To understand the role and position of bureaucracy in contemporary society, it is necessary to compare it from three perspectives: two contem- porary and one historical. The most familiar contemporary perspective is the stereotypical view many people have of bureaucrats (we prefer the term civil servants), and we have already had a taste of that in the introduction to this chapter. The second contemporary perspective is a formal definition of bureaucracy as developed by Max Weber in the early twentieth century. The historical perspective, how and why it came about, will actually help to
explain why the stereotype of bureaucracy emerged and why it is especially identified with government.
Weber may be partially blamed (if that’s the right word) for that, for he regarded bureaucracy as part of the state that surrounded us like an“iron cage.” (Baehr, 2001). To him and many of his contemporaries the seem- ingly sudden proliferation of bureaucratic organization in the context of rapid industrialization was baffling, even threatening, to the individual as well as to society at large. Individually, people felt alienated from the natural world they had known for millennia, and tried hard to salvage some sense of normalcy. It may appear strange in the mind-set of those living in the twenty- first century, but naturism was one of the ways—at least in Germany—that people felt they might reconnect with nature. Nude hiking and sunbathing were popular for a while (Hau, 2003). Since 1906, Weber used to sit at noon on his balcony for an hour, smoking his pipe, in Adam’s costume (Radkau, 2009, p. 377). In society, Weber felt, the advent of bureaucracy was particularly and potentially harmful to democracy, sighing that the future was to bureaucracy and wondering whether democracy would not be overshadowed completely just as easily as human values and feelings could be overpowered by it.
Perhaps the following sounds naïve or displays an ignorant optimism, but would Weber change his verdict had he had a chance to talk with, for instance, Patrick Dunleavy? The latter showed that bureaucracy has been very able to restrain itself, and able to pursue reforms and budget and personnel cuts of its own accord (1991). There is more, however, that might persuade Weber to nuance his assessments. Today, bureaucracy is all around us. Any organization, public, nonprofit, and private alike, of a certain size is structured and operates as a bureaucracy. Governments all over the world are organized as multiple bureaucracies. However, any multinational, any sizeable business is a bureaucracy. Obviously, many, if not all, businesses start small. With Paul Allen and Bill Gates in jeans, Microsoft started small (although with ample funding sources from Gates’s parents), but became a giant, and it is a bureaucracy. Any oil company that made it big after the first gusher could not avoid structuring itself as a bureaucracy. Big nonprofits such as Greenpeace, Habitat for Humanity, and the Red Cross would not be able to do their good works were it not for being organized as a bureaucracy. Hence, bureaucracy is not only an“iron cage” or prison, it is also“an essential scaffolding of thought” (Crowther- Heyck, 2005, p. 117), a prerequisite structure wherein an entire body of thought can develop, and that even can be a playground where the various climbing, swinging, and teetering toys and so forth will structure play but do
not determine how the play is conducted or pursued (Klagge, 1997).
Obviously, bureaucracy can be an iron cage or prison, especially for those who overstep the boundaries of what is considered acceptable behavior.
That it is also a scaffold or prerequisite structure for thought is perhaps best exemplified in a body of law. And it certainly is a playground, for it provides its occupants with the means to do what an individual cannot do. It enables behavior and action that transcends individual capabilities.
The metaphor of the“iron cage”confirms the stereotypical perception of bureaucracy; the metaphor of the playground is more benign, suggesting even that it is not dehumanizing. We will come back to this latter point, but shall now look at Weber’s definition. In his view bureaucracy can be regarded as an organizational structure and as a personnel system (Chapter 8). The eight dimensions of bureaucracy as an organizational structure are easy to recognize.
Eight Dimensions of Bureaucracy as Organization1 1. continuous administrative activity,
2. formal rules and procedures, 3. clear and specialized offices, 4. hierarchical organization of offices, 5. use of written documents,
6. adequate supply of means (desk, paper, office, and so on), 7. nonownership of office (separation of office from officeholder), 8. procedures of rational discipline and control.
In incompetent or even wrong hands, it is easy to see how each of these dimensions can degenerate into an overbearing presence of the state, as is the case in totalitarian systems and which is so beautifully captured in the image of the always-turned-on TV screen in people’s living rooms in Orwell’s 1984 (dimension 1); into laziness, officiousness, and formalism (dimensions 2 and 8); into“turffights”about the authority invested in an office (dimension 3); into rigid adherence to lines of command (dimen- sion 4); into red tape, especially when documents appear to be full of
“legalese”(dimension 5); and into theft of public property (dimension 6).
In those cases bureaucracy (as the“good”type of organization) slides into bureaumania or bureaucratism (compare to the three types of political systems in Chapter 5). The one dimension that seems more difficult to be manipulated by the human condition (that is, by the sins of envy, gluttony,
1Van Braam, 1986; Raadschelders and Rutgers, 1996, 92.
greed, lust, pride, sloth, and wrath) is dimension 7. However, while people may no longer be able to sell or inherit their public office as they could and did in the past, they may well succumb to envying someone else’s position or take pride in the office they hold. In any of these cases, the public interest has been superseded by individual desire. It is important to note that Weber never said that bureaucracy was efficient, only that it was more efficient than other known types of organization. What is implicit in his writing, as Gyorgy Gajduschek pointed out, is that bureaucracy caters to“uncertainty reduc- tion” because it enables political officeholders, civil servants, researchers, and citizens to reconstruct past outputs and procedures from written records and it helps them to plan for the future (policy making and implementation) through its predictability and calculability (Gajduschek, 2006, p. 716).
Earlier we suggested that bureaucracy is subject to manipulation and abuse. Thefirst to suggest that bureaucracy’s rationality and efficiency can potentially turn into irrationality and inefficiency was Robert Merton in his landmark 1940 essay“Bureaucratic Structure and Personality”(1952). What if the impersonal application of rules is exaggerated to the point that they become a goal in themselves, serving the procedures of the organization rather than the needs of citizens? What if bureaucracies measure their own performance in various ways and stop sharing best practices for fear of losing their ranking? What should come first, organizational performance or a citizen in need? The popularity of performance measurement in the United States has been spreading to other countries, and it seems that Merton had a point when saying that people in bureaucracies may focus more on proper application of rules and on measuring their own performance than on the objectives for which it exists today: to help citizens. In the extreme, bureaucracy has been used as an instrument of evil (Adams and Balfour, 2004;
Adams and others, 2006) and not only in the recent past. It will be used so again, but that is because of the human condition. (With a nod to the ongoing American debate about gun control, this may sound similar to the argument that guns do not kill people, but that people kill people. However, this reasoning by analogy does not work because bureaucracy cannot be bought and sold by individuals. Furthermore, nowadays people do not need guns in their homes. It made sense to have weapons when living in sparsely populated areas where help in dire circumstances might not be readily available. In the densely populated, highly urbanized communities of the modern world guns should be in the hands of law enforcement officials only.)
There is a third reason why in democratic societies, bureaucratic organization does not fall prey easily to the human condition. When asked:
“What do you think about government?”people often resort to the stereo- type of it being too big, too little transparent, too costly, too incompetent, and so forth. When asked, however, what they think of specific government services they have had experience with, the assessment is very different, even more so when asked about the quality of service from a specific public servant (for instance, school teacher, police officer, judge, social worker).
The empirical evidence since the 1960s is consistent about the extent to which citizens are content and satisfied with the performance of individual bureaucracies and their civil servants (for instance, police precinct, ele- mentary school,fire department) (Goodsell, 2004). The two authors of this volume know quite a few career civil servants, just as any reader will. And, yes, they have known some who were“not up to snuff”and should never have been appointed to public office. Again, any reader will be able to come up with some examples of her/his own. Everyone knows that“a few rotten apples will spoil the barrel.”If there is truth to this proverb, we can assume that the large majority of career civil servants are decent people who try to do the best they can with the limited resources given to them. Unlike their counterparts in the private sector, they cannot raise revenue (that is, taxes) indiscriminately, for that decision rests with political officeholders and, in turn, with an electorate that recognizes the wisdom of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” We can also assume that in thefishbowl that bureaucracy ultimately is, those who do not live up to expectations will be reprimanded and may even lose their jobs.
It may seem that we have transgressed from presenting a formal and neutral definition of bureaucracy into a defense of its existence, but we had a very good reason to do so. With his formal and ideal-typical definition of bureaucracy, Weber accomplished, inadvertently, two objectives in one stroke. First, he identified the elements of an organizational structure that he saw spreading like wildfire. Like his contemporaries he had neither knowledge about nor experience with this type of large-scale, hierarchical organization, and he wanted to warn his fellow humans against the possible dangers. Second, he defined an organizational structure for which no historical precedent existed. We will substantiate this statement in the next section. Meanwhile, Weber’s definition of bureaucracy has become so common that it is almost difficult to imagine that it only characterizes the complexity of the organization of government from the late eighteenth century on (Morony, 1987, p. 7). That raises the question: When and why did bureaucracy appear in human history, and how did that bureaucracy in the past differ from its contemporary manifestation?