A Review of: “Building Strong Nations. Improving Governability and Public Management by Eran Vigoda-Gadot (original) (raw)

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