, at least in democratically governed systems:
Bureaucracies are in general no longer a burden (Masters, 1986, p. 157).
The work of state functionaries has to be coordinated. Throughout history this has been done through organization, and bureaucracy is the best- known type of organization in the contemporary world. It has been argued that rudiments of bureaucratization existed at least 12,000 to 19,000 years ago, given that at least one archaeological site provides some indication of such organizational features as division of labor, hierarchy, and rules regulating operations and behavior (Nystrom and Nystrom, 1998). However, that seems to be stretching the concept of bureaucracy. These three aspects of organization are not unique to bureaucracy. Common pool resource management systems, as analyzed by E. Ostrom and many associates across the globe, are not described as if they are bureaucracies, and yet they do exhibit specialization and have hierarchy and rules-in-use.
Bureaucratization is a process that many defined as one where organi- zations strengthen and expand the features Weber listed as characteristic for bureaucracy. His definition contains at least two elements: bureaucracy as type of organization (Chapter 6) and bureaucracy as personnel system (Chapter 8). In this chapter we will limit ourselves to bureaucracy as it unfolded over time.
As a type of organization characterized by high degrees of standardi- zation then, clearly, bureaucracies existed in antiquity. Irrigation, food
storage (granaries), recording economic transactions, and taxation are all activities that required a bureaucracy with specialized agencies employing people trained in keeping records. There is evidence of organizing public activities in separate departments in most ancient civilizations that had become states (for instance, Chadwick, 1959). Departmentalization went hand-in-hand with some degree of professionalization; that is, those who kept records had to be literate. This may seem obvious, but in societies where the large majority of people could not read or write, it is a great accom- plishment to master the skill of literacy. Civilizations and states may have waxed and waned but, once established, bureaucracy would not wax and wane. Naturally, specific agencies and government bureaus disappeared with the demise of a polity, but as an organizational device, bureaucracy has been around for millennia. Downs is correct to observe that very few bureaus managed to survive long periods of time (1967, p. 23), but he refers to specific examples of bureaus, not to the phenomenon of bureaus.
This is not the place to provide a detailed description of the emergence and development of government departments (see Raadschelders, 1998b, pp. 114–125), but departmentalization occurred everywhere once societies became more complex. Departmentalization concerns the bureaucratiza- tion of the organization and thus of the functions and activities of govern- ment. Structuring territory and organization has often preceded the professionalization of personnel. That is, for most of history those who could be designated as public sector personnel generally worked for a ruler, not for the people. Rulers appointed public sector personnel on the basis of ascription and/or relationship first; merit (literacy, relevant experience) came second. Once public-sector personnel becomes a civil service, i.e., a body of functionaries serving the people on the basis of individual expertise and experience, modern bureaucracy arises. This happened everywhere, in England (Aylmer, 1980) as well as in the Ashanti Empire (Wilks, 1966), just to mention two examples, and did so from the second half of the eighteenth century.
So far we discussed the emergence and development of bureaucracy as organization, but at least one author argued that society itself has bureaucra- tized as well (the following based on Jacoby, 1976). To Jacoby bureaucrati- zation represents the situation where people’s lives and behaviors are increasingly controlled by government agencies:“not only is he unable to escape from the regulation and manipulation, he seems to depend on it.”
(p. 1). People both complain about but also demand bureaucracy:“Modern man has lost spontaneous self-help. Projects which help others have become rarer; people now depend on specialized agencies to which they can turn.”
(Jacoby, 1976, p. 1) This observation is immediately followed by a crucial comment:
Centralization of all functions and accumulation of power are on the inside (JR/EVG: government); isolation and impotence of the individual are on the outside (JR/EVG: society). These opposites have consistently intensified each other.Thus the looser western interpersonal relations became, the more they depended on bureaucracy(1–2; emphasis added).
This comment concerns one of the most major societal changes in the history of humanity, i.e., how the “triple whammy” (see Chapter 2) of industrialization, urbanization, and population growth“moved”humanity from a society based on (inter)personal relations to a society of imagined communities. In the industrial society, it is no longer the small, physical community of old that protects us from the hazards of life, but it is government. And how does government protect its people? It does so by offering services hitherto provided between individuals in physical commu- nities of people. The virtue of caring for one another when in need is normal and expected in physical communities. Once isolated from one another, as is the case in the urbanized world, it is government that cares for those who cannot care for themselves. In a way, the welfare state is nothing but an institutional arrangement substituting for the type of community care that existed locally throughout history. Henry Jacoby was not thefirst to see where society was headed. Already in the 1830s De Tocqueville observed that “Democracy loosens social ties, but tightens natural ones: it brings kindred more closely together, whilst it throws citizens more apart . . .”
(2000, p. 233) Large-scale democracy emerges across the globe wherever societies become urban, and it is urbanization and industrialization that loosen social ties, that take people out of the natural community and back into the nuclear family. To what extent is this the case today? Have people truly become dependent upon government? Have social ties loosened, and if so, to what extent? An answer cannot be given, since it is impossible to measure “loosening of social ties” in a way that will satisfy everyone. But, considering that there are thousands upon thousands of common-pool resource management systems across the globe, there is reason to believe that bureaucratization and democratization have not overtaken social coordination mechanisms entirely.
Max Weber’sDie Bürokratisierung gehört die Zukunft(1980, p. 834), echoed in Joseph Schumpeter’s“Its expansion is the one certain thing about our
future”(1950, p. 294), is both true and untrue. What is true is that bureauc- racies have grown in size, all over the world, by any measure we have:
personnel size, revenue and expenditure, organizational differentiation, and regulatory activity. At the same time, bureaucracy has not gobbled up democracy as Weber feared, and this can be demonstrated in at least three ways. First, the civil service generally supports those who are elected in political office. Second, next to the common-pool resource systems, there are plenty of other examples of self-governance (e.g., homeowners organiza- tions, sports clubs, churches, and so on). Third, andfinally, an administrative state where the civil service dominates all politics has not become reality.