Analysis and Explanation of Intellectual Fundamentals of Bureaucracy (original) (raw)
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The term " bureaucracy " is of recent origin. Initially referring to a cloth covering the desks of French government officials in the eighteenth century, the term " bureau " came to be linked with a suffix signifying rule of government (as in " aristocracy " or " democracy "), probably during the struggles against absolutism preceding the French Revolution. During the nineteenth century the pejorative use of the term spread to many European countries, where liberal critics of absolutist regimes typically employed it to decry the tortuous procedures, narrow outlook, and highhanded manner of autocratic government officials (Heinzen 1845). Since then this pejorative meaning has become general in the sense that any critic of complicated organizations that fail to allocate responsibility clearly, or any critic of rigid rules and routines that are applied with little consideration of the specific case, of blundering officials, of slow operation and buck-passing, of conflicting directives and duplication of effort, of empire building, and of concentration of control in the hands of a few will use this term regardless of party or political persuasion (Watson 1945). During the years following World War ii this common stereotype was given a new twist by the witty, mock-scientific formulations of Parkinson " s Law, which derided empire building, waste of resources, and inertia by implying that official staffs expand in inverse proportion to the work to be done. Introduction This popular, pejorative usage must be distinguished from ―bureaucracy‖ used in a technical sense. Although the distinction is beset with difficulties, social scientists have employed the term because it points to the special, modern variant of age-old problems of administration, just as terms like ―ideology‖ and ―class‖ point to modern aspects of intellectual life and social stratification. The analytic task is to conceptualize this modern variant. At the macroscopic level, Max Weber's definition of bureaucracy under the rule of law provides the best available solution to this problem; none of the critics of Weber's analysis has as yet dispensed with his definition. According to Weber, a bureaucracy establishes a relation between legally instated authorities and their subordinate officials which is characterized by defined rights and duties, prescribed in written regulations; authority relations between positions, which are ordered systematically; appointment and promotion based on contractual agreements and regulated accordingly; technical training or experience as a formal condition of employment; fixed monetary salaries; a strict separation of office and incumbent in the sense that the official. A government administration so defined must be understood, according to Weber, as part of a legal order that is sustained by a common belief in its legitimacy. That order is reflected in written regulations, such as enacted laws, administrative rules, court precedents, etc., which govern the employment of officials and guide their administrative behavior. Such authoritative ordering of the
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Weberian bureaucracy is an ideal type of rational and efficient organisation. Bureaucracy, according to Weber, is a type of organisation characterised by fixed division of labour, hierarchical supervision, impersonal decision-making, detailed rules and regulations, and formal selection of employees based on technical skills. It emphasises the organisation's precision, speed, clarity, regularity and efficiency. Weberian bureaucracy is considered a theoretical model that is seldom observed in its purest form in the practical world. Governments and large-scale private organisations used this ideal bureaucracy model throughout the 20 th century.
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Bureaucracy is the most important part in the course of a government. Like the Max Weber Model which still exists in the bureaucratic system in Indonesia. This can be seen how the Weber Model is still an option in implementing a powerful bureaucracy from time to time. However, is this model still a bullet and a selling point that has a high character in creating good governance as described by de Gay who in his bureaucratic theory states that the most important thing in bureaucracy and a service is work ethic. This research is to see the rationality of Max Weber's Bureaucracy Model in the Modernization of Public Service Bureaucracy in the Industrial Era 4.0 (Case Study of Medan City E-KTP Service). This study uses a qualitative descriptive approach with strengthening the literature to analyze cases and conduct discussions. The results of this study are first, the Medan Department of Population and Civil Registration implementation still mostly uses administration and written doc...
Comparative Social Research
It is doubtful whether Max Weber would have been appreciative of his current status as the father of organisation theory. Weber did not develop the concept of bureaucracy as part of a quest to advance a science of organisations, or in order to do a microanalysis of the internal structure of particular organisational units. The concept of bureaucracy was an ideal-typical concept developed as a point of departure for comparisons across historical periods and geographic settings. Weber’s research was motivated by macroscopic and historical questions such as ‘why did capitalism develop in the West’ and, ‘how do persons in the West and other civilizations attach meaning to their activities?’ Unlike consultants and organisation theorists that make use of him today, it was not a major concern for Weber to develop criteria for the most efficient kinds of organisations. Rather, his concern was to identify variations in administrative and bureaucratic cultures and patterns by the means of the bureaucratic ideal type. It is maintained in modern textbooks in organisation theory that there has been a development from a closed and rationalistic paradigm towards an understanding of organisations as open and natural systems, and Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy is taken as a point of departure for this kind of narrative. This classification of Weber as an example of a rational and closed approach is highly questionable. The cross-societal and historical approach used so effectively by Weber, is put on a sidetrack in such mainstream narratives. It would be more in the spirit of Weber to focus on organising as an activity, bureaucracy as an ethos and to study organisations within their particular political and cultural contexts.